Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Fifteen

Elaine

Icouldn’t move, staring in shock and horror at the way Lucian pulled the knife out of his hand. He didn’t flinch, didn’t falter, didn’t express even a moment of pain. I stared at him as he wrapped his bleeding hand in a towel. He’d said the words, but I didn’t believe them, not until I saw it with my own eyes. Not until I felt his flesh give way, skin and tendon sliced, even while I looked into his eyes. He didn’t even flinch.

“What the fuck,” I managed to whisper.

A chuckle. “What the fuck is right with me, more like it.”

I still didn’t fathom it. I couldn’t. His hand was already bleeding through the towel but he didn’t give a fuck. “Is this the pain thing you were talking about?”

His eyes were as dark as ever as he answered me. “Congenital insensitivity to pain. Nothing you ever do will hurt me. If you have any sense in that pretty head of yours, you’ll abandon all hopes of it now and do whatever the fuck you’re told.”

“Nothing will hurt you? For real? Nothing?”

“That’s the side effect of my little disorder. I can’t feel it. If I have my hand on the stove, it will burn to a crisp. I won’t feel a thing. Only the smell will make me notice.”

This was huge. Everyone would know if the Morelli heir couldn’t feel pain. It would be part of the gossip. Part of the jokes. Part of the oeuvre of being rich and powerful in New York.

“I’m supposed to be able to feel emotional pain, but I never have. So in that way I’ve never felt pain at all. Which is quite ironic. Quite unfair. Proof that there isn’t a just God. Because I can feel pleasure just fine. I can fuck and enjoy myself just fine.”

He couldn’t feel pain? Not physical, he said. Not even emotional pain. Not yet anyway. I hoped some woman would eventually stomp his heart to pieces. But he could feel pleasure. No wonder he stormed through life, taking everything he wanted, throwing everything else back.

The monster’s eyes were so cold, but there was a hint of something else in his gaze, some kind of unlikely vulnerability in his darkness. People would have talked about Lucian Morelli having congenital insensitivity to pain if they had known.

How had they kept this a secret? Who in the family knew about it?

“Is this why you hurt people so much?” I asked him. “Because you have no idea what it feels like? Maybe if you did, you wouldn’t be such a bastard to people.”

“I don’t need an excuse to be a bastard to people, don’t try to make one for me.”

I leaned back against the counter. “I wasn’t going to. You can’t excuse being that much of a sadistic asshole with a damn illness.”

We stood staring, eye to eye, both of us hating each other, both of us curious, both of us in so much of a fucked-up state we must have been in some surreal dimension in Constantine-Morelli hell.

I guess my tone was genuine when it sounded out next, because I saw his eyes lighten just a touch. “What do the doctors say about it? Can it be fixed?”

“I didn’t want to be fixed.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“Because pain is a weakness, Elaine. I’m free of it. I’m stronger for it.”

I didn’t believe him. Pain was a truth and a connection to yourself. Pain was something that made us stronger, not weaker. “Is it something you’ve had your whole life?”

“From when I was young enough to scrape my knees and not cry along with it.”

I could only begin to imagine the little toddler Lucian with bleeding legs, not needing to cry for his mom. “Who else knows?” I pushed. “People must know, right?”

“None of your business,” he told me, but I shook my head.

“Seriously, Lucian. You can’t tell me it’s none of my business. I just stabbed you through the hand, and you’re telling me you didn’t feel it. How could that never have come up before?”

“People see what they want to see. You should know that. They look at you and see a party girl. They don’t know that you’re a virgin. Or that you’re absolutely terrified.”

“You are an interesting piece of shit, Lucian Morelli, even if I can’t stand you.”

I knew he was trying to hide a laugh at my bold words. Sometimes I definitely made him laugh inside, no matter how much he wanted to hate me. “Forget about it,” he said. “Believe me, you’ll be paying for your actions badly enough already.”

I didn’t give a shit about that. I was more interested in the weird creature in front of me than I was in what he was going to do with me.

I wondered if the rest of his family had it too. The question was out of my mouth before I’d even realized I was saying it. “Who else around you has it? Nobody talks about you guys having it.”

He walked away far enough to flick the coffee machine on, the intensity of the mood broken. His sigh felt casual, almost affectionate. “Stop asking questions, little doll.”

I didn’t want to shut my mouth, I wanted to know every little bit of his secrets. I was like the sneaky little girl tiptoeing through everyone else’s mysteries all over again, curious. “I can hear your brain ticking,” he told me. “Forget it.”

My brain sure was ticking. “Even the Morellis don’t know, do they? You didn’t tell anyone?”

He poured a coffee, and I waited quietly as he took a sip of his drink, wondering just what other secrets his body was holding tight. Maybe we were both creatures of secrets. Maybe there was more in common between us than I would’ve ever believed.

I watched him, trying to understand. I tried to imagine what it must be like in a body like his, so perfect but so oblivious to pain. What must it be like to watch everyone around you crying out when things hurt them, but not having a clue how on earth that could feel?

I got a shiver as I began to realize just what that might mean for a man like Lucian…just what that could lead to…such natural sadism…this natural need to hurt people…

“So that’s why, isn’t it? That’s why you’re such a fucking psycho?”

Another sigh. “Shut your mouth or I’ll shut it for you.”

He sounded tired.

He was fixated on causing people pain…and he would be…of course, he would be…he’d be fixated on causing people pain because he had none of his own…

“It makes you a sadist, doesn’t it?”

“Sadism doesn’t need a reason, sweetheart. We aren’t broken men for you to fix. I hurt you because I’m a bastard who likes seeing you in pain. What does it matter, the reason why?”

His stare made me shudder when it landed on me again—a whole load of layers glistening through the surface, like a moth in the darkness with the faintest of color in his pitch black wings.