His jaw tightens, gaze hardens. “Tell me something first. What would he do now? Petrov.”
I press my lips together.
“Comfort you?”
I don’t bother to answer. He knows anyway.
“Tell me. Is that what he’d do? Because I don’t think so. I think he’d hurt you.”
“Stop.”
“And I don’t think he’d just use his hands. I’ve seen the marks, Mara.”
Shame washes through me. “I said stop.”
“And he wouldn’t stop there, would he? Wouldn’t stop at hitting you.”
“Shut up!” I scream, taking a step away only to have him take a matching one toward me.
“He’d touch you.”
I feel my face crumple and cover it with my hands, trying to rub away emotions I haven’t let myself feel in so long.
“Hurt you in every way.”
I turn to run away but he catches my arm and spins me to face him, backing me into the wall. He sets one big hand against my belly to keep me there.
“Understand one thing,” he starts, leaning his face down to mine. When I try to look away, he leans in closer. “I am not him. I am nothing like him. Don’t ever accuse me of being like him.”
I swallow the lump in my throat and wrap my arms around myself when I begin to tremble with a cold that’s so deep inside me I’m afraid I’ll never get warm again.
“Just let me go,” I try, my voice coming out weak.
“No,” he says and there’s that look again. The same one from yesterday. But I was wrong. It’s not pity. It’s more. And it’s harder to look at. “I won’t let you go, Mara. That’s the point.”
I search his face, shake my head.
He looks at me straight on and I can see the broken side of his face, the two deep crisscrossing gashes. I think he’s letting me look.
“Dante didn’t look like you,” I say. My words wound him. I see it. He turns his head a little, so I only see the good side again. “Why are you lying to me? Telling me you’re him?” A tear slides down my cheek.
He watches it fall as if transfixed, then wipes it away with the pad of his thumb.
“Why?” I ask again.
“I’m not lying to you, and you know it.” His voice is quieter. Darker. “They told you you were Elizabeth because they thought they’d taken Elizabeth. They were supposed to have taken her.”
More tears flow from my eyes.
“Then when they realized their mistake, they told you that you had to be Elizabeth.”
I bring my hands to my face to wipe away the tears that won’t stop falling. I shake my head. “It’s not true.” But it is true. I remember them arguing in the very beginning. When I wouldn’t stop crying. When they realized what I was saying was that I wasn’t Lizzie.
I don’t want to remember this. I can’t.
He reaches out, brushes my hair back and when I meet his gaze something strange passes between us. His fingers make contact with my face as he wipes away more tears and there are those sensations like before. Strangely, I find myself wanting his touch. His hands on me. Something I’ve never wanted before. Something I never thought I could want. And when he pulls me to his chest, I don’t fight him. I just let him hold me for a long, long time, feel him kiss the top of my head, strong arms keeping me to him.
“I won’t hurt you, Mara. And I won’t let anyone else hurt you again.”
I want to wrap my arms around him. Let him carry me, give in to him. Give myself over because he is so much stronger than me. Maybe he can take the weight, the mess of the last fifteen years.
But he pulls away too quickly and I’m left feeling cold again. I wrap my arms around myself once more.
Alone.
Always alone.
And besides you can’t just give away fifteen years. Hand it over like it’s a coat you take off.
“I was off the island that night,” he says, drawing me out of myself. It sounds like a confession. Like something heavy inside him. “I’d snuck out for a girl. But that was all planned. So that bastard could murder my family. We thought you’d died. We just assumed they’d gotten rid of your body. It took Cristiano years to get better. And he was different after. Until Scarlett, at least.” I watch as he tells his story. “It was Noah who recognized you from a picture in Lizzie’s room. He remembered you.”
“Noah?”
He nods.
In the rags of my memory is a little boy named Noah. But that was a very, very long time ago. I remember that he was kind to me.
“That’s not possible,” I say.
He cups my face with both hands, uses his thumbs to wipe my tears. He’s gentle, so gentle, this giant of a man, this killer. But I can’t believe him. Doesn’t he know that?
“I never even looked for you. God. I never even looked.”
His pain is palpable.
I pull out of his grasp, turn my gaze away. I don’t want to see it and I don’t want to feel what I’m feeling. I can’t do this.
“Stop,” I tell him.
“And then you were so close, in the same fucking house.” He’s angry at that last part, his emotions shifting so erratically, so violently.
“I said stop. I don’t want to hear any more.”
“But that bastard had already taken you and after the explosion,” he stops, looks away from me, shakes his head. “It took me five more years to find you, but I never stopped looking once I knew. I swear.” That last part is like a confession and a plea in one. I look up at him, at the agony on his face.
“I said I don’t want to hear it,” I say because I have to.
“You’re not going back to him, Mara. You don’t have to be afraid of him anymore.”
I close my eyes. “You have no idea what you’re saying. You don’t know how powerful he is.”
And I can’t do this. I can’t listen to this. I can’t start feeling again. It’s easier if I just don’t feel. I can manage it then. And the pain, sometimes the punishments help. It’s stupid, I know.
