25. Sicily #2
“I’m not getting changed with you here, especially not into this.”
Cesare groaned a long, displeased sound.
“I have a wife, you met her. She’s the only woman I have any interest in looking at naked, or at all for that matter.
” He sighed. “I miss her and would like her back. This is simply for performance purposes, so put it on so we can hurry up, get the contract voided, and get her back to me. Please and thank you.”
I stared at the fabric, feeling the shiny material slip between my fingers. “Do I get to go back to Milan if I do this?”
He tipped his head back, and that’s when I saw his eyes were, in fact, firmly clamped shut. “That’s the whole point. Believe it or not, I don’t actually want to kill you; Fiorella and Bella would hate me, and she can’t hate me, she just can’t, that’s not a choice, it’s not—”
“All right!” I snapped, interrupting his mad rambling and slipping off Fiorella’s sweater. “Do you have some kind of condition, Cesare, or are you just insane?”
Milan became lost when his emotions got too great.
He believed that he was defective because he felt them, so when they happened, his body wanted to purge them.
It wasn’t so far-fetched to believe that Cesare experienced some kind of mental failure when faced with something from their past, too.
Part of me felt bad for them, for all of them.
The people they’d become weren’t their fault.
Cesare hummed, rolling to his tiptoes and then back onto his heel a few times before he said, “I have a therapist.”
“Maybe you need a new one,” I mumbled.
“I haven’t been to see her in a while because last time, she told me I was psychotic, and I didn’t appreciate that.”
I bundled my sister’s clothes into a pile and slipped on the cold silk. “You’ve locked me in a dungeon! Obviously she was right.”
“Can I turn around now?”
I scoffed at how he ignored me. “Sure.”
Cesare kept his word and didn’t look past my chin.
He took the clothes from my hands gently and set them onto the mattress before steering my shoulders to sit beneath the handcuffs chained to the wall.
A thick wetness seeped through the dress and stuck against my thighs, causing a shiver to wrack my body as I watched Cesare gather the items he’d brought and lay them before me.
It was all Fiorella’s makeup, the stuff I’d seen her just use on Ezio, even down to the half-empty tube of fake blood.
“You’re good at art, aren’t you?” he asked quietly, sitting opposite me with an eagerness that made this psychosis diagnosis way more plausible.
I shoved my fingers into my eye sockets with an exhausted sigh. “How do you know that?”
“I live with your sister; she talks about you a lot.”
The stinging prickles in the back of my eyes made me hate how sensitive I was. “She does?”
I’d been so caught up in my marriage to Milan, so focused on ensuring he didn’t hurt me at the start, that I’d neglected Fiorella.
We hadn’t spoken in months, let alone seen each other, and the party had been an obvious cry for help at that.
I’d tried to listen, but my parents were supposed to have protected her from people like this.
Cesare picked up a makeup brush and pushed it gently into my hand. “Make some art, Sicily.”
I frowned. “What?”
“I’m going to send Milan a little video. Paint the bruises and put the blood on your body, and then I’ll pretend to scare you, and Milan will give Bella back and void the contract.” He smiled, his dimples popping. “It’s a good idea, right? I got it from Fiorella in there, if you didn’t realize.”
“No, no way!” I cried.
“You just have to act, Sicily.”
“I’m not doing that!”
“Would you rather I actually hurt you?” He raised a brow. “Because those are your choices. You fake the scream, or I make it real.”
My eyes roamed the small cellar and the sharp brick walls that were closing in on me. It was a trap, one that I couldn’t avoid. If I did it, Milan would give up everything to save me. If I didn’t, Cesare would hurt me, and it would happen anyway.
I picked up the brush knowing that this was going to break my husband in the worst way possible.
He’d dressed me in all the ways that would send Milan spiraling. Almost bare, almost broken, almost lost. It was worse that it wasn’t even real, that I had to pretend and manipulate the feelings he had just learned about.
The metal handcuffs rubbed ruthlessly against the bones in my wrists as I was forced to my knees, my arms brought above my head to the cuffs like I was in the stocks.
It was humiliating like this, even if he claimed it wasn’t real.
I couldn’t tell if the wet pools against my kneecaps and the slime dribbling down my spine were sweat, the gross brick’s condensation, or the fake blood I’d poured down my throat and let soak into my skin.
The tears falling down my cheeks were the only parts of me that didn’t feel like a performance.
Milan wouldn’t be hurting Bella like this even if he had taken her. He certainly wouldn’t be chaining her to the fucking wall.
