Chapter Six
Eight months later
I tried to figure out what day it was by the markings on the wall.
I hadn’t begun counting the days at the beginning of my captivity, stupid enough to believe it would be temporary.
Sometimes when I’d felt too weak, I hadn’t counted either, but I estimated it had to be Christmas soon, which also meant that Nestore’s eighteenth birthday probably wasn’t that far away.
The creak of the door to the cellblock opening tightened my belly until it felt like solid rock.
My pulse began racing as I wondered what was in store for us today.
The air suddenly felt too thick to breathe.
I struggled with every intake of air. The beatings had become less frequent in the past two to three months.
Maybe once a week, Father still came down here to whip me with his belt or pummel me with the unrelenting water from the hose.
I wasn’t sure what was going on, but he looked as if he were the one being hunted.
He had been Capo for only three months, but since taking over from the previous person, he had lost weight.
It made me gleeful to know things were tough for him.
I didn’t remember if I’d ever loved my father.
Maybe as a little girl, before he’d killed my mother and later his second wife, but the memories of those warmer emotions were distant and almost unimaginable.
Maybe they had never existed in the first place, and I only wished they had.
Nestore did sit-ups in his cell. He worked out every day, using his own body weight, but a lack of food slowed his progress. He was only muscles, sinew, and bone, and always on the verge of passing out. I spent hours watching him. Nothing filled me with more warmth than the sight of him.
One of the younger guards, a bulky man with a bald patch he tried to cover with the longer hair from the side of his head, entered the cellblock. The little hairs at the nape of my neck rose when his brown eyes settled on me. Something in them was greedy and hungry.
He sauntered over to my cell, twirling the key chain around his index finger as he leered at me. “My, my, Amelia Lamorgese. You used to be untouchable. Look at you now.”
I ignored him and looked back down at my notebook, where I wrote down dreams and hopes and memories from long ago, everything that kept me busy and reminded me I was still human.
“Ignoring me?” The sound of the key jarring in the lock made me tremble. My instincts screamed at me to run and hide, but I was trapped.
My throat closed up.
I caught Nestore’s eyes. He sat up, his eyes reflecting concern. No, fear.
I swallowed hard. The guard opened my cell door with a jarring creak and stepped in. The way he scanned me from head to toe made me want to creep under the cot like a small child, as if that would protect me. It hadn’t in the past when Father had come to my room to punish me, and it wouldn’t now.
“Where’s my father?” I inquired, trying to sound confident. He smirked as he locked himself inside the cell.
My heart seemed to burst out of my chest as my eyes scanned my surroundings for a weapon I could use, even if I’d never done it before.
“Leave her alone,” Nestore snarled.
The guard laughed, a dirty sound from deep in his belly. “Watch and learn, boy. Not that you’ll ever get the chance to fuck a woman. You’ll die a virgin down here. If you’re lucky, one of the guards will at least fuck your ass one day.”
I shuddered, fear making my pulse rush in my veins. His shadow fell over me. My hand shook too much to keep writing, so I lifted the pen off the paper and peered up.
“What do you want?”
He cackled. “I think you know what I want.”
He gripped my arms and jerked me to my feet. I screamed, overcome with terror. Without thinking, I rammed the pen into his upper arm. He roared and ripped it out, then tossed it away.
He slapped me so hard I fell to the floor, my head ringing from the impact.
“Leave her alone! You’re a dead man!” Nestore roared, but the guard only sneered as he staggered toward me.
“I’ll rip your dirty cunt apart, you bitch.”
I scrambled backward, toward Nestore’s cell. The guard followed and bent over me, gripping my hair.
My scalp seemed to split open. The pain blinded me briefly, and I screamed.
A martial scream sounded. Not mine.
Nestore gripped the guard’s shirt and jerked him toward the bars. His face slammed against them, so he released my hair, and Nestore wrapped his arm around the man’s throat from behind, holding on to the bars for leverage.
The man’s eyes bulged as he struggled against Nestore’s hold, his arms flailing almost comically.
I scrambled away, my heart slamming into my rib cage as I watched.
Nestore pulled my pen from his trousers and rammed the tip into the guard’s eye over and over again.
The man’s flailing increased, and the key chain flew out of his hand and past the bars into the aisle.
