Page 77 of Curse

There are no abrasions that suggest rape that I can see, but I’ll still have the doc check her thoroughly. If I find out he raped her before I got there, I don’t fucking care what Vin’s and Tommy’s opinions are. Aurelio is a fucking dead man right now, today.

I get warm water and a washcloth from the bathroom, returning to gently clean her wounds, remove the blood that is starting to dry on her skin.

She flinches when the cloth touches her skin, but I continue without a word, flipping her back over to clean Aurelio’s bloodfrom her face. The swelling around her jaw and eye causes a wave of guilt to rise in my throat, choking me, and I trace the back of my fingers along her jaw line. She winces, and I pull back.

Going back in the bathroom, I come out with a pile of wash cloths and a basin of warm water and soap. Taking my time, I gently wash away as much blood and dirt as I can to clean the wounds and assess the damage. She’s too tired to fight me.

I shouldn’t have left her alone and gone to fuck with Franco. But she shouldn’t have lied to me about the flash drive. If she’d trusted me from the start, I could have gotten the flash drive to Aurelio and he never would have known about her. None of this would’ve happened.

Where she’s laying on the bed is wet, and I walk over to my side of the bed and pull back the blankets, exposing the silk sheets. When I come back and scoop her up, she slaps at my face, her voice cracking. “No! I don’t want you!”

Scowling, I carry her around the bed and let her go on my side, pulling the sheet over her. “I have no intention of fucking you, Siena. You’ve gotten yourself into a world of shit, and I’m trying to save your fucking life.”

As I pull out my phone to text Dr. Rossi, she struggles to sit up, leaning shakily on one elbow. Her eyes burn with fury.

“Igot myself into this?” she hisses. “Are you fucking insane? How is any of this my fault?”

Finishing my text, I slide my phone into my pocket and bend down so my face is inches from hers. “You didn’t give me the flash drive when I first asked you for it. You didn’t trust me. That’s how.”

“Trust you?! You fucking killed my sister!”

Her words, the way her voice cracks, the pain on her faceare a knife to the gut, but I keep my expression blank. She’s parroting Aurelio, or maybe Franco. I say nothing, arms crossed, letting her vent.

“How is it my fault that I’m in this nightmare? That your psycho boss followed you to the dungeon you had me locked in so that he could torture me and try to rape me? That he killed my father? Thatyoukilled my sister? That you want to fuck me until you’re bored or until you’re ready to kill me?”

Rage surges through me, drowning out the guilt. I press my palm to her chest, pushing her back down on the mattress. She grabs my wrist, glaring at me.

“If you’d given me the fucking flash drive the first day I asked for it, this ‘nightmare’ would never have started,” I snarl. “Instead, you lied to me for weeks. Ran from me, fought me, hid things from me—and I’ve burned every relationship I have to the ground defending you, protecting you the best I could, keeping you breathing.”

“You keep me breathing. But not my sister,” she croaks.

I lean in closer to her, threateningly. Her eyes widen in terror, and my cock twitches in response. It’s sick, I know, being turned on by her fear, but I have this irrational desire to fuck her until her anger is gone, the past few hours are erased, and I’m back with the woman I held in my arms and kissed goodbye this morning.

I close my eyes briefly, reliving it. Ikissedher. I fucked her in a bed and stared into her eyes while I did it.

And she fucking lied to me.

My voice is heavy and threatening. “Your sister’s death was collateral damage. The result of being with the wrong man at the wrong time.”

My breathing hitches as I realize that Siena almost met thesame end as her sister and for the same reason.

Being with me. The wrong man. The wrong time.

It’s in that moment that I realize what I have to do, what I’mgoing to doto protect her, and the thought alone is enough to make me physically ill.

I pull my hand back from her chest and she coughs, rasping out the words. “You swore to me that you didn’t kill her,” she whispers, her voice cracking.

I pause, staring at her, taking her in, her incredible beauty made more raw and dangerous by her wounds. She’s looking at me with those intense brown eyes, accusingly. There’s so much pain in them, and it hurts me to look at her, but I hold her gaze, knowing that the next words out of my mouth will end us.

“I didn’t know you then,” I say, straightening and turning toward the tall windows overlooking the estate, turning away from the hatred I know will cloud her face.

There is silence for a moment.

Her voice is soft when she speaks. “You didn’t know me when you killed her, or when you lied about it?”

I can’t look at her. The truth is that she doesn’t understand how this world works. That the course of her life changed the day she stepped out of her car at the site of the plane crash.

Bellamorte or not, whatever her family’s status in our world all those years ago, she’s only alive because she is with me, because I am the ruthless killer she hates.

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