Chapter 34 Isabella
Isabella
“Come on, Gem,” I called through the closed door. “Why don’t we go take a walk? I’ll bet I can get Damian to take us.” I wasn’t sure of that at all, actually, but Gemma hadn’t come out of her room since the incident in the hallway. It had been days, and she barely let me into her room at all.
“Leave me alone,” came a muffled reply through the door.
“I can’t do that. You’ve been holed up for too long.”
“Then take a fucking hint.” Her voice was downright cruel, dripping in venom. Gemma and I hadn’t spent much time together growing up, and we had never had a contemptuous sibling relationship. Hearing her speak like that to me now was physically painful.
I squared my shoulders. “I’ll leave you alone for now, but if I have to get someone to drag you out for lunch later, I will.” I practically sprinted away before I could hear her response; I’m sure whatever she’d said would only make me feel worse.
I nearly bowled Amalia over in the hallway.
She took one look at my face and steered me to the kitchen.
I was filled with appreciation for her: she had taken to finding ways to cheer me up.
She loaded a plate with chocolate chip cookies and placed it in front of me before she turned to put the kettle on.
“Earl Grey or something lighter?” she asked, opening a box full of tea bags.
“English Breakfast.” She and I were both monitoring my caffeine intake, but a cup of tea or coffee a day was fine.
Amalia hummed softly to herself as she poured my tea and added just the right amount of milk and sugar. “She’s still refusing to come out?” she asked.
I groaned and put my head into my arms. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I heard, more than saw, her set down my mug in front of me. “I told her that I would drag her out at lunch if I had to.”
Amalia snorted. “I can’t see that going well.”
“Me either.” I hummed and reached for my mug. It was warm in my hands and helped to ground me. “Do you think I should do it anyway?”
She shrugged. “Elio would help if you asked.” Elio and I were still warming back up to each other. He’d made a stammering apology for what he’d said to me, and I accepted it, but it was still awkward between us.
“I think that’s an even worse idea.”
“What’s an even worse idea?” Lorenzo curved around my back and snagged a cookie from my plate.
“Letting Elio drag Gemma out of her room,” I mumbled, leaning back against him, allowing him to take my weight. “Would that be too traumatic?”
I didn’t have to see it to know that Lorenzo rolled his eyes. “Who cares?”
I nudged him. “I do, asshole.”
Lorenzo huffed and reached for another cookie. He was quiet for a moment while he chewed it. “What if I sent her to one of the minor families in New Jersey?” he asked finally.
The “no” was on the tip of my tongue…but it wasn’t exactly the most horrible idea. If we moved her out of New York, there was a possibility that she could go back to school. She could start over. That had to be better for her than being stuck here, right?
But, then again, I couldn’t do that to her. She just lost our mother in one of the cruelest ways possible. It wouldn’t be fair to isolate her further, would it? Stick her with strangers she didn’t know simply because I couldn’t stomach her being mad at me?
“We can’t do that,” I said. “She’ll never forgive me.”
Lorenzo’s face was flat, but I appreciated that he didn’t push. “It’s up to you to acclimate her,” he told me, but it wasn’t like I didn’t already know that.
“I’m working on it.”
He dipped his head and brushed his lips against my temple. “If you can’t make it work—” He let his words hang in the air, but I understood him all the same.
I didn’t bother knocking on the door when I went back to Gemma’s room.
Instead, Amalia lent me her skeleton key so that I could unlock the door myself.
When I swung it open, I was immediately aware of how stale the room smelled.
The television that I had brought in for her was blaring Gilmore Girls.
“What the fuck?” Gemma whined. My sister was lying in bed, and it was clear, just looking at her, that she hadn’t bathed since she’d locked herself in here.
“Get up.” She gave me a flat look; she didn’t have to say a word for me to get the message. Too bad for her. I wasn’t going to disappear today because she wasn’t happy to see me. “You’re going to shower and come down to lunch.”
“No, I’m not.”
I crossed my arms over my chest. “You can either get up and get in the shower yourself, or I can drag you through one, but it’s happening.”
Gemma glared at me, but she climbed off of the bed and trudged into the bathroom.
I gave her thirty seconds, and then I followed after her.
“Seriously?” she yelped, grabbing her shirt to her chest. I closed the toilet lid and sat down, keeping my face passive until she turned the shower on.
“Are you going to sit there and watch? Really?”
“That’s pretty much the plan, yeah.”
It felt a little like the psych ward, watching Gemma while she scrubbed her scalp, but I held firm.
If I gave her an inch at this point, she would take a mile, and I knew it.
When she was finished, I did step out to get her some new clothes, and once she was dressed again, I wrapped my arm around her.
“Let’s get some food now,” I said, using the momentum of her shower to get her out of the room.
Gemma didn’t speak to me, but she didn’t fight me either. Amalia was already bringing food to the dining room. I steered Gemma into a chair away from Lorenzo and plopped her down into it, and then turned to help Amalia.
I was in the kitchen for thirty seconds, maybe less, when something crashed in the dining room.
“If it weren’t for you, my mother would be alive,” I heard Gemma scream.
Shit, I thought and ran back the way I came.
Amalia was close on my heels with her phone in her hands.
Elio and Damian weren’t at the estate, but she could call her husband back if we needed him.
Lorenzo was still seated at the table, but his eyes were hard, and his mouth was set into a line. Gemma was standing; her chair had crashed to the ground. She was staring at Lorenzo like he was Satan himself.
“Gemma.”
She didn’t look my way. “Everything that has happened to me is because of you,” she said. “If you had kept your fucking thug hands off my sister, everything would have been fine.”
“You wouldn’t have a sister because your father would have probably sold off another of her organs to pay off the debt he owed me,” Lorenzo said. “But I suppose that’s fine with you.”
She looked stricken. Tears welled up in her eyes. “Don’t you ever—”
“What? Tell you the truth?” he asked, tilting his head. He looked every bit the predator staring down at its prey, contemplating if he should keep playing with it or go ahead and eat it.
“Lorenzo.” I meant it to be a warning, but he barely even glanced in my direction.
“Your mother chose you and left your sister in the hands of a fucking monster.”
“You’re the monster,” Gemma shouted, voice cracking as tears slipped down her cheeks.
Lorenzo snorted and stood. Even standing as far apart as they were, he seemed to grow until he was staring down at Gemma.
“That may be so,” he admitted in a voice that was almost gentle.
“But if it wasn’t for me, you’d still be hanging from chains next to what was left of your mother.
Efram would have let you watch her rot in front of you.
So, maybe, you should try being a little grateful that I brought you into my home. ”
While he spoke, Gemma’s face grew alarmingly red. Before she could make the situation worse, I grabbed my sister by the shoulders and turned her away. “Go,” I said. “Now.” My mind was already reeling with the apology that I would have to come up with to make this up to Lorenzo.