Page 47 of Bound Enemies
His head slammed into the marble floor.
Where he then lay, stiff and silent, for the length of a breath. Maybe two.
Maybe a small eternity as Pau and his men and Leontina all simplystaredin the jarring silence.
But then the man in black let out a shout from behind them, and everything after that was chaos.
The staff came pouring in. There was panic all over the castle, there was an endless amount of rushing around, and ultimately they carried the old man out and loaded him on a helicopter staffed with paramedics to take him to the nearest hospital in Florence.
Pau was in the middle of things. He had Giaco on the phone the whole time, and it wasn’t until he received word that Umberto had made it to the hospital and was declared stable that he realized he hadn’t seen Leontina in a long while.
Since that moment they’d all stared at the old man crumpled on the floor—not a monster any longer, not a terror, not a Machiavellian villain. Just a breakable human who had hurt himself and fallen, subject to the rules of gravity and mortality like all the rest of them.
Pau still couldn’t get his head around it, not really—but he ceased caring once he realized he didn’t know where Leontina was.
His first thought was that she’d run again. And even as he thought that, he also wondered how he could blame her if she had. If he was her, he imagined he’d have made it to the border by now without so much as a glance back.
Being in this castle and watching the literal downfall of the wickedest man he’d ever known made his own behavior stand out to him, starkly.
And not with the honor he’d always believed he had on his side.
She had told him she loved him. And what had he done? He had acted no better than her father. Cold. Abrasive.
Could he blame her if she decided that she would be better off on her own?
He looked around the main hall, where there were still staff members rushing around, and whispering to each other. No doubt feeling a mixture of competing emotions tonight, because it didn’t take much to discern that even Umberto’s staff did not care much for him. Pau would be deeply surprised if they were even well compensated.
“Have you seen—” he began, when he caught the eye of one of the members of staff who had handled herself particularly well during all of this.
The woman studied him.
Then, “Come with me,” she said, and started off so quickly that Pau didn’t have time to confirm that they were talking about the same thing.
Still, he followed. He kept pace with the woman as she took him, bewilderingly, into what he assumed were the servants’ quarters and then up sets of stairs that wound around behind the walls of the castle.
Several stories up, she led him out into a hallway that spoke to the castle’s age and certainly had none of the questionable grandeur of the more public floors below.
She marched him down to the end of the hallway, stopped, and pointed at the door at the end.
Before he could ask her where the hell he was, and why, she disappeared again.
So Pau pushed open the door, not certain why his heart was pounding so hard in his chest, and stepped inside.
It was a bedchamber, though it looked to him like something out of medieval times. Everything was stone. The floors, the walls, the small, slitted windows. There was a canopied bed in the middle, a trunk at the end of the bed, a tapestry too faded to make out what might once have been on it and, more importantly to his eye, there was a large armchair in front of the fireplace.
Where, though no fire was lit, Leontina was sitting. With a pile of what looked like particularly weathered books in her lap.
He felt a deep sense of relief go through him, because she was here. She hadn’t run. And on the heels of that, he felt something else. It was like a blow, but it lingered, making his heart ache.
So much he found he needed to press his palm there against his chest.
Pau didn’t think she’d looked up when he walked in, but when Leontina spoke, it was clear that she knew exactly who had come in.
“I thought that if I read the books in your house, I would get to know you,” she said quietly. “That I’d be able to figure you out based on who you read, and how well read the pages were. That the clues to who you are would be pressed between the pages, waiting to be uncovered.”
She did turn then, and he couldn’t place the expression on her face. It seemed remote. Possibly even something like sad.
He felt his heart kick in again, harder.
