The Illegitimate King (Castaldini Crown 3)

So. She wasn’t cowed yet. Bene. In fact, it was great that she wasn’t. He would have been seriously disappointed if he’d won that easily. He hated easy victory. And when it came to her, after all the years of frustration she’d put him through, he wanted—no, needed—her surrender to be a struggle. That way, the pleasure of her capitulation, when it came, would be all the more intense.

He was going to revel in this. Big time, like she’d said.

Time to play hardball.

The exhilaration of taking the skirmish to the next level danced on his lips. “Let me share a fact of life, Principessa. One from real life, not the sterilized, rarefied version it seems you’ve lived for all of yours. I don’t need the crown. It’s the crown that needs me. Desperately. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you have no option but to abide by my terms and demands, to do everything I tell you to.” He knew he had that serene look on his face that lions had on theirs as they took down their kill. He savored stressing his point. “Everything.”

Clarissa’s heart stopped for what must be the hundredth time today.

After a couple of dropped beats, it burst into another stumbling gallop that pushed no blood to her head, that left her feeling she was teetering on the verge of oblivion.

This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening. He couldn’t have said all he’d said. This was insane.

And he was watching her with the same coldness with which he’d once looked at her across the ballroom on that first night. Which made it all crazier. Why was he even demanding this, her, if that was what he really felt toward her?

She struggled to keep hysteria from tingeing her voice and features. “I said that should be entertaining. And it is. You think you’re irreplaceable, don’t you? Well, you’re not. My father is just going through his list of candidates. In case you didn’t know already, you—in spite of your belief in your own indispensability—didn’t rank first there. You merely happened to be third.”

He took another sip of his juice, savored it slowly, made her imagine what he no doubt meant her to, those lips on her every secret, savoring her, before he murmured languidly, “Third and last.”

“You really have an inflated sense of your own importance, don’t you? Figures. Too many billions can do that to a man.”

“When they’re not inherited, and have been gained through legal venues, it’s safe to say they do indicate indisputable personal value.”

“Legal? Are you absolutely certain about that?” The look he gave her sent shivers of alarm, almost fear, zigzagging through her. She’d crossed a line.

She didn’t give an ant’s leg. Just as he didn’t, about her or how she felt. “May you live happily ever after with your indisputable personal value, Signore Selvaggio. We’ll find someone else. Someone who won’t play cheap games when he’s offered something as incalculable as the honor and privilege of the crown of Castaldini.”

The danger in his eyes switched off, but the benevolence in the smile he bestowed on her was far worse. She felt her blood freezing in her arteries. “Good luck with that.”

She stilled, the ice spreading. “What do you mean? And quit being cryptic. If you have something to say, then say it.”

He gave a lazy shrug. “I don’t have anything more to say. You know the rest, even though you’re pretending not to. Contrary to what you accused me of, and unlike you, I don’t play games.”

“What are you talking about? What’s that ‘rest’ I’m supposed to know?” she snapped.

His gaze sharpened, the steel luminosity of his irises flaring and subsiding with the flames of the torches until it seemed that the shifting shadows and golden lights they cast over his face would expose some supernatural entity that his magnificent body housed—one who examined her with brooding, malignant amusement.

Suddenly he threw his head back and laughed—a harsh, ugly sound so unlike his laughter during the past hours. Despite everything, this confirmation of the loss of the illusion of harmony and affinity they’d shared sent regret skewering through her.

“Dio santo, sei serio. You’re serious. You know nothing. They left you in the dark, the old jackals. That explains everything. Why you think you can be your usual scathing self with me. They didn’t warn that you they can’t afford for you to alienate their last option. How remiss of them.”

“That isn’t true. It can’t be. Someone else w—”

He cut her trembling protest short “—would bring about the end of Castaldini as we know it. No other man of Castaldinian origins or with the prerequisite D’Agostino blood—whether obtained on the right side of the sheets or not—possesses enough power to drive away the kingdom’s external enemies and to defuse the internal conflicts. But I have my own empire, to which I owe my allegiance. On the other hand, even you can work out that I don’t owe Castaldini or its people any measure of that. So don’t play the honor and privilege card with me. I’m not in any way duty or honor bound to take on the responsibility of safeguarding Castaldini’s crown and future. If I’m to accept doing your kingdom that ‘incalculable’ favor, I demand an ‘incentive to sweeten the deal,’ as you put it. And you’re it.”

She stared at him, at the face of his serene cruelty, his absolute certainty, the tremors she’d been struggling to hold back breaking free, starting to rattle her bones.

He went on as if he was auguring something as trivial as a soccer game’s outcome. “If you refuse, you can go back to your precious father and Council with my refusal, and let them pick someone else from the inadequate choices they’ve already rejected for the best of reasons, and let Castaldini go to hell.”

He couldn’t be lying about all this, could he? But maybe he didn’t consider it lying, just maneuvering her by any means necessary to corner her. He was a master manipulator, after all.

And he wasn’t even finished. He went on, and she discovered he’d saved the worst for last. “And when Castaldini is in ruins, maybe becomes some second-rate, exploited annex to one of the surrounding nations panting to drain its riches into their resource-poor, overpopulated, debt-ridden bellies, I’ll still come after you. And I will have you. The crown will be lost, but you’ll be mine in the end, Clarissa.”

She was panting by the time he finished. Quaking. Then it all blurted out of her, all the indignation and distress he’d so expertly inflamed beyond the danger zone. “You’re the one who can get lost, or can go to hell, Ferruccio Selvaggio—or D’Agostino, or whatever your name is. Be sure to take your toxic conceit and cruelty with you. Castaldini will survive without your oh-so-vital intervention, and you’re not coming near me….”