So I know you didn’t do this. I’m relieved, because I know you had a…well, a fascination with her. But let me tell you, father to son, man to man, that you’re better off without her. Forget her. Come back to the company. You won’t be the CEO, but you were never going to win.
My course of action was clear and determined as I pulled up into my driveway at Bishop’s Landing. I was going to find out what the fuck Elaine was thinking with that letter. I was going to take that sweet little virgin pussy of hers as mine while she confessed her secrets.
I was expecting a presentation of her usual impudence as soon as I stepped over the threshold, but she wasn’t parading around the place. She wasn’t in the hallway and she wasn’t in the living room, even though the TV was still blaring out with her face on the screen. I had a flash of panic that she’d smashed a window and gotten away.
But she was in the kitchen, and the sight of her caught my breath—sitting down on the floor with her knees up to her chest, lost to the world around her.
That sharp prick got me again, in the gut this time. The one I hated, the one that made no sense to me, the one that was all about Elaine Constantine.
I yanked her up to her feet, slamming her into the counter like a piece of meat ready for the slaughter. Only that’s when she caught my breath again, that’s when I finally saw the streaks of tears down her pretty cheeks and realized what they were for.
The blood was crusty on her thighs, cuts still raw from where she’d butchered herself. I should’ve loved it, her pain, her blood, her tears, but I didn’t. The thought of anyone hurting her flesh that wasn’t me, even herself, was enough to slam me with rage.
“What the fuck is this? What the fuck do you think you were doing?”
This time there wasn’t even a spark of spite in her as she stared up at me. She was a broken girl, lost to every hurt and fear in the world.
I bent down to retrieve the knife from the floor. She’d picked the best, clearly determined for the cleanest slices. She flinched as I slammed it down onto the counter.
“If you’d left me alcohol, I wouldn’t need to.” She was shaking, clearly wallowing in her own shit and unable to get a grip of it. There they were, peeping through the surface—those intoxicating little butterfly secrets. The colors of pain and rage and grief that intoxicated me.
“Or maybe I’ll just lock up the knives.”
Her eyes got their venom back at that point. Her jaw tightened. “Fuck you, Morelli! You have no fucking idea how damaged I am. Go fuck yourself!”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “But I’ll find out. Those secrets inside you will be mine for the taking. I can’t wait to find out just how damaged you really are.”
“Don’t count on it,” she said. “I’m not telling you shit.”
She tried to pull away, but I wouldn’t let her. I pressed up against her with my hands on either side of the countertop. She was pinned. Contained. Mine.
I laughed. “Clearly, you don’t hate me nearly so much as you hate your own family, sweetheart. Them or the Power brothers it seems. You must have a secret dirty liking for the Morellis, seeing how you set the Power brothers up for my crime.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about, asshole.” She was lying. We both knew it.
“It seems you wrote a damning little letter, didn’t you?” I whispered with spite. “A scrawled little note to tell the world you’d been taken by the Power brothers.”
She tried to lie some more. “I just wanted them to take some shit for all the hell they put me through. I just wanted them to suffer.”
I gave her an evil smile. “Oh, really? You hate the Power brothers more than the Morellis?”
She didn’t try to lie again. She just stared, hating me.
I leaned even closer to taunt her. “I’d even dare to say you hate your own family more than the Morellis, don’t you? Maybe you aren’t worthy of the Constantine name.”
“I’m damn well worthy of the fucking Constantine name,” she snarled at me, and then she found a flare of life in the depths of her. She twisted between my arms like a snake, scrabbling against the counter to reach for the blade, and then she grabbed it. She grabbed it and let out a screech as she plunged it straight through my hand. “Fuck you, Morelli.”
That’s when she should have run like a crazy thing and tried to get the fuck out of there. She tried to, really she did. She made to run, but I was still holding her tight.
I was smiling. Smirking. Loving just how horrified she was when she saw I didn’t flinch in the slightest. My hand was bound to the wood of the counter, and I didn’t even let out a curse.
Elaine was so shocked that she drained white when I pulled the blade free of my hand and cast it straight back onto the counter.
“What the fuck?!” she spat. “What the fuck is wrong with you? I just sliced right through your fucking hand, Lucian! Are you out of your mind?”
My laugh was every bit as evil as she’d ever known.
Chapter Fifteen
Elaine
I couldn’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.