He’s still talking but I try to tune him out. I sing Flora’s song in my head. I close my eyes and sing. His thumb comes to my lips. I must be mouthing the words.
“Your grandmother—"
My eyelids fly open, and I slam both hands flat into his chest. “Stop it! My grandmother is dead! They’re all dead. And I don’t want to hear about how they died, and I lived all because somebody made a stupid mistake! I don’t want to hear any of it!”
I swing one arm up to his face, almost get my hand around the eyepatch but he catches me. He drags both arms over my head, holding them against the wall, leaning in so close I smell the scent that was on his pillow.
“I said not to do that,” he says, tone low, voice like gravel.
“Why not? Are you afraid I’ll see what I already know? You forget that I watched you kill that man at the penthouse. You liked it. I saw that, too.”
“He deserved to die. They all did.”
“Only monsters enjoy the feel of blood on their hands.”
He snorts, one side of his mouth curves momentarily upward. “I never said I wasn’t one. But I’m not your monster.”
That makes me pause. I need to think. “Why are you doing this? What do you want with me?”
“I want you safe. I want you home.”
“I already told you I have no home and I will never be safe.”
“You’re safe with me.”
I twist, tug at my arms but it’s useless. He just stands there like it’s costing him no effort at all to keep me in place.
“Just let me go.”
“I’ll let you go when I’m ready. When you’ve heard me.”
“What if I don’t want to hear you?”
“Well, that’s too bad, sweetheart.”
There it is again. Sweetheart. I blink, open my mouth to say something but I can’t remember what.
“You used to make me little hearts cut out of pink paper and leave them on my pillow. Always pink
with you. My brothers would laugh so fucking hard.”
“I hate pink,” I lie. I don’t feel either way about pink. I shake my head. I need to stop this. For fifteen years I have been learning to store the few memories I had away. And I do remember. I remember the boy, Dante. I’ve always remembered him even when all the other faces faded, his somehow remained. Even over my own grandmother’s. But I learned to keep those memories locked up in a box until they were all but forgotten. Until there was no lost life to cry over. Until there was no one to miss so much it made it impossible to breathe.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I ask again, eyes warm with quiet, never-ending tears.
“Why am I making you remember?”
I don’t answer.
“It hurts. I know. It’s why you want me to stop but you have to face it now.”
“No, that’s not why. Let go.” I twist and turn but he doesn’t give, not an inch.
“You suffered the most out of everyone.”
“You don’t know me.” I realize then there’s only one way to make him stop. I have to wound him like I did moments ago but harder.
“You’re strong, Mara. A survivor.”
“I’m not that.” I know what I am. Weak. A coward. I don’t know what he reads in my expression or my body language, but he lets me slip my wrists from his grasp, keeping his hands on the wall. He leans into them to keep me caged as he looks down at me.
“But you need to stop and face the past. It’s the only way to have a future.”
“A future?” Doesn’t he understand that for someone like me, there is no future? No hope?
“And I’ll be with you. It hurts. I know. Fuck, do I know. That’s why you want me to stop, but—”
“No, you’re wrong. That’s not why I want you to stop,” I say, cutting him off, my voice clear, not choked. Because I need to end this now. I need to make him stop now before it gets too far, and I can’t stop it anymore. Before I can’t put the lid back on Pandora’s box. So, I change tactic. “You want me to tell you I believe that you’re Dante? What if I did? What would it matter?”
His eyes narrow as he takes in this change.
“You need me to tell you it’s okay? Is that it?” I force myself to keep going. To not give in to the weakness that has me hugging my arms to myself. “You want me to say that I’m okay now that you’ve rescued me? That you’re my hero?”
“I’m not a hero. I know that,” he says through gritted teeth. I’ve hit a nerve. I see it. Guilt. That’s his Achilles’ heel.
“Tell me, is that what you want? Why you came for me now? Fifteen. Years. Later. Fifteen years too late?” I don’t have to work at pretending the anger I feel. The rage. I just have to direct it at him. No matter how much I know it’s wrong.
“Mara,” he sounds calm, but that calm is fading. He has anger inside him too. A rage as violent as mine.
“Do you know what my life was?” It’s hard to speak around the lump in my throat, but I keep going. Pushing him, poking at that rage, nudging it to the surface. “Do you have a single fucking clue?”
He exhales, blinks away momentarily like he can’t quite look at me. The breath he draws in is tight.
“Do you think I can ever go back after all that happened? Go home? What would I go back to? A life I don’t remember? One I never got a chance to live? One where I watched my best friend murdered because they thought she was me?” My voice breaks.
He steps away, runs a hand through his hair. “Fuck, Mara. That wasn’t your fault. You know that, don’t you? Please tell me you fucking know that.”
I step toward him, steel my spine, and stand up straighter. “You want to know how I know you can’t be him? Can’t be the boy with the bright green eyes who was a hero to me back when there weren’t any monsters to slay?”
His lips draw into a tight line, and I know if I say what I’m about to say, I will cut him deeply.
But I can’t not say it.
I can’t stop.
“Because Dante would never have let what happened to me happen.”
9
Dante
Fuck.
You can hear a pin drop.
She’s right.
She is absolutely right.
