Page 10 of Savage Claim

“We aren’t,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

I grabbed her chin and made her meet my eyes. “You left.” The words cracked open the leaden anger that I had forgotten about in the pit of my stomach.

I half-expected her to cower or to apologize. Anything except for the defiance that flared in her honey eyes. “You lied to me.” It wasn’t so much a lie as it was an omission but pointing that out now wasn’t going to help either of us. Isabella sighed. “Look, Lorenzo, I’m tired. Can I go to sleep? Please?”

I couldn’t bring myself to deny her such a simple request. “Okay. Do you think you can walk?”

Her eyebrows scrunched again. “Why?”

“Never mind.” I hooked my arm under her knees and around her shoulders and pulled her off the bed.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, wrapping her arms around my neck to stabilize herself. As if I would let her fall.

“You’re sleeping in my bed,dolcezza. No arguments.”

That defiant look stole over her face again, but it was gone just as quickly as it came. By the time I got her down the hallway to my room, she was asleep again. I tucked her beneath the covers on what had become her side of the bed and settled in beside her. The events of the last twenty-four hours hit me like a brick to the face, and before long, I was dropping into sleep myself.

CHAPTER 8

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 feltperfectsliding 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 admitted. “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?”

Theunlike you and Ihung 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 yourefusedto do anything like I thought you would because you did nothing likeshewould.”

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.”

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