Could I blame him though, in all honesty?
I’d started sneaking out of my room again and back down to the bottom floor. Every day, I convinced myself that it would be the day I’d go and see Giorgio again, but I hadn’t heard any new news of him, and every time I got to the fridge to collect some food to take to him, my fear got the better of me. I remembered the feeling of his arm throttling my neck, and even if I didn’t go into his cell, I envisioned him reaching out to grab my arm and attempting to yank it off.
That fear ping-ponged with the other one I had, which was that when I went down there I wouldn’t find Giorgio at all. My mind made up images of splatters of blood, or even his dead body lying in the middle of the floor. I thought of all manner of torture tactics that I knew weren’t above my father, like bloodletting and dismemberment, anything to cause intense amounts of harm without actually killing. What if I went downstairs and Giorgio was marred beyond recognition. Dying or dead already?
So I walked back up to my room. Call me a coward, but I simply wasn’t ready to face what lay on the other side of Giorgio’s door, but it didn’t stop me from walking down there every night, only to get scared and come back. I wanted to apologize to him and I wanted to yell at him, either way, I just wanted to see him.
“Good evening,” Savio greeted as I came downstairs for dinner. “You look tired.”
Sleep hadn’t been my friend lately. It was either nightmares of Giorgio trying to kill me or nightmares of my family trying to kill him. “Yeah, I’ve been having a hard time sleeping lately.”
“Any reason in particular?” he asked.
“No, just not sleeping well,” I replied.
It felt odd lying to Savio when I’d only ever told him the truth in the past. The family and our lifestyle were slowly wedging between us.
I hated it.
“What about you?” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m doing the best I can.”
I understood that concept deeply. “Yeah.”
Romeo came striding into the room with his nose up and a haughty smirk on his face. He looked so much like my dad that it made me sick to my stomach, but then he sat himself down at the head of the table and crossed his hands.
“You’ll die if dad catches you there,” Savio warned.
“As if he could,” Romeo replied. “I’ve been at the top of my game long enough to not fear that old man as much as the rest of you. His rules don’t apply to me.”
He was as disgusting as my dad too. The thought that he truly believed he’d earn Lucia’s real love was a joke. She was as smart as she was quick, and she had to see right through him. Her being locked in his bedroom was no different from Giorgio being locked in the dungeon. There were no other sides to Romeo. He was a monster, cut from my father’s block and I hated them both.
“Aw, don’t look at me like that little Natalia, I’ll be much nicer to you when I’m in charge. You should be pleased,” Romeo said with a gross smile.
“Yeah, I’ll work on that,” I replied flatly.
Despite his arrogance, when additional footsteps could be heard making their way into the dining room, Romeo got up out of the head chair and moved over to his regular seat. Marcello walked in and sat down, looking a little more pleased with himself than normal, and eventually my father walked in as well. Food was brought in not long after, and we commenced a long, and silent, meal.
Near the end of it, however, my father looked up at me. He stared at me with a long, pensive glare before glancing down at my plate. “If you’re done, you may go.”
My plate was mostly empty, apart from some lingering bread and butter, but I hated being dismissed like I was nothing. I lifted the bread and started putting pieces of it into my mouth bit by bit. It was dry, no longer warm, and I was full, but that didn’t stop me from taking at least a tiny stand against my father.
It backfired, however, as he folded his hands in front of his face and proceeded to sit and watch me. Savio, Marcello, and even Romeo all shifted uncomfortably as he sat staring, and eventually, my stomach turned and I couldn’t take another bite for fear of regurgitating. I set the bread down on my plate, dropped my napkin down on top of my bread, and got up from the table.
I made a show of walking out so that they would believe I’d gone when I was instead hanging out by the doorway out of the dining room. One of our family’s grunts walked through the hallway at that time, and we locked eyes, but there was a cut down his cheek that looked rather fresh. Whether it was my father or Romeo, someone had punished him recently, so after giving me a quick look up and down, he turned around and walked in the other direction.
“Has that rat been taken care of?” my father’s gruff voice asked.
“Yes,” Romeo replied.
“And Lucia?”
My heart started beating a little faster. Did something happen I was unaware of during my hiatus from the dungeon.
“It’s not an issue,” Romeo replied.
My dad slammed his hand on the table. “If she cannot be trusted to...”
