Page 34 of The Madman and his broken Princess
Nestore gave me a bitter smile. “There’s only darkness where I am. I crave revenge. I crave their screams, and I won’t be sated until every last one of them has perished. I can’t.” He brushed my cheek with his fingertips in a featherlight touch. “You aremy light. You remind me of my past self, of a time before the darkness consumed me.”
“You can leave the darkness.”
Nestore lowered his hand and didn’t say anything. His expression told me he didn’t think he could. Maybe he didn’t even want to.
“I can’t bear all this darkness, Nestore. I prayed every night for the past three years that we would both find a way to escape this place, and now you want to stay. Why? I don’t understand.”
“I won’t leave. This is my home.”
“Is it really? After everything that’s happened?”
A shadow passed his eyes, but his expression remained hard and stoic. “It is the place I inherited from my father, the home of us, Romanos. It’s the place from where I’ll rule over my territory. I won’t let memories chase me out of my own home. I’m stronger than the ghosts of my past.”
Was he? Then why was he so desperate to exact the most brutal revenge?
His gaze flickered with trepidation. “You promised to stay by my side. We promised each other our firsts, remember?”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “I do. I want to stay by your side.”
I also wanted to escape this place with a despaired longing that threatened to crush me. Relief crossed Nestore’s face.
I returned to bed, heartbroken and unable to fall back asleep, while Nestore disappeared into the bathroom. Nestore emerged clean and dressed in sweatpants fifteen minutes later and stretched out on the blanket on the floor.
“You can come to bed, you know?” My pulse quickened. After what I’d witnessed in the basement, a tiny part of me feared the man Nestore was becoming.
“This is more familiar, and I won’t share a bed with you until we’re married.”
Marriage. I had dreamed of marrying Nestore, but in my fantasies, he had always been smiling like the boy at his fifteenth birthday party.
Would I ever see this version of him again?
In the following three weeks, Nestore went on missions with Remo and Nino. I heard the hushed whispers from Niccolo and the other guards who had remained to keep watch over me about how brutally Nestore killed his enemies. They called him the Madman of LA in revered and horrified whispers. Every time he came back, more darkness had consumed him. Every time he returned, my heart broke a little more for the boy he once was. I wasn’t stupid. I knew he’d harbored darkness back then, too, but it had been contained. It hadn’t drowned out everything else like it did now.
And since Flavia had left the mansion to live in Santa Barbara, I felt even more trapped in my own despair and the past.
The worst days were the ones when he went down to the basement to torture my father and the other prisoners. On those days, I could barely look into his eyes, at the ferocious hunger for bloodshed in them.
On one of those nights, Nestore returned covered in blood as usual, and something broke inside me. Every time he went down there, I too went down mentally. I couldn’t stop myself from joining him in the dank basement in my mind, and every time I did, I felt small and powerless and filled with terror. I didn’t want to feel like that anymore.
I stood in front of him, crying. “Please stop this, Nestore. I can’t bear this anymore. This house harbors too many horrors. I need to leave for a little while. Flavia told me I could visit her in Santa Barbara.”
Nestore gripped my shoulders with blood-covered hands, his eyes frantic. “You promised not to leave.”
“Just for a little—”
“No, do you hear me? I won’t let you leave. You belong here. By my side. You’re mine, Amelia. You are my light. You are the reason I’m alive.”
He released me and stalked into the bathroom. Bloody handprints marked my skin and nightgown where he’d grabbed me. A wave of nausea and despair washed over me. I was the reason he was still alive, but I felt like I was dying a little more every day I spent in these haunted walls and witnessed Nestore’s descent into utter darkness.
Nestore wanted me to be his light, an anchor to the boy he’d once been and that he’d lost, but the girl who’d shone brightly enough to be all that he desired had been lost, too. And the small flicker of her light that had persevered would be snuffed out under the force of Nestore’s darkness.
Nestore would never let me go, but I couldn’t stay.
Ihugged my arms tightly around my legs as I stared bleakly into the darkness. It was early in the morning. The sky was slowly turning gray and orange, but the fragile rays didn’t reach the inside of the room yet.
I had been awake for hours. I couldn’t fall back asleep. Without Nestore in the same room with me, I hardly slept at all. Nestore was gone on another mission with Remo, Nino, and Niccolo—purging San Diego of the remaining rats, as they called it—when I decided to risk running.
The walls seemed to whisper Father’s cruel words.Worthless bitch. You’ll die down here. Nobody will remember you.