Those last words cut into me like the shards that tore me apart in that house. She could have slapped my face and it would have been less violent. Less painful.
I look down at her not quite believing it, the words themselves echoing as if bouncing off the walls. Repeating. Repeating.
“Because Dante would never have let what happened to me happen.”
She stares up with her wide blue eyes, accusing and innocent and terrified at once. Her face is pale, the skin around her nose and eyes pink from crying. She’s waiting for my reaction. Ready for an attack like earlier when she curled into herself thinking I’d hit her. Assuming I would.
Fuck. This has gone off the rails. Everything so very different than I could have anticipated.
I knew she’d be confused. I thought she’d remember me though. It was arrogant, to think it. To assume I’d swoop in and rescue her, and we’d all live happily ever after.
Newsflash, asshole. Kidnapped girls who have lived their lives in captivity don’t get happily-ever-afters. And neither do monsters. I am one, inside and out. I let her see that with her own eyes. Couldn’t shield her from my true nature.
“Matthaeus.” I don’t take my eyes off her as I say his name, sounding much calmer than I feel. I wonder if she hears the current just beneath that false calm.
Neither she nor I look away when Matthaeus comes into the room. He probably heard every fucking word.
“Watch her. She tries anything, give her something to help her sleep.”
Her eyes narrow and her mouth tightens but she remains silent. She doesn’t look away from me, those vivid blue eyes familiar, twisting something inside me.
He nods tightly.
I walk away, unlock the door, and get out of the apartment, letting the door slam shut behind me. I hadn’t taken off my coat, so I button it against the icy wind when I get through the downstairs door. I walk blind through the empty lot, out the broken gate. I don’t look back at the warehouse. It’s one of David’s. Harder to dig up than the others. He had wanted to make sure no one would know about this one, at least when he was alive. I can’t imagine him having spent much time inside it. Not his style. He had it stocked with weapons though and I know he’s had men stay there. I saw the trash they left behind. I wonder what kind of operations he ran out of the place.
But that’s not what I’m thinking about now.
I’m hearing her words repeat in my head. “Dante would never have let what happened to me happen.” I let them take me under as I walk for half an hour before finally getting too fucking cold to be outside any longer. I turn the corner and walk into the first bar I see, a run-down, smelly hole in the wall.
But it’s dark and there’s liquor, so it’ll do.
I walk up to the bar and the two men sitting nearest the empty stool are quick to vacate their seats. I open my coat, shake off the snow. I don’t bother taking it off before I drop onto the stool. I push my wet hair back and it stays back, putting my face on full display for the barman who to his credit, doesn’t flinch. He just stands there eyeing me while drying a glass. He’s a big guy. Bald. Bearded and tattooed. He nods in greeting.
“Whiskey,” I say.
He sets a glass down in front of me, uncorks a new bottle and pours.
“Leave the bottle.” I take a hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet and set it on the bar. Not that this whiskey’s worth that.
He eyes the bill but doesn’t take it just yet. “Sure thing.” He walks to the other end of the bar, and I pick up the glass, swallow the contents. I catch my reflection between the bottles of liquor in the tarnished mirror behind the bar. I see why the men who scurried away did. I look wrecked. And scary as fuck.
I pick up the bottle and the glass, then pour. I have
to do that since I lost my eye. Can’t just pour something out into a cup that I’m not holding. Depth perception is still a challenge, but I work around it. Shrapnel hit my eye the night of the explosion, but the doctors thought they could save it. I knew when I opened them there was a problem, but I figured that was the bandages obscuring my vision. In time it became evident I was losing my sight in my right eye. Then it got infected, and well, here I am. A patch like a pirate.
Alessandro likes it. Thinks it’s cool.
I smile at the thought of my nephew. Miniature Cristiano. He had Scarlett buy him an eyepatch as soon as he understood why I wore it so I wouldn’t feel like I stuck out. He was irritated his wasn’t leather like mine though.
I swallow the rest of the contents of the glass and pour again. Christ. This hasn’t gone like I expected, but she’s right. What did I think? That I’d fucking swoop in like some knight in shining armor and slay the beast and then what? She’d forget everything those bastards did to her and go back to living the life she was meant to live? A life she’s never known?
Fuck. I don’t want to think about it all, but I need to. I need to do this with her. Like I said. I owe it to her.
This all happened because of me. Because David raped my mother. Got her pregnant when she only wanted to be free of him. So, to punish her, he had that bastard Rinaldi violate her, then made her watch as her husband and children were massacred.
Not me, though. I didn’t die.
And I have a feeling if she’d had a choice, if she could have sacrificed me to save them, she might have. I wouldn’t blame her. I was the living, breathing reminder of the violence done to her. A secret she had to keep from her husband, the man I knew as my father but wasn’t. I still wonder what he’d have done if he knew. If he’d have been able to love me. To stand the sight of me.
Pouring another glass, I take a sip, leaning back in my chair. The liquor is starting to do its work.
She was never cruel or even unkind to me. She loved me. I know she did. But sometimes I’d find her watching me and it always felt off. I understand now why that was.
Stolen: Dante’s Vow Page 6