After the ceremony, he’d arrived to find her door open, and his sprint had faded. She always closed her doors. She probably wasn’t inside.
He’d been about to go tearing through the palace searching for her, to make a very public fool of himself when he’d…heard.
Her voice. As he’d never heard it. Cruel. Cold-blooded.
Stella had accused her of entrapping him for the sole reason of becoming queen. And…Dio… Phoebe…she’d admitted it, gloatingly sure of her power over him.
Stella had dashed out of Phoebe’s room in tears, not noticing him standing there, dumbstruck. Echoes of her voice and Phoebe’s still shrieked their vicious catfight in his brain until it felt like pulp.
He means nothing to you at all, does he?
Yeah, my power over him is total.
His own thoughts battered him. Taunting. Jeering. You believed she wanted you for yourself? That that made more sense than her wanting to be queen?
His worst nightmare. Again. A virtuoso act. In the past, and now, far worse. She’d used reverse psychology so he’d rise to the challenge, do whatever it took to be perfect in her eyes. As he had. And all that time, everything that had appealed to his tastes and logic and healed his wounds and ensnared his mind and spirit—unreal. Every word and glance and touch, a yank from a master puppeteer. Everything—everything—they’d shared, a lie.
His feet moved, taking him inside her room. She lay on her bed. Everything. She was everything. And she’d left him with nothing.
She suddenly jerked up and looked around. “Leandro, darling…”
She looked…overwrought. She’d guessed that he’d overheard her confessions. Was thinking how to perform damage control.
He felt something within him give, like the steel foundations of a skyscraper moaning as they collapsed.
He heard himself saying, “I’ve chosen a wife, Phoebe.”
He stopped, torturing himself with every nuance of her masterful act. Such expectation on her face. Such trust. Such adoration.
And he lost whatever shred remained of his control, his sanity, in the conflagration that consumed his soul.
“You want to know who she is? The only woman to suit me, the woman worthy of being my princess, my future queen, mother of my children, my heirs, owner of my heart and soul?”
He waited again. Saw the dawn of absolute delight.
Then he drawled, “A pure, noble, Castaldinian woman.”
He opened himself to the shock wave razing through her until the agony of it decimated his last shred of humanity.
And he taunted, “What do you think of Clarissa D’Agostino?”
Phoebe stared at Leandro. The man she loved with everything in her. The father of her unborn baby.
He’d turned into a stranger. And he’d said…he’d said…
This had to be some trick. But he didn’t have a sick sense of humor. And this was beyond sick…this was…was…
The banked panic began to rise. “Don’t, Leandro. That’s one thing that just isn’t—isn’t…”
“Funny? You think I’m joking? I’m not. Can’t you see that? So—how does it feel now? To be led on until you think you have the world in your hand, only to be cut down in one vicious stroke? To know that you mean nothing?”
She wanted to close her eyes. She couldn’t see this. That face. Demonic in beauty and evil. Far worse than Stella’s. Than anything. But she couldn’t look away. She was paralyzed. Beyond agony. Beyond shock.
All this time, he’d been building up to this moment? When she’d believed in him, lived and would die for him? He’d done this just for the pleasure of slamming her down? This was his revenge for her daring to run away from him once? Was there cruelty like this?
There was. And worse. It was him, looking at her with that mad gleam in his eyes, a feline hunter waiting for its kill to twitch so he could batter it again. And again.
But she wouldn’t curl up and play dead. She had to fight back. If he was the monster he was showing himself to be, she wouldn’t just expire in silence.
She could say nothing. The truth was sinking its talons into her guts, preparing to wrench them apart.
“So what do you think of my choice, Phoebe? As the king’s daughter, Clarissa is everything my wife should be. And she was such a vision tonight. Don’t you agree? Come now, Phoebe, tell me. You know how I value your opinion.”
Every word was one more slash, tearing everything she’d believed they’d had apart, everything she’d thought would sustain her for the rest of her life.
“I wouldn’t have believed that even you had the nerve to ask something like that, to…to…”
“To…what? Mat’ooli, don’t say…you expected me to choose you?”
She could only stare into his malice. So there truly was no end to one’s capacity for suffering.
She wondered if pain could kill. It should. Nothing should be this cruel without an end. “Isn’t that what you wanted me to expect? What you worked so hard to lead me to expect, when I started this relationship with no expectations? Beyond feeling blazingly alive in your company, in your arms? Isn’t this what you planned? What do you want to hear now—how completely you’ve taken me in?”
Hot tears corroded her eyes, scouring down her face, splashing down her chin to spread darkness on her red taffeta dress, his choice. Had he planned that, too? So that she’d look down and see the stains spreading like oozing blood? Were those tears, or was her pierced heart bleeding out?
More needed to gush out of her. “Have you appeased your monstrous pride? Have you taken your revenge on me for once daring to escape your abuse? Are you now satisfied that you’ve damaged me beyond repair? And you’re asking my opinion on your ‘pure woman’—me, the woman whose innocence you took, whose pride and heart you destroyed and who you’re reviling for it? But I can’t blame you. I set myself up. Again. I got what I deserved. But though I now know that my opinion—and I—mean less than dirt to you, I’ll tell you I believe that Clarissa would make the best queen. I just wish for her sake you weren’t the one who’ll be king.”
Run. She had to run. Pride had nothing to do with it—it was maternal instinct. The baby inside her was the one thing that gave her the strength to get away, to survive.
She passed him, reached the door when she turned. “I once told you we owed each other no hellos. I owe you one thing now, a wish…” He was standing there, chest heaving, eyes scary, his focus that of a madman. Pain ruptured her heart all over again, crushed it in its own blood. “I wish for you to go to hell, Leandro. The same one where you sent me.”