“And Cassius?” Maria asked with a raised brow.
Dom didn’t try to hide the fact that his youngest brother was touched by darkness. “I know Cassius cares for Kat, but I’m not sure if he will ever feel love.”
Maria wasn’t sure Cassius would either.
Putting distance between them, she turned, taking a seat on the edge of the bed. “Well, I hate to break it to you, but you were right; I don’t have feelings.”
“I know you are capable of love. I’ve seen it.”
Maria looked back toward Dom as he caught her emerald eyes and held them captive.
“You want to know how I knew you were heartless, princess?” Dominic stalked toward her. “I watched a fourteen-year-old girl watch her mother get buried, and she didn’t shed a single tear.”
How did he …? Maria tried to avert her eyes, hiding her lie, but the hold he held on them made it impossible. “That doesn’t mean anythi—”
“It does … when Lucca did.” Dominic stepped in front of her, making her crane her neck to look up at him as he towered over her. “Tell me, princess. When you were told she was dead, did you even cry then?”
That was a secret she wanted to keep from the world.
A little Maria had stared at her shoes for half the funeral, trying to look sad. At one point, when a single tear had fallen out of the corner of Lucca’s eye before he quickly wiped it away, she had known just how fucked up she was. There was a type of guilt she carried for not being able to shed a tear for her beautiful, dead mother. It had proven just how inhuman—no, monstrous—she truly was.
Maria forced her eyes from his, looking at the ground as she whispered her admission, “No. Like I said, you were right.”
“I thought so, too”—Dom took a seat beside her on the bed—“until I saw you cry for Leo.”
She didn’t say anything, continuing to stare at the old floorboards, not wanting to be reminded of that wretched day.
“And Kayne …,” he continued with a brokenness in his voice.
Maria looked over at him strangely, wondering why he had suddenly changed his mind from when he had told her, What you felt with Kayne wasn’t love, princess.
Getting up, she’d had enough of this game. “Dominic, give me my phone and let me the fuck out of here. I want to leave now.”
“No.” Dom lazed back on the bed, making himself comfortable. “I said I would give you your phone back after you tell me why you came.”
“Fine,” Maria simply said, going to find something to knock the key down from its place. She opened a door to see a little attached bath.
Dominic suddenly sat back up. “What are you doing?”
Snatching a toothbrush, she hoped he liked the taste of dust.
“I know you feel it,” he taunted, standing in the bathroom doorframe and blocking her from leaving. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have walked out after seeing me with Bristol.”
Furious, Maria ducked under his arm and squeezed past him.
“You’re just fucking scared because seeing her with me made you realize you do have feelings for me.”
Using the toothbrush, she quickly tried to swipe down the key, being forced to still, listening to his words.
“Hurts, doesn’t it?”
The key fell off the ledge and onto the floor. Dropping the toothbrush, she picked up the little old key with shaky hands, trying to manage to get it in the lock.
“Hurts to see the person you love with someone else, and there’s nothing you can fucking do about it.”
The key slipped into the lock.
Dominic’s rough voice became strangled. “But I promise you this, Maria, whatever it made you feel will never fucking compare to the pain you caused me by choosing Kayne.”
Maria snapped. Letting go of the key, she violently spun back around and stomped back toward Dominic, who stood in the middle of the room. Giving his chest a hard shove, she spat her words at him like venom. “You expect me to know how to fucking feel when you said it yourself—my heart is dead. Every time I’m around you, Dominic, my body screams at me to touch you, to choose you … but I never feel a single thing here.” Maria placed a shaky hand over where her heart was supposed to be. “But I did with Kayne.”
In his eyes, she could see his hope turning to heartbreak all over again in a split-second, but she kept going.
“But what I didn’t know was that the little twitch I felt in my cold, dead heart was trying to tell me he wasn’t the one for me.”
Maria’s breaths were heavy from being forced to share her feelings that she didn’t want to admit, but she needed to finish. “I have never done anything with my heart. My gut has led me to the decisions I’ve made in my life, and I haven’t regretted a single fucking thing until Kayne. So, you and Lucca were right; I didn’t love him. But how the fuck was I supposed to know that?” she cried angrily up at him.