Page 87 of Modern Romance September 2025 1-4

CHAPTER THREE

Amelia did not allow herself to grin, though she desperately wanted to. Watching shock chase across Diego’s face felt like the thrill of a lifetime.

She did have the upper hand. Because he had afforded her a lot of power in order to keep himself isolated. She had not planned to use it quite so forcefully, but…

She didn’t like being here. She didn’t like thinking about him living here for two whole years, and her allowing it.

It was a tragedy. She’d known he felt grief, maybe even some guilt, but she hadn’t known it was this bad.

She really hadn’t thought much about him at all, which felt like something that would have disappointed her father.

She wouldn’t disappoint his memory. She wouldn’t close or sell the castello, even though she technically could . She didn’t need to, nor did the business require it.

But she could threaten it, and Diego could believe her capable of doing so. She could get him down the mountain. She could…show him what life was like. She had to.

For her father.

“Do you need to pack anything?” she asked pleasantly enough.

He stood there, no doubt inwardly fuming. He said nothing, but fury all but waved off him. Danger seemed to fill the entire room, but it didn’t fill her . Not with fear or anything as sensible as all that.

No, whatever fizzled around inside her felt nothing like fear. She didn’t want to come up with words for what it might be, because then she would have to ask herself why danger felt like… excitement .

Without a word, he turned on his heel. He stalked away, through a door she could only assume led to a bedroom. For a moment, she stood where she was and breathed very carefully around the strange things crashing inside her.

Then she followed.

His bedroom was another shock, another little dagger of pain. It was basically a closet. The bed was little more than a pallet. There were no windows. No fireplace. She heard herself whisper his name in abject horror without really meaning to.

He whipped his head around to face her, giving the impression of a wounded animal lashing out. She wanted to reach over and soothe him, even knowing that, just like that wounded animal, it would not be welcomed.

“I will go down to the castello,” he bit out. She could see now that he had a leather tote opened on the pallet bed. “Only to have a face-to-face meeting with everyone necessary to ensure that you never have the power to shut it down.”

“We could have that meeting now, if you’d like. After all, I’m the only one with power to ensure I don’t have the power. Unless you terminate me, I have full control over the castello.”

“Very well, I will meet with the attorney required to terminate you .”

Worry settled into her chest, but she didn’t let her smile falter. “If that’s really what you want.” She motioned at the bag. “Would you like me to pack for you? I’m still your assistant until you see things through with the lawyer.”

He stared at her as if she were a madwoman. Maybe she was. She didn’t need to push this. She didn’t need to make threats to get him off the mountain. She could return to the castello and let everything continue as it had.

But he lived like…like a prisoner. And she could see the words her father had written in her mind’s eye.

He will be a good man someday. I wish I could convince him of that.

Amelia would use whatever means necessary to convince him.

To make her father’s wish came true. Because if she was doing what he would have wanted, enacting the things he would have done—if perhaps a year or two too late—then it was like he was still here.

Making the memory of him proud kept him alive inside her heart, she liked to think.

So she would do so. Before a new year dawned.

“There is nothing to pack,” Diego said darkly.

He lifted the bag to his shoulder. He’d put something in there, but not clothes or toiletries.

She couldn’t even hazard a guess as to what it might hold.

In two strides, he stood in front of her, glowering down at her.

“You will regret interrupting my peace.”

He smelled like woodfire. His eyes blazed with fury. He was so much larger than her. Physically intimidating, and yet she did not feel any kind of self-preserving impulse.

Quite the opposite. She had to curl her hand into a fist to fight off the impulse to reach out and touch .

She took a step back, afraid of her reaction to him more than she was of him .

“Alternatively,” she said, seeking a calm and reasonable approach to his fiery response, “we could handle this in a rational manner. I could remain in your employ. You could allow me to open up the castello for its traditional Christmas events, thus helping that arm of your businesses. You could make a small handful of appearances, and when all is said and done, and the clock strikes midnight on a brand-new year, if you still feel as you do now, you may return to…” She made a show of looking around.

“This. And I will close the castello to the public forever. I won’t bother you ever again, except to do your express bidding. Unless you’d like to fire me, that is.”

His gaze moved over her, and she had no idea what he was cataloging when he did that. What he saw. What it meant to him. But he seemed to keep doing it, taking her in as a whole.

“Such promises,” he muttered darkly, then pushed past her and out of the cabin.

It would be twenty-four hours—at most, Diego decided. He would have her contract altered, her power stripped. A simple meeting with his lawyers should make it so.

He would not get rid of her, though it was tempting. But he needed her for the day-to-day. Once she had no power over the castello, she could go back to doing what he’d hired her to do. She would understand that random acts of greed would not go unpunished.

Because what else could trying to sell the castello out from under him be?

She would stay in his employ because she was good at the jobs she was supposed to do, but she would not have the power to sell anything .

Surely his lawyers could see to that. He could have called them, but he knew his presence would ensure they took this seriously.

And it would ensure Amelia Baresi could not corrupt his plans.

What had changed in two years to have her suddenly crossing every boundary he’d so piously planted?

It did not matter. She did not matter. What mattered was arranging everything the way he chose, the way that suited his punishment.

The idea of returning to the castello was a physical, blinding pain.

Pain is the price.

So maybe this too was part of his penance. He didn’t enjoy that thought, but he reminded himself that his choices required him to move toward the pain now, embrace it.

He left the cabin without a backward glance, following Amelia out to where a car was pulling up in the snow. He found himself stopping short, already stabbed clean through by the identity of the driver.

He recognized the man, or thought he did. “Armondo…”

“That is Mondo, Armondo’s son,” Amelia said, the correction quiet and gentle. “Armondo still does some driving for the castello staff, but not these treacherous roads. They’re just a little too challenging for him these days.”

