“Are you going to bed?” Fiore asked, a heaviness in her tone.
I shrugged, slapping my hands on my thighs. “What do you want me to do, Fiore? Sit here like we’re best friends?”
When she said nothing, I escaped, leaving the warmth of the living room and making it to the staircase before my body was snatched from the steps and yanked into the kitchen. A warm, wide hand spread across my lips, another around my waist, and I hated that I was so easy to bend and mold into wherever someone wanted me.
My kicking and biting were no use; he didn’t seem to care, didn’t seem to even flinch.
“You can stop licking my fingers now, fucking hell,” Cesare grumbled, grimacing as he let me go by the open back door and wiped his hand on his pant leg. “What was all that drama about?”
“What?” I snapped quietly, panting as I tried not to look out at the pitch-black, empty yard behind me. “You just snatched me and kidnapped me. What did you want me to do, thank you?”
“Technically, you’ve already been kidnapped, so does it count if I kidnapped youagainfrom the hallway to the kitchen?”
There was an awkward, grating silence.
I blinked. “I don’t?—”
“I’ll look it up later.” Cesare clapped his hands, pointing to the garden. “After you.”
“No, I’m not going out there.” I folded my arms around my body, shielding me from the freezing chill that blasted through the back door.
Cesare rolled his eyes before crouching, and I couldn’t figure out what he was doing until he snatched my ankles and threw my body over his shoulder like I weighed nothing, like I meant nothing too. The wind was knocked from me as I thudded against his thick shoulder, enough that I didn’t scream or protest at first.
“You’re right to be scared of these fields, Sicily.” He chuckled darkly, leading me somewhere into the shadows until my eyes couldn’t find anything familiar to latch onto. My heart thudded wildly, my hands gripped his shirt for anything to hold, and I heard my breath hitch as something snapped beneath his boot. “Bad things happen in this forest.”
“L-like what?”
He sighed deeply. “Not my story to tell.”
“I guess I’m about to find out. Lucky me.”
He paused before throwing me back onto my feet beside a building with rugged stone brick walls. “I fear you’ve misunderstood.” I couldn’t see him properly, but I could feel his shadow close to one side of the wall. “Ididn’t do that shit to her. Ihelpedher, that’s why she helps me.”
My heart stopped. Even my shivering stopped. “Who?”
Surely he didn’t mean my sister because if he did, what the hell had happened to her in these fields and who had hurt her?
Cesare didn’t answer me. Instead, he pulled open a metal door that he had to tug with a grunt of effort. It scraped against the floor, and he snatched my arm into his fist, shoving me inside.
It was empty all for a decaying mattress in the corner and silver links hanging from one side.
This was a torture chamber. There were fuckingchainsand slime on the walls.
He was going to kill me.
“No,” I breathed, turning instantly to run, but slamming straight into his chest instead.
Cesare was perhaps the scariest villain I’d ever come across because he looked sonormal.He was a lawyer, he fought to put people like himself behind bars,he combed his hair and wore nice clothes, he had a wife and a baby on the way, but he was also a Lucca, and I wasn’t foolish enough to believe that these brothers weren’t battling demons scary enough to frighten the devil.
I wasn’t sure if I was shivering because the wet, slimy shit on the walls was becoming ice in here, or because I was absolutely terrified of what Cesare was going to do to me. Maybe both, but when he walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him, leaving me in the depths of shadows, it didn’t matter, nothing mattered—I just wanted Milan.
“Okay, Jesus Christ, it’s cold.”
I blinked at the light and silhouette that had appeared in the doorway. It wasn’t the nice, calm light of someone coming to rescue me, it was a blinding torch in the mouth of my captor because his hands were too full of…random crap.
Cesare threw a dress, the same flimsy silk nightdress I’d woken up in, into my hands, pausing when he saw the disgust onmy face. “Don’t judge me,” he mumbled around the torch. “Fiore put you in that when I brought you here, not me.”
“Pleasure to know that you still have some semblance of morals.” I tutted.
