He’s crouching in front of me, and his expression is concerned now. The rage is gone.
That concern?
It’s like a balm to my soul.
“You’re still—”
“I’m not sick,” I counter, unsurprised that he knows about my illness. I feel like everyone does.
He reaches up, and his hand hesitantly rubs over my head. “The first time I landed in Rome when I was transferred here, I saw on the news that you were being operated on.” His jaw works. “You have beautiful hair. Like an angel,” he whispers.
The words sink into me like stones slipping through water. Not only his choice of words, but that, on his first day here, he saw me on TV.
Fate... yet again.
Could it be more obvious?
My tongue feels thick in my mouth as I tell him, “I used to think I was an angel.”
I’m not sure why I say that. I never intended to, but the words slipped out, just like everything else I said tonight.
He frowns at me, then his fingers trace along the crispy part of hair which I use to control how much of the scars are visible. I’ve had a haircut since it grew out, and I kept some parts longer and use gel to cover the thick ropes of mangled flesh that expose my surgery to the world.
That he touches me there, in such an intimate a spot, doesn’t seem to register.
It isn’t the touch someone gives a stranger, and while I know that’s because we’re not strangers, he doesn’t. Yet he touches me like he knows me.
Because he does.
He just doesn’t realize it.
Well, not consciously.
“The cyst?” he asks simply.
“The cyst.” I tip my chin up. “It caused delusions.”
“Are you well since—I mean, should you be out and traveling if you were sick?”
“I discharged myself.”
Surprise has his brows lowering. “Why did you do that?”
“Because I’m as well as I can be within the length of time since surgery. But the truth is, being in the hospital would have been detrimental to me. I’m a nomad. I travel around a lot. Being stuck in there was sucking the life out of me.”
“If you needed to be there, then you shouldn’t have left,” he chides, and I shiver when his fingers collide with a scar.
It isn’t sensitive.
If anything, it’s still numb, but I can feel him.
Feel his touch, and it’s like heaven.
I tip my head toward him, letting the curve of my skull rest on his hand.
“I’m as well as I can be.”
“You almost collapsed—”
“I tried to keep up with you. I failed,” I tell him dryly. “I exerted myself too much. Plus, before that, I followed Paulo.”
“You did?” His brow puckers. “Why?”
“Because his response was strange to your absolution. I was angry at first. So angry with what he said.” I blink at him. “I’ve been friends with a lot of victims of domestic abuse over the years, and I knew how his niece had to be feeling.”
“Like shit.” His voice is thick with emotion. “I won’t let her be attacked just because no one will—”
“The police have to help.”
His scowl makes a reappearance. “With what? Something he hasn’t done? Something she hasn’t even confessed to with me? Why would she speak with the police when she won’t talk about it in confession?”
I gnaw on my bottom lip, hating that he’s right.
But I’m also torn, because I felt the bloodcurdling rage earlier. I felt the loathing and the hate for a man who could be self-piteous when he was the abuser.
“I don’t hurt people who don’t deserve it,” he murmurs softly, and his hand trails over the curve of my head and toward my chin.
When he reaches down, and turns my fingers over to bare my palm, he sees the blood there, and his fingers trail over them too.
It’s absentminded.
Like his thoughts are elsewhere and his fingers represent him wandering, meandering through his mind, and I’m not about to complain, not when his touch is a thousand times more magnetic than I’d ever imagined.
All of a sudden, the body that had never responded to all the cute guys in school, college, or at the frickin’ gym, is flaring to life as if a police siren has just started flashing.
Every part of me—body, mind, soul, and heart—flutters in response to his touch. I feel like a flower, a bud that has been tightly furled in the dark, slowly opening and blossoming now that the sun is kissing its petals.
Only, Savio isn’t the sun.
If anything, he’s the dark.
The moon?
Maybe.
Even that projects a faint kiss of light, just not one as powerful as the sun.
I stare at his hand as he traces patterns on mine, and I whisper, “Even Adam had Eve.”
He stills. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He doesn’t look up at me, so I reach forward, and tip his chin up so he’s staring straight at me. “You know what it means.”
“I don’t know you. So how the hell can I know what you’re thinking?”
“You do.” Where it matters. “You know me.”
He shakes his head. “This is crazy. You’re—”
“No. I was crazy,” I admit. At least, in the eyes of the world. “But not anymore.”
He’d been crouching in front of me, however, my words have him flooding the space with energy. He surges upward and backs away from me.
“You can run from me, but you can’t hide,” I intone softly, staring at the blood on my fingers. “I’ll do what I must to keep you safe.” Finally, I look up at him. “Even if it’s from yourself.”
Savio
She’s crazy.
That’s the only thing, the only way I can accept what she’s saying.
Frowning at her and her words, I demand, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Is it true what they wrote in the articles? About the rebels who held you?”
I tense up, not expecting her to speak about my past. No one ever does. It’s there, a big shadow that looms over everything, but it’s avoided by all—be they my flock or the higher ups in the Church. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. There were many articles written about them. How am I supposed to know which one you mean?”
She ignores my defensive retort and clarifies, “The authorities said they found dozens of women’s and girl’s bodies buried on the compound when they finally infiltrated it.”
My throat feels too tight, too thick to swallow. Air doesn’t penetrate my lungs as I’m transported back to that time, to that place.
To the heat. The stench. The screams.
A hand touches me, bringing me back. Grounding me. I stare down at it, at the soft palm that’s free from calluses, but stained red from my back.
She touches my chest like she has the right to touch me there, and fuck, if I hadn’t felt the same way when I rubbed my hand over her hair.
This is weird. Beyond strange. But what about my life isn’t?
“They were all raped before they died,” she says huskily, stepping closer to me now she’s back on her feet, not allowing me to move away from her.