Manhattan's Most Scandalous Reunion by Dani Collins, Caitlin Crews
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE FALCONEVILLAhad stood in some or other form for centuries. Each generation made sweeping announcements about all the changes they would make to the historic structure, yet none ever managed to leave so much as a fingerprint.
That was the trouble with a bloodline like his, Cenzo knew. Nothing it touched was ever truly its own.
He remembered his childhood here, mostly spent in the company of nannies and other staff, because his father was always too busy managing the vast Falcone empire.
And his mother was always too busy.
Cenzo felt that same swell of bitterness in him as he found his way through the marble halls he knew so well. The same acrid rush that he’d been fighting since he’d left the Castello dei Sospiri.
It had been another long month.
And Cenzo had been avoiding this meeting.
First, he had indulged his rage. His fury. He had flown to his property in Paris and had availed himself of civilization. The finest restaurants, the most diverting shows. He had told himself he could not possibly miss his flirtation with servitude. He could not possibly find his bed too soft and his waking hours invaded by worries over the happiness of a woman who had betrayed him.
But Josselyn was all he thought about.
And it wasn’t as if that faded as the weeks went by. It was only that the longing for her became so commonplace that other things found their way in, too. Like the things Josselyn had suggested about his mother.
Cenzo had dismissed them all, of course—but that didn’t keep him from going over them again and again. Especially as he was neither the man who had married Josselyn, bent on revenge, nor the man who had served her. He was both of them, and neither, and nothing looked as it had.
Not his own reflection. Not the world he did not live in, but only inhabited, without her.
And not his mother, either.
He found Françoise where she always was at midday, lolling about in her dressing room and tending to her toilette. Because she did not rise before noon, no matter what. She insisted that her chocolate be placed at her bedside so she might sip it slowly as she considered the day before her. She had always been very particular. And so quick to share her opinions on all things that he had been certain she could not have a single one he hadn’t heard.
In this past month, he hadn’t been able to stop wondering what he’d missed.
Françoise saw him in the mirror of her vanity table and waved her staff away.
“I hope you’ve come to tell me of your success,” she said when they’d gone. She sat in her favorite chair, there before her glass, critically examining her face. Ruthlessly looking for signs of age, he knew. He had once thought she was insecure, though he knew better now. “That you have reduced the girl to rubble and made it clear to her father exactly how you plan to treat her. Like the disposable whore she is.”
Cenzo could remember, with perfect clarity, the man he’d been when he married Josselyn. He remembered all his plans in detail. He remembered the triumph he’d felt that she had fallen so easily into his clutches and how pleased he’d been that there was an attraction between them, because it would make his inevitable victory all the sweeter.
He could remember all of that, but the driving need to take revenge had deserted him. It had gotten tangled up in the way he’d served Josselyn for weeks, too deeply invested in her happiness to be able to swing that pendulum back to where it had been.
And savoring her innocence had not helped.
Because of those things, it was as if he saw the world in a different way. As if there were new colors and the old ones no longer made sense.
Not just the world in general, but his world. And his mother most of all.
“Your absence from the wedding was noted,” he told her.
Cenzo would normally move farther into the room, but today he remained in the doorway.
“I should hope that my absence was noted.” She let out an affronted little laugh. “I wanted to send a clear message.”
And no matter how he had come at this problem, he always ended up in the same place. “I think you may have succeeded on that level, Maman. But I do not think it is the message you intended.”
Françoise made a production of swiveling around in her chair so she could stare at him, her only son. Her only son and her only defender.
The sinking feeling inside him, his constant companion this last month, only got worse.
Because he had been heedless in his support of his mother, always. Heedless, reckless, desperate. She demanded no less.
And he, who had thought himself such an independent man, beholden to no one, had always, always done as she’d asked.
You are well and truly poisoned, Cenzo, but not by my father,Josselyn had said.
He hadn’t believed that when she’d said it. But as time passed, it had seemed as if her words had grown barbed and weighted. And uncovered poison in him he never would have believed was there.
He still didn’t want to believe it.
But he had spent a month of his life living without the driving need for revenge his mother had put in him. He remembered it too well.
That and the ghosts. The memories he’d never wanted to face.
Looking at her today, he felt empty.
“It is as I feared,” his mother said, bristling. “You have fallen victim to the Christie girl. Yet another man felled by a taste of a common—”
“Careful, please,” Cenzo said with a soft menace he did nothing to hide. “You are referring to my wife. The future mother of the heir to the Falcone legacy.”
