Chapter 4 #2
I lost my virginity tonight, watched the man who took it almost die in front of me, and was abducted, all in the span of a few hours.
And now I’m here, with this strange girl who looks like she’s stepped out of another century, talking about hair colours?
I’m so shocked by the mundane question that all I can think to do is answer it honestly.
“Yes,” I say.
Her lips curve in a satisfied sort of smile.
“I thought so,” she replies. “What an extraordinary shade. Like a moonbeam.” She raises her free hand, and for a second I think she’s about to grasp at some of the stray strands that have escaped my ruined bun.
But instead, she takes my hand, her skin smooth and cool.
“Come up to my room,” she says, tugging me towards the stairs.
“Oh, no,” I say, twisting to keep the door in my sights. I have this ominous dread working its way through my bones. Dread that tells me, if I step away from the door now, then Curse won’t walk through it. That if I go too far into this house, he will never find me.
Maybe he won’t find me at all tonight. Just because he’s still alive now doesn’t mean he’s well enough to come for me. He could still be unconscious.
He could still be dying.
“No,” I say again, more harshly this time, my voice scraping my windpipe.
“You can stay down here if you like,” Severu says with a shrug, as if it truly means nothing to him. “If you wish to stand at the door like a dog, waiting for your man to walk through it.”
“What?”
His words slap me, so stinging I nearly raise my fingertips to my face to check for swelling. Like a dog?
Maybe the words hurt because some part of me thinks they might be true. That the monster Curse Titone has become does not deserve my devotion, and that by continuing to care about him like this, practically panting after him, I am somehow debasing myself.
“There’s a window in my room,” Fiametta says quietly, giving my hand a slight squeeze. “You’ll be able to watch the road and see the vehicle the moment it arrives.”
The front door is solid and opaque. I won’t be able to see the Titones approach until it opens.
I’ll be stuck here, staring at the unyielding wooden surface of it, while Severu and his men circle me like vultures in the background.
Having a quiet room without these men that I don’t know at my back, able to watch the road through the window, seems suddenly vastly preferable.
“OK,” I whisper.
Fiametta gives my hand another small squeeze, then leads me to the glossy steps of the staircase. Once we’ve ascended, she brings me down a long hallway to a door that’s been left ajar.
“Don’t listen to him,” she says as she pulls me through, then shuts it.
“Pardon?”
“My brother,” she clarifies. “That horrid dog comment.” She leans back against the door she’s just shut and shakes her head.
“He doesn’t understand things like romantic attachments.
Whatever part of the brain comes up with all those nice, fuzzy, oxytocin-drenched feelings, well, he hasn’t got it.
He’s not quite mammalian in here.” She taps her temple.
“He’s more like her than anything else.” She lowers her finger from her head, then flicks it, seeming to indicate something – or someone – behind me.
I turn, and in the soft light of the room, I don’t see anyone at all.
I do, however, notice a huge glass enclosure, at least seven feet long and four feet high, set up on a table that spans most of the left side of the room.
Among a profusion of what looks like brown mulch, something large moves inside.
My shredded nerves spasm, and I give a startled gasp.
“She won’t bother you,” Fiametta says quickly, soothingly, like a mother to a worried child, even though she’s got to be at least five years younger than me. “Cordelia is quite calm as long as you handle her properly. And she can’t get out of there on her own.”
“She’s huge,” I breathe, trying to make sense of the twisting brownish-red body among the mulch.
“Yes, she is. Nearly two metres long,” Fiametta says with something close to affectionate pride.
“And she’s old, too. Almost twenty-five, now!
She was my sister Matilda’s. Matilda died twenty years ago.
When I was just a baby.” She crosses the room to the enclosure and gazes through the glass.
“Sometimes I think a little bit of Matilda’s soul went into her.
Maybe half of it. Yes. Half,” she says, seemingly more to herself than to me now.
“Half of it into Cordelia, half into Luca.”
“Luca?”
“My nephew. The guy who was with you and Sev downstairs,” she says, straightening up. “Matilda was pregnant with him at the time. She died the day he was born.”
So Luca is also Severu’s nephew, then. Not his son.
Turning my attention away from the serpent in the glass and the snaking branches of the Serpico family tree, I try to locate the window Fiametta promised me, taking in the rest of the room as I do so.
The bedroom’s décor is very much in line with Fiametta’s personal appearance, everything old and romantic and gothic.
It’s only now that I realize the room isn’t lit by a lamp, but by candles.
“Over here,” Fiametta says, guessing my intentions.
She strides past a solid-wood four-poster bed to the other side of the room, across from Cordelia’s enclosure.
Tugging aside heavy crimson curtains, she reveals a large window with a sort of bench built into the low sill of it, creating a little nook.
There are a few velvet cushions there, convincing me that Fiametta must sit here to read sometimes.
Maybe this was where she was trying to get through The Castle of Otranto before she came storming downstairs to complain about the noise.
“Go ahead,” she says, indicating the bench with a small but sincere smile. Then, the next words so practical and mercenary they seem completely at odds with her delicate warmth, she adds, “Don’t worry. It’s bullet-proof glass.”