Nestore released the guard when he hung limply in his grip, and he tumbled to the ground, gurgling as blood spurted out of his eyes.
Nestore breathed harshly as the guard jerked, then stilled.
I was frozen in shock. Blood spread out around the head, and the stench of feces flooded my nose.
Nestore had killed this man in a horrid fashion. I wasn’t even sure why I was so shocked.
“The keys,” Nestore rasped, looking exhausted. I stumbled toward the bars and knelt, then squeezed my arm through the gap between the bars, trying to reach the dropped keys, but they were still more than an arm’s length away.
“I can’t reach them,” I whispered.
Nestore sank to the floor with his back against the bars, his chest heaving. I crawled over to him and touched his shoulder. “Thank you for saving me.”
“I’ll always save you,” he said fiercely.
I sat against the bars, so our backs were touching, and regarded the corpse with trepidation. “I hope they’ll bring us food tonight, so someone takes away the body.”
“He’s dead. You don’t have to fear the dead. Fear the living,” Nestore murmured. He was right, but the idea of spending the night with the dead body terrified me. His face was disfigured from the pen and would definitely feature in my nightmares.
“I’m worried they’ll punish you if they find out you killed him,” I whispered. “I’ll tell them I did it in self-defense.”
“They won’t care if it was self-defense, Amelia. Let me take responsibility. I didn’t save you so you’d get punished for something else. You won’t take the fall. They can’t do anything to me that they haven’t already done.”
Despite his words, I could detect a note of fear in Nestore’s voice. I wished I could protect him as he protected me. I wished we could find a way out of this.
I washed myself with the small cloth Flavia had given me for that purpose.
It was rough and smelled musty by now. The cool water on my skin felt good, even as the cotton skimmed bruises and cuts.
I imagined I still didn’t smell particularly good.
I didn’t have any soap, so blood and sweat seemed to have ingrained themselves in my skin, but my nose was immune to it by now.
Nestore did push-ups in the cell beside mine. Nobody had come to torture either of us in ten days.
Nobody had visited us at all in more than twenty-four hours, which meant no food, and the dead body had been in a cell with me since yesterday. As he began to decay, it became increasingly difficult to ignore his presence. Nestore was pushing his body more because of these new developments.
“What do you think is going on?” I asked.
Flavia hadn’t been allowed to come down here in many weeks, so I didn’t get any updates, and even before that, her visits had been rare since she’d given birth to Luciano four months ago.
I hadn’t seen him yet. She didn’t want to bring him down into the basement, a decision I wholeheartedly agreed with. This wasn’t a place for a child.
Nestore paused mid push-up and looked at me before he resumed his workout, panting, “Something is in the air. I can sense it. Your father exuded animal fear the last time he came for me. Someone’s after him.”
I bit my lip. “That’s good, right?”
Nestore got on his knees, sweat trickling down his chest. The bruises and cuts had partly healed after so many days without torture, but the many scars spoke of the pain he’d endured. Seeing his missing left nipple always made my belly tighten.
Still, for the first time since Nestore had been thrown into this cell, fresh injuries didn’t slow him down. His motions were more fluid, and I caught a glimmer of anticipation in his eyes.
“The question is if the one who’s after him will be after us.”
“It can hardly get worse for you.”
“Whoever comes next might torture you in ways your father hasn’t done for various reasons. So it can get indefinitely worse for us.” His eyes moved to the man he’d killed. “Though if your father lost control over his men, your situation could already be perilous, dove.”
I swallowed hard. I hadn’t considered it from that angle yet. In all the time I had been down here, nobody had dared to touch me inappropriately, so maybe my father still wanted to marry me off.
Nestore got up and walked over to the bars separating us.
He gripped them and looked at me with fierce determination.
“I’ll protect you, Amelia. Somehow, someway.
When someone comes in, you get as close to my cell as possible so I can reach through the bars and attack them.
” He pulled the bloody pen from his pocket as if to remind me what he could do, when I hadn’t stopped thinking about it.
I got up from the bed and moved toward him, smiling slightly. I grabbed the bars below his hands. He leaned his head against the bars, and I brought my face up so our foreheads touched. The small touch sent a wave of warmth into my belly.