Page 64 of Ache for You (Slow Burn 3)
Squinting out the windshield, I ask, “What is this place?”
“Castello di Moretti.”
I turn to him slowly as shock spreads throughout my body.
He smiles at the look on my face. “Home sweet home.”
He makes it sound like a double-wide trailer. “You live here?”
“I grew up here. This has been the seat of the Moretti family for more than eight hundred years.”
“Uh-huh.” I stare at him.
“Why are you looking at me like that?”
I point at the monster castle. “This explains a lot.”
Shaking his head, he maneuvers the car into a courtyard and kills the engine. He gets out of the car and comes around and opens my door, something Brad never managed to do the entire time we were together.
I blink hard to clear the water suddenly pooling in my eyes. Don’t start crying again. Don’t you dare.
“Come,” Matteo says softly. “There are many old, priceless objects inside you’ll no doubt enjoy breaking.” He extends his hand.
I shouldn’t do this, but I’m feeling reckless. So I take his hand and let him help me out of the car. He closes the door behind me but doesn’t let go of my hand.
He leads me through a stone archway into another smaller courtyard. I don’t know all the technical terms for what I’m seeing, but suffice it to say that it’s all very castlelike. Fortified stone walls, towers, those little slits in the walls medieval archers could shoot through, all that.
When we enter through a small wooden side door into the main part of the building, a laugh unexpectedly bursts out of me and echoes up into the rafters.
Matteo glances back at me.
“Total shithole,” I say with a straight face.
He turns away, but not before I see his smile.
We walk, and walk, and walk. The place is a maze of marble and stone and hanging tapestries, heavily carved wood furniture and gilt mirrors, flowers spilling from porcelain urns. We pass what I decide to call the Wall of Death, which features a variety of medieval axes, swords, spears, and other items designed to deprive a person of life in the most painful of ways in a giant glass cabinet lit from underneath just to make it all the more creepy.
“You grew up here?” I mutter under my breath, unable to imagine a young child wandering around this place. It’s a miracle he didn’t accidentally kill himself running into one of the thousand sharp edges everywhere or falling down and cracking open his skull on the slippery and unforgivingly hard marble floor.
“When I wasn’t away at boarding school.”
There’s a dark undertone
in his voice that suggests boarding school wasn’t all fun and games. I want to ask him about it but am distracted by the smell of baking bread. It seems we’re headed toward a kitchen. I hear women laughing and the sound of clanging pans. Then we pass through an open arched doorway into an enormous room that makes the word kitchen seem insufficient.
There are bread ovens and two wood-burning fireplaces and a long sink built right into the thick stone walls. Three large oak tables command the center space on the floor. There’s a hearth so large it could fit several cauldrons, and a long row of shelves filled with pantry goods.
The two women I heard laughing fall silent when we walk in. Plump and grandmotherly with identical uniforms of black with starched white aprons, they could be sisters.
In unison, they curtsey.
“Mio signore.”
I barely know any Italian, but I do know they just called Matteo “My lord.”
When I snort, he slants me an irritated look. He says something to the ladies, gesturing toward the stainless-steel refrigerator on the other side of the room. Then he nods at them in farewell and leads me away as they gape after us in surprise.
As soon as we’re out of earshot, I snicker. “Where are you taking me, my lord?”
