Chapter 5 Isabella
Isabella
Isaw Lorenzo coming, and I ran, shoes slapping against the wooden floors of the hallway. I wasn’t staying here. There was no way on this Earth that I—
A hand grabbed me, and I shrieked, trying to shake it off.
But I ended up shoved against the nearest wall instead.
Lorenzo had me pinned with a hand against my throat, and I gagged and struggled when I realized that he was smearing blood against my skin and into my clothes.
I trembled in his grasp, but it had little to do with the way he was choking off my air.
The tacky feeling of blood on my skin made me want to scratch and itch at it until I tore myself to ribbons.
I needed to get away from him. Now. Before I lost my goddamn mind.
“What the fuck were you doing?” he demanded, leaning in so that I could feel his breath on my face.
“Amalia said—”
He squeezed down, and I gasped, unable to get any more air in. “What did Amalia say, Isabella?” he asked and eased his hold on my throat.
I coughed even as I fought to breathe through it. “I could—” Another painful breath in. “Walk around.” When he dropped his hand entirely, though he didn’t shift back at all, I said, “If you want privacy, you should close your door.”
I saw light ignite in his eyes, and I thought that he might hit me…
but he was smiling instead. It was even more unsettling to see him like that.
Anger I knew what to do with, what to expect.
His smile, though? It was a killer smile, probably literally speaking.
A little dimple formed on his cheek, and it made him even more attractive.
I didn’t know how to feel. The heat of his body on mine, his breath on my face, made things low in my belly tighten.
There was no denying that Lorenzo was attractive.
But fear was just as strongly running through my body, and the fear and arousal were mixing into something intoxicating that made my head feel stuffed with cotton. I didn’t like it.
“You’re a brat,” Lorenzo said. He reached out again with his blood-spattered hand, and brushed some of my hair across my forehead.
My skin itched from the cooling blood that he smeared on me.
My stomach twisted sickeningly; there was a very real danger that I was going to throw up all over his shoes.
I hadn’t had a panic attack in months, but I could feel it tickling at the edges of my mind the longer I stood here.
If only I could find a way around him; I could feint to one side and escape out the other, and then I could run back to my room and lock the door.
It’s his house, idiota; I’m sure he has keys to every room.
So, my solution wasn’t a solution at all. I stood there, pressing myself back into the wall as far as I could. The lip of the judge’s panels dug painfully into my spine. “You’re a psycho,” I countered, cursing myself all the while for the inability to shut the hell up.
Lorenzo was still smiling, and it wasn’t fair that he looked that good.
While I was screaming at myself to run, to find a way to escape, my body didn’t seem to be getting the memo.
I had never wanted someone that I was equally as afraid of before.
“I can do whatever I want in my own home,” he said, ducking in even closer to me.
I whimpered as his lips skimmed my clean cheek.
His other hand touched my waist, inched the hem of my scrub top up ever-so-slightly.
My pulse was hammering in my head; my skin was on fire.
A scream was building in my throat. “I have a deal for you, Ms. Rossi, a way to shorten your time working for me.”
A little gasp caught in my throat. Considering the amount of money that my father owed Lorenzo, I wasn’t sure if I would ever be free of him.
“What kind of deal?” I asked. As much as I wanted to go back to school, back to my life, I wasn’t a fool.
As far as I was concerned, Lorenzo Vitali was the devil and making deals with him was the equivalent of selling my soul.
“Become my surrogate.”
The world seemed to slow down. I shook my head. Clearly, I hadn’t heard him correctly. “What?” Of all the things Lorenzo might have asked for, a baby wasn’t one that I would have guessed.
“Become my surrogate,” he repeated. “I’ll eradicate your debt upon delivery, so to speak.”
I was already shaking my head before he stopped speaking. “I can’t,” I said. “I could never just hand over a baby like that.” Especially to a monster like you, I added in my head.
Lorenzo hummed. “That’s a shame,” he said. His hand was on my throat again in an instant, although this time he was more holding than cutting off my airway. “I guess I could always ask your younger sister. Gemma, right?”
Ice water flooded my veins. “How do you know about Gemma?”
His eyes were cold as he looked down his nose at me. “Your father had a lot to brag about.”
“You leave her alone!” I snapped. “She’s got nothing to do with this. My father hasn’t spoken to her in more than ten years. He doesn’t know anything about her.”
“Seems like he does. Gave us the address to her dorm and everything.”
Anger snarled through me. “Fuck. You.”
“Brat,” he seethed. “I’m being kind to you, but if you don’t want my deal, I’ll take your sister in your place. I’ll tear your father’s fingernails off with a pair of pliers and break every one of his bones. I’ll play with both of them until they’re begging for death.”
My stomach rolled. I could taste bile in the back of my throat. “You can’t.”
“Not only can I,” Lorenzo said, “I will, and I’ll make you watch while I do it. Do you understand? I might leave you alive long enough to witness what I would do to your family, but in the end, all three of you would be dead, and no one would ever find your bodies.”
Tears dripped down my cheeks. What else was there for me to do? “Okay,” I said.
“What?”
I sucked in a breath. “I’ll do it,” I said. “Just leave my family alone.”
Lorenzo stepped back, and cool air rushed around me, making me shiver. “See how easy that was? There’s no reason for all this fuss, is there?”
I shook my head.
“Go put on something besides those damn scrubs. They’re covered in blood. Amalia is serious about serving dinner at seven, and I won’t allow you to upset her.”
He hadn’t given me a ton of room to go around him, so when I did, my body dragged against his. I was trembling all over as I stumbled on colt legs down the hallway to my room. I didn’t look in the direction of Lorenzo’s office as I passed its alcove: I didn’t want to see a body on the floor.
I reached my room with surprising ease and stumbled over to the ensuite. I looked at myself in the mirror and gagged: my face was smeared with blood. It was in my hair too. How could I let someone do this to me, and yet…
I squeezed my thighs together to stave off some of the ache between them. You’re just as much a psycho as him, I told my reflection. I shouldn’t want his hands anywhere near me. He had choked me, for God’s sake!
I turned the cold water on in the shower and stepped inside. The frigid water beat down on my skin, chilling me. I was shivering again, but at least the ache in my core was gone, driven away by the cold.
The toiletries had been changed out in the three days that I’d lived here.
Once Amalia knew what scents I liked, she made sure to stock up.
I took my time shampooing and conditioning my hair.
When I was finished, I wrapped a towel around myself and my hair.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, Lorenzo was sitting on my bed. I froze. “What are you doing here?”
“You violated my privacy,” he said with a shrug. “I thought I would return the favor.”
I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to look more annoyed than I felt. “Can you get out? I need to get dressed for dinner.”
“What are you going to wear, exactly?” he asked. “Your scrubs again?”
I thought of the pile of fabric on the bathroom floor.
I didn’t have much in the way of clothes since I wasn’t allowed to go back to my apartment, so I had been borrowing the few things from Amalia that fit, and she had rewashed my work scrubs.
She was planning on taking me shopping for new things, but we needed to get the okay from Lorenzo first, and of course, he hadn’t bothered to give it yet.
Thinking of my scrubs, all wet with blood, I didn’t relish the idea of putting bloody fabric back on, and everything else was in the washer. “I don’t know.”
Lorenzo stood and motioned me to come closer. I didn’t want to, but my body moved at his command. He opened the dresser; it had been stocked with clothes. “I’m not sure if the size will be exactly right,” he said, “but I think you can find something that will work.”
I pawed through the drawer. Most of the clothes were, in fact, my size. “Thank you,” I said. “Where did you get—?” I looked up, but Lorenzo was gone, and my door was shut.