Chapter 8 Isabella
Isabella
My head felt like it had been split open with a meat cleaver.
I had never had a true migraine before, but every time I opened my eyes, the very air touching my skin made my gut seize, and I imagined that this was very close to that.
My hand went to my belly and I rubbed it gently.
The doctor said the baby was fine, and I wasn’t cramping anymore…
but chloroform was an anesthetic. What if that mattered?
When I was finally able to open my eyes without feeling like I was being tipped headfirst into a vat of nails and sandpaper, I found Lorenzo in a chair beside the bed. His eyes were closed, but he still had a grip on my hand.
I tried to tug away, but his hold tightened, and his eyes opened again. “Are you back in the land of the living?”
I gave myself a silent assessment. My head was still hurting, but I felt more present than I had any other time I’d opened my eyes. “I think so.”
He reached over to the bedside table and grabbed a glass full of ice water. “I’ve been refreshing it every time the ice melts,” he said.
I very nearly rolled my eyes. Did he want a hearty thank you or something? I sipped at the water and nearly groaned; it felt perfect sliding down my throat, soothing all the aches as it went down. “I don’t really know what to say to you,” I admitted as I handed the nearly empty glass back to him.
“I’ve been thinking about it while you’ve been in and out,” he said. “I think I finally have it all figured out.”
The desire to respond sarcastically bubbled up, and I fought the urge. I wasn’t in the mood for a war of words with Lorenzo. “Say whatever it is that you want to say.”
“You’re a pain in my ass.” I rolled my eyes, but Lorenzo squeezed my hand in his nearly hard enough to rub the bones together.
“You’re a brat, and half of the time, you don’t think about what comes out of your mouth, and every single emotion plays out on your face, even when you think that it doesn’t. ”
I tried to look away, but he squeezed my hand again. “Lorenzo.” I wanted it to be a warning, but his name came out more like a plea.
“Sienna was perfect,” he said, talking over me. “She always knew exactly what to say, and she knew her place in life. She and I had very little to argue over, understand?”
The unlike you and I hung between us in the air. My head was starting to truly pound again; I could feel my pulse thumping in my ears. I didn’t want to hear any of this. “Stop talking.”
But Lorenzo was on a roll, and he wasn’t listening to me. “When she died, I went numb. I looked at her broken body, and I sealed away the part of me that was broken because of it. I promised myself that I would never open that part up again.”
Why was he torturing me? If he wanted to punish me for leaving, he could have just put me back in that room with the lock on the outside.
Or in one of the rooms in the basement. He didn’t have to drag out all the ways that I would never mean anything to him.
Never measure up to the ghost of his wife.
Being slapped would be less painful.
“You and Sienna share more than a few features,” he said. “I’ll bet if we looked hard enough, you would be a missing branch of the Bianchi family.” I had no desire to know if that was true. “But I could never mistake you for her.”
I wanted to curl in on myself, but he wouldn’t let me go. “I get it,” I said. “I’m a bad copy.”
“You are,” he agreed. “You looked just enough like her to trick me into letting you into my house, and then you refused to do anything like I thought you would because you did nothing like she would.”
My eyes started to sting, but I didn’t cry. I had enough of people making me cry or feel less than. “Enough,” I told him. “I don’t want to hear this anymore.”
Lorenzo was starting to look frustrated now. “You’re not getting it.”
I tried to wrench my hand away. “Let me go,” I demanded. “I get it, okay? I understand that I could never be like Sienna. I get that you’re disappointed in the replacement that you bought.”
He stared at me, eyes hard and angry, for a moment, and then he leaned in and kissed me. It wasn’t a nice kiss: there was nothing soft about it. Instead, his mouth mashed mine against my teeth, and I nearly bit my tongue at the suddenness of it all.
When he pulled back, there was blood on his lip from where my teeth had sunk in.
“You are a very different person than Sienna,” he said.
“When I look at you, I don’t see her. I tried to see her.
I put you in her clothes. I took you to the places that I took her.
But nothing worked; you were still Isabella. ”
The clothes bit was a lot to wrap my head around, but it wasn’t shocking. They fit me too well to belong to Amalia, and what other woman had lived at the estate? “Was that disappointing to you?” I asked. “That I was just me?”
“It pissed me off,” Lorenzo admitted. He leaned in and kissed me again. I turned my head, and his lips caught my cheek.
“Don’t touch me.”
He tried again, grabbing my chin this time so that I couldn’t turn my head.
When his tongue brushed my bottom lip. I bit him.
He pulled back with a smirk that made me want to stab him with an ice pick.
“I was more angry that I wasn’t disappointed,” he said and kissed me again.
I could taste blood, but I bit him again.
This time when he wrenched back, he wasn’t smiling.
“Why weren’t you disappointed?” I didn’t want to know, but I had to hear it.
Another attempted kiss, another fight, and he was truly angry now.
“I fell in love with you, you goddamn brat,” he said, and the words sounded like gunshots in my ear.
Everything was sort of loud and soft and far away and too close all at once.
I was so sure that he was going to say that he was tired of playing pretend with me, or something to that effect.
“You don’t mean that,” I said because he couldn’t be serious.
“I want you,” he said. “I want to love you.”
My breath hitched in my chest. “And you always get what you want,” I said, and he smiled, sharp and a touch cruel and so beautiful that it hurt to look at.
“Exactly,” he said, and then we were kissing again. I couldn’t take it for long before I had to pull away, breathing hard and head wobbling. “Are you okay?”
“No,” I said. “It’s weird and wrong and fucking sick that you tried to turn me into your dead wife.” He rained kisses all over my face. “This isn’t Wuthering Heights. You aren’t Heathcliff.”
“Dolcezza.”
“You run hot and cold. You scare me.”
He hummed, and we kissed again, longer now. I let him swirl his tongue into my mouth before shoving him away. “You tried to choke me. You fucking bought me, Lorenzo.” I held his face in my hands and stared into his piercing eyes.
“Say it, dolcezza,” he ordered gently, like he already knew what was in my heart. Maybe that was what he meant: I couldn’t disguise the emotions on my face.
How long had he known that I loved him? Did he know before me?
“I’m in love with you.” The words were a confession and a plea all at once. “I’m terrified of you, but I love you.”
He kissed me again, another deep, world-darkening kind of kiss. “I’ve never put much stock into those words,” he said. “But everything is written so clearly on your face.”
“I was angry when I left,” I said. “I was so sure that I had fallen for a man who could never love me back.”
Lorenzo’s smile was twisting back into a frown now. “You hurt my brother.”
I had no intention of apologizing. I couldn’t because I didn’t really mean it. “He lied to me,” I said. “Everyone lied to me for months.”
“Don’t be mad at them,” he said. “I’m the one that issued the gag order.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
His jaw tightened; he was clenched far too hard.
I reached out and soothed my fingers across the muscle until he began to relax.
Lorenzo turned his head just enough that my fingertips brushed over his lips.
I felt them press kisses against my finger and hands.
“No,” he finally confessed. “I wasn’t ever going to tell you. ”
The revelation hurt, but not nearly as much as I thought it would. “Eventually, we’re going to have to talk about that,” I said, and he hummed in agreement.
“But for now?” Lorenzo asked.
“For now, I want to go back to sleep,” I said. Lorenzo crawled onto the bed and pulled me close. “That wasn’t an invitation,” I grumbled.
“Tough shit,” he murmured against my hair. I thought about kicking him, but his chest was so warm. I curled into him.
Lorenzo Vitali had become the thing that I needed more than anything else. The thought should make me sick…but I was just grateful that, somehow, he felt the same.