Page 20 of Forbidden Until Midnight

‘You listen to me, and you listen good.If you want to have even the smallest chance of maintaining any kind of relationship with your brother, not a word of this gets out. Ever,’he’d warned darkly.‘You’ll go back to your friends, you might even find another fiancé. I don’t care. All that matters is that none of this gets out.’

As the words ran through her mind like a film reel, she knew that the worst was yet to come.

‘I will not have it known that I let a bastard into my family and treated her like my own.’

A waiter passed with another tray of drinks and she took the glass of whisky, swallowing the tears that had gathered in her throat along with the peaty alcohol.

Everything felt wrong. Her skin crawled as if some dark nightmare had slipped over her and she couldn’t escape it.

The man she had thought was her father, the man she had loved, the man for whom she had worked hard to become someone he could be proud of, had turned into a vicious monster. He had all but cast out her mother, allowing her to remain in the house only to save face.

And her brother—poor little Freddie who, having turned twelve over the summer, knew that something was wrong—had begun to retreat into himself, as if pole-axed by the secrets in the family. Yes, Eleanor could leave. But she didn’t doubt for one minute that her father would prevent her from returning or seeing her brother while he remained under his roof. And what would happen to Freddie without her mother or her around to protect him?

She didn’t think her father would do anything to him, other than mould his young, barely formed personality into whatever he wanted. And that, she was beginning to realise, was the most terrifying thing about the whole situation.

That her brother would lose his innocence. That he would be twisted and warped into her father’s image. That Freddie would become like these young men in the garden, laughing at whatever cruelty had taken their fancy.

Because that was what they did. They found something or someone and made them the butt of their jokes, casting them as an outsider to torment for their own amusement. And she didn’t want Freddie anywhere near these people. Fighting back the cramp fisting her stomach, she threw back another mouthful of whisky, a drink she’d acquired a taste for two years earlier, with Santo.

Santo.

She knew he’d be here this evening. She thought that perhaps he might have come here with expectations. Expectations that she’d encouraged last year, back when she’d thought she’d survived the worst that life could throw at her.

A bubble of almost hysterical cynicism rose from deep within her.

Naïve. Foolish.

She knew that Santo had believed her to be both of those things. And he’d been right. All along, she had been incomparably naïve and utterly foolish. And now it seemed as if broken shards of rose-coloured glass lay at her bare feet, ready to cut her if she moved even an inch.

‘Eleanor, are you sure you’re okay?’ Ekaterina asked, and she was about to reply when she felt it. When she felthim.

She swallowed, capable only of nodding her reassurance. Because if she opened her lips the only thing that would emerge was a miserable sob.

The hairs stood up at the back of her neck, goosebumps shivering over her skin. The weight of his attention was an icy finger trail across her shoulder blades, poking and prodding an accusation of betrayal and disappointment.

She could only imagine his shock at seeing her back here amongst the very people who epitomised everything he seemed to hate about this event. The very people she had turned her back on three years before. The very people that her father had blackmailed her into joining again.

‘If anyone finds out, you’ll never see Frederick ever again.’

And Santo would. He would find out, he would cut to the heart of her secret so effortlessly, and she couldn’t allow him to do that. She couldn’t risk it. So, with that threat ringing in her ears, she turned her back to where she felt Santo’s presence and said to Ekaterina, ‘Let’s dance.’

‘And that’s when I told him that he could invest whatever he wanted, but that I was having nothing to do with it.’

‘Quite right. So have you considered...’

Santo tuned out from the banal conversation of the men and women around him. It was always the same: who had the most money, where could that money be put to use, what could they get? This constant grab, grab, grab.

His gaze scanned the room, refusing to settle on Eleanor, but always keeping her within his line of sight. He clenched his jaw as, from the corner of his eye, he saw her wobble awkwardly on her heels. He hadn’t been counting, but he could tell that she had already had more to drink that evening than all of the previous New Year’s Eve parties put together.

Something was wrong.

And she hadn’t come to him.

Old insecurities rose to the surface. Memories of being unable to do anything to protect his mother, of being helpless against his father. And then, just when he’d got big enough to fight back, his father had used her against him. The threat against her was the only leash that Gallo Sabatini had needed against Santo, and he’d used it well.

Until that last day. He’d heard the argument from outside the house. The screams that had caused the blood to freeze in his veins. Santo had rushed through the doors of the villa just outside Rome and found his mother crouched over his father’s broken body lying at the bottom of the curved staircase.

With shaking hands, she’d pulled her mobile from her pocket. He’d honestly thought she’d been calling the police until he’d heard her begging Pietro to come. When his mother had looked up and found him standing there...

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