Diego looked at the driver through the glass—a picture-perfect replica of Armondo, if he hadn’t aged at all since Diego’s childhood.

Diego remembered his father sneaking off to smoke a cigarette with Armondo when he would drive them into Bolzano for business.

Mother did not approve of smoking, so those trips were the only times Father had indulged.

For all their faults, they had been devoted to each other. For all their faults…

“Shall we?” Amelia asked, her voice soft as she gestured to where the car waited.

Diego moved forward stiffly, some of his motivating fury dulled by the sight of someone he kind of recognized. Armondo—no, his son.

Mondo opened the door for them. “Buon pomeriggio, signor.”

Diego could not find his voice to respond, so he nodded and slid into the car. Amelia entered on the opposite side. They left a large gap between them on the expensive leather seats.

They drove in a heavy silence. Diego didn’t miss that when Mondo had a straightaway and could take his focus off the curving, narrow road for a moment, his gaze lifted to the rearview mirror, as if he were studying Diego and not sure what to make of him.

Amelia had her phone out, occasionally typing some sort of quick missive into the machine. She paid almost no attention to him at all.

Diego realized he had not been in a car for almost the entire time he’d been up at the cabin. He had walked everywhere he needed to, or had deliveries made when necessary. Being in a moving vehicle going down the mountain was disarming.

Everything about this day was like an earthquake, scrambling up the foundations he’d built. Out of guilt. For his penance.

They wound down from the part of the mountain where his isolated cabin was situated to the broader valley in which the castello was nestled.

It was amazing what a mind could remember, what instinctual memory the landscape created.

Because he knew the moment he’d see the first spire of Castello di Natale around the curve.

He could count the seconds to when the first tower would come into view, then the second, then the third.

Almost as if the entire castle was mapped into his bones.

If the feeling hanging around the center of his chest did not feel singularly like dread, he would not admit it to himself. Dread was the only feeling he allowed.

When the car drove from paved road to cobbled drive, Diego had to focus on breathing in and out carefully so he would not have a physical reaction Amelia might take as weakness.

He had heard so many people throughout his childhood go on and on and on about the beauty of Castello di Natale.

The perfect Christmas castle. Opulence and luxury mixed with tradition, and a coziness that allowed each guest to feel every inch the wealthy class they were, while reminding them of something simpler.

Even when he had been a different person, he had never understood why the generations held on to this tradition.

Opening one of their homes to other wealthy families, throwing grand Christmas balls, as his great-great-grandparents had once done in order to save their riches.

His parents had enjoyed such revelry, he supposed, and showing off for their friends.

While Diego had once enjoyed a party, he’d never enjoyed the feeling of his parents wanting him and Aurora to perform for their friends, as if they’d had children only to make them behave like trained monkeys.

But the tradition had continued. Until death. Until tragedy. He had considered selling off the castello , and all the Folliero holdings, in those first grief-stricken days. Get rid of everything. Be nothing and no one since he’d killed them all.

But when he’d met with the lawyers and his father’s assistants and staff to arrange just that, he hadn’t been able to verbalize the desire. In that moment, selling it had felt like murdering them once again.

So he’d shut up the castello but held on, keeping the same staff in place. And now, even two years later, he could not fathom selling or opening the castello.

“How long has it been?” Amelia asked, her voice gentle and kind.

How she could sound either when she had taken this evil turn of forcing him from his solitude and penance was a mystery to him, but the question hung there between them.

How long had it been? He’d not been home to the castello in quite a few years. Even when attending Bartolo’s funeral in the valley, he had not darkened this door. He had kept his distance.

“You were likely still in diapers.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.” She gave an injured sniff. “I was twelve when I came to live here. I remember a few of your visits quite clearly.”

He eyed her. “Do tell.”

“Well, Aurora loved to complain bitterly about your presence. And I was her favorite ear for complaining.”

“I did not realize you and my sister were close.” He could not bear to say her name aloud. It brought up too many images of a brazen young woman, spoiled in her own way but bright and vibrant. Someone who could have made something of herself, if her life hadn’t been cut so tragically short.

Because of him.

“Close? No. She did not consider me the same class as her, but despite that snobbery, she was an odd sort of kind to me, and she liked to have a rapt audience. I was young and lonely and happy to be anyone’s audience, particularly if they were under the age of thirty.”

He regarded her then. Her regal profile.

The straight, elegant way she held herself.

She had come to Italy at the age of twelve because her mother had died…

Diego could not remember how. Only the sudden shock that Bartolo would be bringing a child into the castello and would no longer be Diego’s right-hand man in the same way he had been since he’d started university.

“Why did you come to an isolated castello? Why did your father not raise you in Milan? Or leave you in London?”

Amelia lifted a shoulder. “I couldn’t say. I never really thought of it. My mother was dead. I didn’t really care where I was, as long as I was with someone who loved me.”

She didn’t say it in any kind of pointed way, but it felt a bit sharp all the same. A reminder that she, too, had lost her parents, and he wasn’t special.

But she didn’t know that her father’s demise was partly Diego’s fault. No one did. Except him. She might have grief, but she did not live with guilt.

The car rolled to a stop behind the castello.

Amelia moved to get out herself, then looked back at him with something akin to mischief in her steely eyes.

“The other thing I remember quite clearly was you loving to make a drunken scene when you came home. Perhaps we can avoid that this time around, hmm?”

Then she was out of the car, striding toward the castello— his Castello di Natale—as if she were in charge. Of this place, of his family’s legacy. Of everything he had pushed away, determined it was his penance .

But he was beginning to wonder if that penance would have been staying here all along and living with the ghosts of those he’d killed.