His mother gasped, but he could see her clearly now. He could see the calculation in her gaze—and he had to wonder if it had always been there. He feared it must have been. How had he missed it?
“I had every intention of crushing Josselyn beneath my heel,” Cenzo told her, still trying to see what he must have seen before. Still trying to find some softness, some real emotion. But there was only her armored beauty and that narrow glare.
Cenzo could remember too many things now, and they were things he should have remembered before he hit his head. But it was as if having amnesia had only awakened him to all the ways in which he’d forgotten the most important parts of his own life. He’d been weaned on tales of the Falcone legacy as if it was the only thing that could possibly matter. And after his father had died, he had been reeling about in despair—and his mother had filled his head with enemies and blame.
It had seemed a natural progression. Grief was for lesser men, surely.
But now he remembered all the rest of it. The strain that had always hung between his parents. His father’s increasing isolation and his mother’s brittle refusal to curb her social engagements, no matter how many times the society pages printed those photographs of her with other men that made his father ill.
Françoise had spun that, too. Your father can be jealous, but I persevere, she would tell him as a boy, as if she was the hero of the tale. Or, Your father is protective, that is all, for he alone knows the many wrongs that have been perpetrated against us both.
Cenzo understood now that he had believed he had enemies long before he knew what that word meant.
But now he knew that his greatest enemy had always been the lies his mother told.
“I am not my father. I will not give you an infinite number of chances. I will ask you once. Did you proposition Archibald Christie?” And Cenzo smiled coldly while she sputtered. “And before you answer, you should know that he kept your letters.”
Because he hadn’t seen those letters, but he believed Josselyn.
He believed her.
Once he’d understood that, he’d come straight here. For he believed her, even now. Even after she had made him think he was a lowly servant.
Françoise held his gaze, but said nothing.
And as that silence drew out, Cenzo faced perhaps the most shameful truth yet.
That even now, even when he knew better, he had expected an explanation. Something to exonerate her.
“I applaud you for not lying,” he managed to say. He let out a hollow laugh. “It shames me to admit I almost wish you would.”
Josselyn had torn the scales from his eyes, and he couldn’t close them again. He couldn’t go back to his willful blindness.
He couldn’t pretend.
“You told me he killed himself in despair,” Cenzo said, every syllable that he uttered its own condemnation. “After a conversation with Archibald Christie.”
“He spoke to Archibald after he left the island and was dead soon after,” Françoise replied haughtily. “What other conclusion can be drawn?”
“When did you last speak to him?” Cenzo asked softly. Because he’d spent hours and hours trying to get the facts to make sense with what Josselyn had showed him.
And her silence now confirmed his suspicions.
“He radioed you, didn’t he?” he asked. “He couldn’t call you from the island, but he often radioed in that year. You would lock yourself in his office and talk to him each night. And I always wondered why, when you told me he was depressed, it always sounded as if you were the one defending yourself. What was he accusing you of, Maman?I’m betting it was all those men you betrayed him with, over the years. And I bet that when he left the island, he called the man whose betrayal had hurt him the most, and first, only to discover the truth.”
Her face only twisted. “You are wrong. He was a sad, ill man.”
“He was a good man,” Cenzo said, his voice thicker than he would have liked. “And he was a Falcone. He never would have killed himself. He drove halfway up Mount Etna so he would not come here in a temper, didn’t he? You should never have let me believe otherwise.”
And he faced the fact that even then, there was a part of him that wanted her to deny it. To explain all the little things he’d taken much too long to put together. To shine a different light on events that made them all make sense—and allowed him to revere her as he always had.
But she didn’t.
Because there was no getting past the letters, was there? She’d written letters, Josselyn had read them, and he would rather have acted the servant for years than have to face what that meant.
“Cenzo,” his mother said then, reaching out to him—no doubt reading the resolve on his face. “Cenzo, my son, this girl has confused you.”
“On the contrary.” He straightened from the doorway. And when he looked at his mother, he finally saw her. He finally, fully, saw her for who she was. Sheer poison, as Josselyn had known when he had not. He supposed that was one more thing he would have to live with. “Remember, please, that everything you consider yours is mine. Do not try to play your games with my wife. Or her father. You may stay here in this villa and rot—but if you test me, Maman, I promise you I will throw you out on the street. With my own hands.”
She gaped at him. “You would not dare.”
“I would advise you not to try me,” Cenzo bit out.
That was how he left her, sputtering still. He had no intention of returning.
And now the weight of her lies was gone, only one thing remained.
The most important thing.