He dropped all of the things in his hands onto the mattress in the corner before staying with his back turned to me. “Put it on, I won’t look.”
My previous statement went straight out of the nonexistent windows.
“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 ofme 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 alot.”
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 tolisten, 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.
