Chapter 29
I wake up in a haze, my skin feeling raw. I don’t remember falling asleep. I don’t remember much after the whiskey and the sex.
I turn my head to see if he’s lying next to me. He is—but he’s awake.
Valerio is propped up on an elbow, watching me with a look that makes me feel like a specimen under a microscope. He looks genuinely disturbed. I know him enough by now to be sure it’s the fact he’s still in bed with me…and that he had sex for the first time.
“You’re still here,” he says.
“I am.”
“I don’t…” He touches my shoulder with one bare finger. He stares at the point of contact as if he expects my skin to melt. “I don’t understand why.”
I sigh. I don’t feel like being a therapist today. I don’t want to treat him like a patient and analyze him right after what we shared. I just want him to try to be happy without having to dissect and question it.
“Let’s just be people,” I whisper, sitting up. “No doctor or therapy. Just a normal day. Can we do that?”
He tracks the movement of my throat when I swallow. “A normal day.”
He agrees silently by getting out of bed and getting dressed.
It’s almost like he’s excited. I watch as he puts on his shirt, his trousers, and his blazer.
Then the gloves. He slides the black leather over his fingers—the same fingers that were buried in me hours ago.
A sick possessiveness curls in my gut. Mine. I took his virginity.
He’s mine. The thought is intrusive. Unfit. But I want to brand him so no one else ever tries to look.
I get dressed too, and we leave in his car. He’s going on his first date…and it’s with me. Mine. Mine. Mine.
I link my phone to the speakers of his expensive car, filling the black beast with Lana Del Rey.
Valerio’s eyes are fixed on the road. “The woman singing sounds like she wants to die.”
“She sounds like she’s in love,” I counter.
“Same thing.” He reaches over, resting a gloved hand on my knee. The tingling between my legs starts again, but this time it tingles in my heart too. Fuck. I’m in too deep. I’m invested in Valerio Morelli—not just my body…my heart too.
Ten minutes later, he brings his hand to his mouth and takes the glove off with his teeth, placing his bare hand on my thigh. I absolutely melt.
We do the things “normal” people do. We get ice cream. We talk about anything and everything under the sun.
“It’s melting,” he grumbles at the vanilla ice cream. He looks at a group of teenagers laughing too loudly near the trash cans. “If that boy hits the glass one more time, I’m going to break his wrist.”
He isn’t “better.” Is it bad that I prefer him just the way he is? With me being the only person who can tame him? It’s selfish.
Later, we’re at a small outdoor table, and I’m nursing a coffee, watching the way the sun hits the sharp line of his jaw. I’m almost happy.
Then she appears.
A woman in her late forties. She has his eyes—the same gold-flecked irises—but hers are wide, flooded with terror. She stops at the edge of our table, her face turning the color of ash.
Valerio goes perfectly still. The espresso cup in his hand cracks.
The woman’s hand shakes as she points a finger at me. “Leave,” she whispers. “Save yourself. Get out now.”
I frown, setting my cup down. “I’m sorry?”
“You don’t know!” she screams suddenly. The sound is shrill. People stare, but she doesn’t care. “They’re monsters! All of them. He’ll drain the life out of you until you’re just a shell! Run while you still can!”
She turns and bolts, her coat flapping behind her like a shroud. What a weird woman.
Valerio stares at the empty space she left, his face unreadable. The cup finally gives way in his grip, dark liquid seeping into the leather of his glove.
“Valerio?” I reach for him.
“The check is paid,” he says. His voice is dead. The man from the bed is gone. “We’re leaving.”
The car ride is a tomb.
The Lana Del Rey track is still playing, but the music feels like a mockery now. The speedometer climbs—eighty, ninety—as he weaves through city traffic. It seems like he can’t wait to get rid of me.
“Valerio, talk to me.”
He doesn’t acknowledge me.
“That woman,” I say. “She had your eyes. The exact same gold. Was that her? Was that your mother?”
The car swerves violently as he jerks the wheel, tires screaming against the pavement before he corrects it.
“Don’t,” he rasps.
“Lucian said she was gone, but he never said she was—”
“I said don’t.” He snaps his head toward me for a split second, and the void is back.
It’s deeper than before. The man who let me touch his bare skin this morning is dead.
This is the thing that lives in the cellar.
“You’re a doctor, right? Then diagnose the silence.
It means the conversation is over. I don’t want to fucking talk. ”
“We were having a normal day, Valerio. You were here. With me. Don’t let her pull you back into the dark.”
He lets out a harsh, barking laugh with no humor in it. “A normal day? I’m a Morelli. There is no normal. There is only the rot. I am a monster, little prey. She’s right… you should run while you still can.”
He doesn’t take the turn for his penthouse. He swings the car onto my street, braking so hard in front of my building that my seatbelt locks against my chest.
“Get out,” he orders.
“Valerio—”
“Out, Charlotte. Our sessions are over. The ‘normal day’ was a lie. Go back to your life and pray I don’t decide to come back into it.”
My heart breaks in a way I didn’t think it could. The progress, the touch, the way he looked at me in the sunlight—it’s all gone. He’s built the wall back up, brick by bloody brick.
I open the door, my legs feeling like lead. I want to say something, to reach across the console and rip the gloves off his hands, but I know it’s useless. She has won.
As soon as my feet hit the sidewalk, he floors it. The matte black car disappears around the corner.
We were doing so fucking good. I understand that his mother is a traumatized woman, but that huge diamond on her finger made it clear she has moved on.
Why can’t she let her sons move on too? They didn’t choose to be his sons, just like she didn’t choose to be his wife. She keeps placing them in the box of “monsters,” but isn’t that what she conditioned them to be? She won’t let them fucking breathe.
Valerio deserves to live without being punished for his father’s mistakes. He deserves to be happy… to be seen.
And I’m going to do my best to make it happen.