She knew he’d get it out of her one way or another. She gave in, shrugged. “She was having marital troubles with my father…”
“And she took it out on you?”
“She had a psychiatric disorder, I guess.”
“You guess? She wasn’t diagnosed? Treated?”
“She never admitted there was anything wrong with her. Lack of insight supports the opinion that she was deeply disturbed. You see, my mother was very beautiful and she’d been pursued since she was a teenager. Her father, a very rich and influential man, believed all her pursuers were fortune hunters. He drove them away then turned on her to ‘discipline’ her. Especially when she got attached to one of them for a while.”
“He hit her when she was old enough to get married?”
“Do you want me to talk, or do you want to play commentator and analyst?” He raised an eyebrow, made a mock-contrite gesture for her to go on. “My grandfather then arranged her marriage to my father, a self-made billionaire and the new king of Castaldini, someone he thought worthy of his only heiress. Everything went like a fairy tale, and they had two male heirs to their lineage and combined fortunes, if not to the crown. But in truth, things went from bad to worse between her and my father. It seems they conceived me during one of their last attempts at being a couple. An attempt that failed. After I was born, they were unofficially separated and my mother focused on me to a pathological level.”
“She wouldn’t let you out in the sun, to play in the sea like all children should. She told you it was for your own good when she was using you to anesthetize her pain. She made you her life’s project so she could have an excuse to suffocate you, used her innocent little girl as an antidote to her failure to earn the dependence of someone who had a choice. And when it didn’t stop her pangs, she punished you for it.”
She gave a mocking sigh. “Okay, I’m shutting up now. You’re ready to write a book analyzing my mother’s character, motivations and every last action.”
“I became who I am by reading people accurately from a single word or action.”
He was so outrageously sure of himself. And so right to be. She sighed again. “Yeah. You’re so good, sometimes I think you read minds. So…now you know. How about we drop this?”
“And continue the other eagerly anticipated subject we were discussing before we diverged into that delightful revelation, you mean? All in due course. You haven’t finished this story. Tell me how this ended, your father’s role in this mess. Where was he when your mother was suffocating you and systematically abusing you?”
“Listen, don’t try to swing this back into my father’s corner. I won’t let you. He was the king and he had a job to do, a very complex job as you’ll discover, if it becomes yours one day. My mother kept me in her apartments, and he had no reason to think anything was wrong. Apart from dogging my every step and controlling my every breath until I was about five, she was sort of okay. But I admit, I was a handful. Hyperactive and rebellious, never responding until she yelled at me or shook me, never obeying any order until threatened and punished.”
“Good for you.”
She hugged herself. “Not really. I think I drove her over the edge.”
“She told you that, didn’t she?” he snarled.
“When she started hitting me for real? Yeah, she said I made her do it, being so naughty.”
“Every abuser’s excuse. That their victim made them do it.”
“I guess so. She…she also kept saying she hated me for being so like my father, that she hated him because he stopped loving her.” She paused to gulp a breath and to brace herself against the terrible sound his teeth made gritting against each other. “Then it was over, just like that. A few days after my eighth birthday, Durante walked in unannounced and found her…found her…”
“Hitting you. How did she hit you, Clarissa?”
“How do people hit? The usual way.”
“I’ve hit many people in my life. Bullies bigger than me or equals who attacked me first. But since I hit to end an aggression, I hit hard, go for the face. She didn’t touch your face, did she? That was how she got away with it, leaving no marks on you. She covered you from head to toe in clothes and said you sunburn easily when she was covering the bruises she inflicted on you. She wasn’t so crazy after all, was she, if she gave covering her crime that much care and premeditation?” Clarissa could no longer find air to breathe. He’d sucked it all out of her world with his insight, the way he’d framed what she’d always shied away from seeing, realizing. “How was she hitting you when Durante walked in?”
“She—she was kicking me. In the stomach.”
There was that terrible grinding sound again, accompanied by the marrow-chilling purr of an enraged lion. “Did he hit her?”
“Would you have hit your mother in the same situation?”
He bared his teeth. “Maledizione, si…hell, yes.”
“Well, Durante isn’t you. He isn’t used to violence or so quick to use his fists. And he’d had years with her when she was whole, when he adored her. He’d been torn over her deterioration for a long time, and he was so shocked to witness what he did. He had believed that I was her world, all that she lived for anymore. He restrained her, took her kicks and spitting and ranting that she hated him, too, for being so like our father. Then he took me away, gave me to Antonia, then went to our father and demanded that I be removed from my mother’s apartments and care, forever. And I was. My father took me to his apartments and I’ve been safe ever since.”
“What happened to your mother?”
“She seemed to…give up. On everything.”
“Only abusing you gave her the will to go on, eh?”
“Please, Ferruccio. She’s still my mother.”
“She forfeited her right to be your mother the first time she hit you to vent her self-absorbed anger and petty frustrations.”
She tried to huff a laugh. It came out a distressed rasp. “If that was universally applied, no one would have mothers or fathers anymore.”
His scowl deepened. “You know what I mean. She injured you, repeatedly, systematically, got more vicious as time went by. She could have killed you.”
“I don’t think it would have gone that far. And after a few years, I—I became sort of her keeper, until I went to college. She wasn’t the same woman who abused me anymore…and I—I loved her.”