Cesare crouched before me, looking over me as he gulped deeply. “I won’t hurt you, Sicily, I just need my wife back and for my child’s life not to be endangered by the contract. You understand that, right?”
“Milan is bound by the same contract, Cesare,” I cried, the tears mingling with the makeup. “It’s not all up to him to change, he can’t—”
“He is the Capo dei Capi of the Cosa Nostra; he can force Diego Sansone to void it, but he won’t because of you.
” He stood, dragging forward something large by the handle.
It wasn’t until he shone his torch onto it that I noticed it was an axe with a painted red tip, but this one was covered in unnatural looking spikes, all rusted and carved into the blade.
“This is my axe; I made it myself when I was fifteen. Do you like it?”
“No,” I croaked, refusing to allow him to silence me even if my terror told me to shut up.
He shrugged. “Can’t please everyone I guess… Now, I’m going to set up my phone and swing this around your head a couple times. Just act scared, cry a bit, and scream sometimes. Got it?”
No.
I nodded anyway in the hope that he would keep it fake and not decide to enter an even deeper psychotic episode and actually chop my head off with that hideous thing.
Cesare threw Fiorella’s sweater over the blade, ripping a piece of fabric from the sleeve before shoving it into my mouth.
It felt cruel even if it was performative, but the scent of Fiorella, of her flowery perfume hung near my nose and offered me the smallest escape as I closed my eyes and listened to Cesare’s feet shuffle around the dungeon.
When I finally heard the beep of the video tape starting, I opened them and found a monster.
He wasn’t himself, not even the man who had the psychotic breaks; he was just the psycho inside of his brain, the sickness coming out to play.
Cesare paced around me, turning back to grin at the camera before he lurched forward, pulling a cry from my confused brain that had been told not to fear him, but absolutely did.
He gripped my throat like he had in the kitchen, not enough to even cut off my lungs, but enough to make me splutter.
I couldn’t imagine being at the mercy of this man for real.
I gasped when he pulled away, choking on my breath as he charged at me, his axe-blade thing raised, and swung it toward me.
He didn’t hit me, nowhere near, but I couldn’t stop the muffled sob that left my lips.
My body hurt as he laughed, perhaps from tensing so hard, perhaps from the humiliation, or maybe it was just that the bruises felt a little too real.
I was a painting, one that was purposefully drawn to destroy the man I loved. I was crafted into what I loved, and the meaning of rage and rebellion that lived within the paintings I drew was suddenly becoming smudged at the hands of a man.
Cesare dropped his axe to his side, but he covered the view of me on the camera with his own body, bringing his lips to my ear, shoving down the gag, and whispering, “Scream.”
Every thought left my mind. It was empty in there, like I existed somewhere deserted, but as my eyes clenched closed, I saw Milan, and I remembered how he’d sobbed.
My ears popped when I opened my lips. I didn’t hear my own scream, but I heard Milan’s. I didn’t feel my own tears, but his. I felt all of him, I felt the little boys these men had all once been, and even when Cesare released my arms and they flopped to my lap, I couldn’t stop.
“It’s done, good job.” I heard him say, but my tears were not a performance. “It’s done, Sicily, it wasn’t real. Stop crying!”
Part of that was real, and that was the part he would never understand.
I let my eyelids drift closed, let my body exhaust itself crying, and I wasn’t sure when Cesare had left or when I was scooped up by my sister, but my head lay on her lap as she cried, screaming Brenno’s name.
“Oh my god, Sicily, what did he do?” Fiorella sobbed, stroking my matted hair as she kneeled on the floor, my cheek pressed into her warm lap. “I’m so sorry, he’s sick, Cily, he—”
“Fiorella!” Brenno’s shout echoed distantly, followed by loud footsteps like he’d run. “Fiore!”
She sniffled. “In here! Come quickly.”
Brenno’s panting breaths came into the room, and I heard him drop beside my sister before I felt his fingers pressing to my wrist. They thought I was dying. It was almost comical.
“Go, baby, I don’t want you in here,” Brenno said to my sister, struggling to get a hold of his breath. “Fuck, your screaming, Fiore, it sounded—” He paused, and his breath shook on his exhale. “Go, Fiorella, he’ll listen to you to calm down.”
I flicked my eyes open when Fiorella ran from the dungeon, and Brenno’s hands dragged me into his lap instead. I would’ve rather lain on the disgusting wet ground than touch this man, but he held me tight against my struggling until I was too exhausted to move again.