Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Eighteen

Lucian

Ifelt like someone had scraped my insides out and laid them on a platter on the counter. I’d never felt like it before. Exposed, like parts of me had been spewed from my center.

The realization that Elaine had reminded me of Bethany Fryers from the very first sight of her at Tinsley Constantine’s masked ball was a hammer. Was that where the fixation had come from? Or did I simply have a type, regardless of the trauma surrounding these women.

The curve of her pretty little chin. The slope of her neck. The blonde waves cascading from her, and those pretty blue eyes. Yes, she reminded me of Bethany. They were both beautiful young women. But they were also drastically different.

Were the comparisons between them simply happenstance?

Was I trying to atone for past sins?

I’d done my best to blank out my early memories of Bethany. Somehow, I knew she was a weakness in my perfect strength. I’d long since lost track of the girl who’d first captivated my fetishes, and I’d wanted to. I didn’t want even a hint of her in my life.

I was uncomfortable with the swing of the balance—her knowing more about my past than I knew about hers. I didn’t tolerate any form of weakness in myself, and that’s what it felt like.

I felt weak. It made my words lash out at her as they came. “I’m serious, Elaine. It’s time for you to reveal your dirty secrets. I want to know every filthy little part of you.”

She shifted on her feet, nervous. Still, she couldn’t hide that addictive curiosity in her stare. “I don’t have to tell you anything, Lucian,” she said, but again there was no venom in it. She couldn’t have mustered any if she’d tried. I could smell her temptation to talk to me. It was ripe in her shallow little breaths. She wanted to share.

“You owe me your fucking life,” I said, knowing cruelty would compel her more than kindness. “The Power brothers would have killed you by now if I hadn’t taken you.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” she said, but again, there was no venom in it.

The standoff arced between us, laced with a concoction I didn’t understand. Hate, disgust, retribution, want, need. I hated needing anything. Need was something I could usually snuff out with a click of my fingers, getting whatever I wanted in a flash, but not with her. Not with Elaine.

“You’d better start using that tongue of yours,” I said to her, “or I really will make you pay back the debt. I’ll make you pay in ways so vile, you could never imagine.”

She raised her chin at me, proud, even though she was a wreck, standing in my kitchen, with crusty bloodied thighs, swamped in my shirt. “You would get off on my secrets,” she told me. “You’d do nothing but laugh in my face. You’d like them.”

I would’ve usually agreed with her. Her stories should give me nothing but inspiration for how I wanted to make her suffer in my grip, but I wasn’t feeling it. The twist in my gut was another one of those crazy sensations that made me want to retch. Feelings? Emotional pain? What they did to me, she said. Who hurt you, little doll? The thought made me clench with rage.

“Who did things to you?” I asked her, and her chin dropped, eyes on the floor.

“It’s none of your business,” she said, her impudence nowhere to be seen. “I’m not having you laugh at me like that. Fuck me up all you want, but I’m not having it.”

I stepped closer and tipped her face up to mine. “You know I’ve got congenital insensitivity to pain. You know things that nobody else on this planet knows about me. You’d better start talking to fix the imbalance. Secrets or pain, Elaine. Your fucking choice, but make it now.”

Her eyes were so sad when they met mine. “Yeah, well at least I get a choice for once in my life. I didn’t think it would be Lucian damn Morelli who’d be giving me one.”

My stare was solid on hers. “Who hurt you, little doll?”

She took a breath and the strength in her shoulders collapsed, leaving her just a tiny slip of a creature against the counter. Her fight was leaving her in the most beautiful of ways. Her butterfly wings were deathly still as she gave up her flickering attempts to fly away.

She was calm in a way that surprised me, and it was strangely attractive.

A sigh. “Seriously, Lucian. I don’t want you laughing at me.”

“I’m waiting.”

My gaze was firm. Her resolve was breaking. Those butterfly wings parted for me, just wide enough for me to see that the caterpillar between them was an innocent little baby of a bug who’d never been seen before.

Nobody had seen Elaine Constantine before. Not the real, true broken core of her beauty.

“It’s a long story,” she told me and I didn’t doubt it. “It’s a long fucked-up story that’s never been told. I tried, when I was young enough to think my words actually meant something to the people around me, only to be called a liar.”

I was disgusted by the way her words meant something to me.

“I believe you,” I said.