in the world, no matter how good, couldn’t change what she’d done or who Rafael was or any of the many, many reasons they could never, ever work.
At heart he was his father, who married and remarried at the drop of a hat and believed himself deeply in love without ever having to prove it for too long. And she was entirely too much like her own mother, who had disappeared into the things she loved, whether they were prescription drugs or men—until it had killed her. So selfish. So destructive.
Running away in the way she had might not have been a particularly mature choice, or even a good one. Lily understood that. The pain she’d caused was incalculable. One night in Venice couldn’t change that. Maybe nothing could.
She was no less selfish. No less destructive. But at least she was aware of it; she accepted the truth about her behavior, however unpleasant. Like everything else, she thought then, there was nothing to do but live with it. One way or another.
She squared her shoulders and dropped her chilled hand back down from the window, feeling scraped raw inside. Lily decided that was hunger. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten something. She pushed her way out of the bedroom into the sitting room she’d glimpsed so haphazardly last night, sure there must be something to eat somewhere in a palace so grand.
But she stopped short when she entered the sitting room. The fire in here was blazing, and there was an impressive selection of breakfast foods laid out along the side table as she’d expected, but what caught her attention was Rafael.
He stood by the windows, looking out on what she assumed was the same view she’d left behind in the other room. She thought that was the sum total of who they were. Forever separated, forever lost to each other in pursuit of the same end. A wave of melancholy threatened to take her from her feet then, surprising her with its strength.
She shoved it back down and blinked that heat in her eyes away.
“It’s pretty out there,” she said, inanely, and it was worse because her throat was so raw. She coughed and pulled the coverlet tighter around her, cold despite the warmth of the room. “Though very raw, I think. With all that snow.”
It had something to do with the way Rafael stood there, so remote, wearing nothing but low-slung trousers that showed off that powerful body of his. It was the set of his broad shoulders, or that sense that he wasn’t really there at all. That he saw something other than the snow and the canal, and the light of a winter morning turning the sky to liquid gold.
“My mother was mad,” he said without turning around, as if he was wholly impervious to the cold on the other side of that window. Or in his own voice. “That is not the preferred term, I know. There were so many diagnoses, so many suppositions. But in the end, mad is what she was, no matter how they tried to sanitize it.”
All it had taken was an internet connection to find the few articles about Gianni Castelli’s doomed first marriage, so this was not precisely news to Lily. She’d read everything she could in a fury when she’d been sixteen and less than pleased about her mother’s new fiancé. But she couldn’t remember Rafael ever discussing his family history before. Not ever, in all the time she’d known him. That he was choosing to do so now, unprompted, made her heart beat hard and low in her chest.
“That is the excuse that was always trotted out in those years before she was taken away,” he said after a moment, when Lily didn’t respond. “That she was sick. Unwell. That she wasn’t responsible for her actions.” He shifted then, turning to look at her, though that wasn’t an improvement. That darkly gorgeous face of his was shuttered. Hard. Her heart kicked that much harder against her ribs. “As it turns out, it’s not much of an excuse when it’s your mother they’re talking about.”
“What did she do?” Lily didn’t know how she dared to speak. She realized she’d stopped dead a step from the door, and forced herself to move again. She walked farther into the deceptively cheery room and perched on the edge of the nearest chaise, as if she couldn’t feel the terrible tension in the air.
“Nothing,” Rafael said softly, his dark eyes bleak on hers. “She did absolutely nothing.”
Lily swallowed, hard. “I don’t know what that means.”
His mouth shifted into something not at all a smile. “It means she did nothing, Lily. When we fell. When we ran to her. When we jockeyed for her attention, when we ignored her. It was all the same. She acted as if she was alone. Perhaps, in her mind, she was.”
“I’m sorry.” Lily didn’t know why he was telling her this story, and she couldn’t read any clues on his face. “That can’t have been easy.”
“Eventually she was whisked away to a hospital in Switzerland,” he continued in the same distant tone. “At first we visited her there. I think my father must have believed that she could be fixed, you see. He’s always liked to put broken things back together. But my mother could not be repaired, no matter how many drugs or therapies or exciting new regimens they tried. Eventually, they all gave up.” He thrust his hands in his pockets, and though he didn’t look away from her, Lily wasn’t sure he saw her, either. “My father divorced her, claiming that was best for everyone, though it seemed it was really only best for him. The hospital started talking about her comfort and safety rather than her progress, and told us it was better if we stayed away.”
Lily didn’t know what she meant to say. What she could say. Only that she wanted to help him, heal him somehow, and couldn’t. “I’m so sorry.”
His mouth moved into a harsh curve. “I was thirteen the last time I saw her. I’d taken the train from my boarding school, filled with all the requisite drama and purpose of a young man on a mission. I had long since determined that my father was to blame for her decline, and that if I could see her alone, I could know the truth. I wanted to rescue her.”
Lily stared back at him, stricken. The fire popped and crackled beside her, but Rafael didn’t appear to hear it. And she couldn’t seem to read a single thing on that hard face of his.
“Rafael,” she said in a low voice. “You don’t have to tell me any of this.”
“But I do,” he replied. He studied her for a moment, then continued. “The hospital wouldn’t let me see her, only observe her from afar. My memories of her were of her rages, her tears. The way she would go blank in the middle of crowded rooms. Yet the woman I saw, alone in her little room, was at peace.” He laughed, a hollow sound. “She was happy there, locked up in that place. Far happier than she had ever been outside it.”
Lily studied him for a moment. “What did you do?”
He shrugged in that supremely Italian way. “What could I do? I was thirteen and she wasn’t in need of rescuing. I left her there. Three years later, she was dead. They say she accidentally overdosed on pills she should not have been hoarding. I doubt very much it was an accident. But by then, I had discovered women.”
Lily stiffened where she sat, and a harsh sort of light gleamed in his dark eyes, as if he could track her every movement. “I don’t understand why you’re sharing these things with me.”
“I had no intention of becoming my father,” Rafael told her quietly. “I had no interest in becoming some kind of relationship mechanic, forever tinkering around beneath the hood of another broken thing. I liked a laugh. I liked sex. I wanted nothing but a good time and when it turned heavy, the way it inevitably did? I was gone. I never wanted to feel that urge to rescue anyone, not ever again. I wanted no complications, no trouble.”
