44. Isabella
CHAPTER 44
Isabella
S calding water rained down on my head, but I couldn’t feel it on my skin. I was shivering, freezing cold. “I’m going into shock,” I told Lorenzo, who had his arms around my waist.
He shook his head. “You’re panicking,” he said. “I’ve seen shock. This isn’t it.”
I wanted to argue, but my tongue felt thick and useless in my mouth. Instead, I leaned forward and rested my head against his clavicle. Lorenzo’s hand massaged the back of my neck; the other hand petted over my scars.
“I’m here,” he said. “I’ll do whatever you need.”
I wanted to forget and to chase what I’d seen out of my mind. I didn’t want those images behind my eyes when I slept tonight. “Kiss me?”
Lorenzo stared at me for a moment, and then he craned his neck down and pressed his mouth to mine. I parted my lips, inviting him inside, but he didn’t. He kept his mouth soft; it wasn’t the type of kiss that led anywhere.
I pulled back. “Lorenzo, please.”
He threaded his fingers into my hair at the base of my skull, and my eyes rolled as he massaged my scalp. “Relax, Isabella,” he coaxed.
I couldn’t. There was a knot of tension between my shoulder blades that refused to unwind. Lorenzo reached for the shampoo and poured some into his palm. He tipped my head back and started lathering it into my hair.
Once he was satisfied with the amount of bubbles that he’d worked up, he put me back under the shower head to rinse my hair out. Once it was out, he did the same process with conditioner. “You’ve done this before,” I said.
“I have,” he said. “I’d like to think I have been well-trained.”
I giggled. The sound was too high and a touch hysterical, but it had to be a good thing that I could laugh, right? “You have been,” I said. While the conditioner sat on my hair, Lorenzo took my shower puff off the hook and the body wash that I had been using. “You don’t have to.”
He hushed me softly. “I want to,” he said. “Let me.”
I let him wash my body, and it was nice. His touch was a warm comfort, and slowly, the numbness began to fade. The cold pit in my stomach started to melt. But the moment the feeling started to rush back, the sobs came.
Lorenzo was waiting for it because he reached behind him and turned the water down so that it wasn’t as scalding. “Let’s rinse your hair and get out of here,” he suggested. When I nodded, he ran his fingers through my hair as the water washed over us.
Finished, Lorenzo shut off the water and got both of our towels. He wrapped his around his waist, and with mine, he gently patted me dry. “Will you touch me?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Not tonight, dolcezza ,” he said. “You don’t want me to.”
“Yes, I do.” I needed him to help me wash the day away. I didn’t want to think about any of it ever again.
“No,” he said. “If you’re feeling better in the morning, absolutely, but not now.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“It’s not healthy to use sex to cope with violence.”
I laughed. It was an angry, hollow sound. “Not healthy ? Really? That’s what you’re going with?” I put space between us, angrily toweling at my hair. “What was healthy about you making me come after you told me that my father sold me out, exactly?”
Lorenzo didn’t come any closer, and somehow, that was even more comforting than him taking me in his arms. I wanted to snarl and gnash my teeth; I wanted to be angry at him for denying me. But anger was so hard to hold on to when I felt that cold slipping back in. “Hearing bad news isn’t quite the same as seeing a man getting his fingernails ripped off at the nail beds, dolcezza .”
Nausea gripped me by the throat, and bile rose in my throat…but I wasn’t haunted by what I had seen. More, it was the lack of feeling that was turning my stomach. “I don’t care that he was in pain,” I said. “I don’t care that Damian and Elio are probably elbow-deep in his entrails right now. Does that make me a monster?”
Lorenzo didn’t placate me, and he didn’t try to sing me a pretty tale. Instead, he shrugged. “If not caring that the man who nearly killed you is dead makes you a monster, then at least you aren’t alone, dolcezza .”
I pressed a hand to my chest. “Is this what you feel all the time?” I asked. “Numb?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “But I don’t feel guilt over it. That’s probably how you know that you’re not a monster. You’re numb in response to what you’ve seen and how you’re processing, yeah? But you also feel bad about it. I don’t, and I haven’t since I was in my teens.”
“But, how?”
“Father David deserves everything that happens to him,” he said.
I didn’t disagree with him, but I couldn’t formulate my thoughts. Lorenzo, thankfully, wasn’t in a mood to rush me. We got dressed, and he stayed in the bathroom with me as I applied moisturizer to my face and brushed my teeth. Normally, he wouldn’t stay to witness my nighttime routine, but he didn’t want to leave me alone and I appreciated that.
Afterward, Lorenzo tucked me into bed and made sure that I was fully cocooned under the blankets. “You’re not staying?” I asked when it became clear that he wouldn’t be climbing in with me.
“I need to check on Damian and Elio and arrange for the cleaners first.”
The way he said cleaners didn’t sound like he would be hiring a housekeeping crew to come in. “You’re going to erase Father David.”
It wasn’t a question, but he nodded anyway.
“And you’ll come back when you’re done?” It was such a pathetic question, but I didn’t think that I could stand him being gone for too long. For all that was fucked up and wrong here, Lorenzo was who I trusted most.