19
Rafael
She shouldn't trust me. Not when it came to her heart and her freedom, but in this I would never let her fall.
Still, I couldn't blame the hesitation to place her hand in mine as indecision warred on her face. "I won't let anything hurt you," I murmured softly, raising a brow and waiting for her to follow through on the command we both knew I'd issued. She'd be getting into the water with me, even if I had to force her.
Her fear of water might have worked to my advantage in keeping her isolated on the island, but I wouldn't risk her drowning in an escape attempt if it came down to it. Desperation made people do things that they would never have considered normally. If I stripped away Isa's free will, she might have walked into the ocean just to spite me.
Much like wandering around Southern Spain alone just to get away from me because she was pissed I'd brought her here.
"Youwant to hurt me," she whispered, her eyes darkening with a moment of understanding. "Is that what this is? A way to hurt me without having to put in the effort of chasing me down?"
I sighed, reaching forward and grasping her around the hips. Tugging her into the water with me slowly, I enjoyed the feeling of her body wrapped around mine as she instinctively clung to me to protect her. She might pretend she didn't understand the nuances of the pain I wanted to cause, but her body told me no lies.
She understood the difference.
"I want to hurt you in ways you'll enjoy. Not with fears that grip you and torment you over a decade after your accident," I said, keeping one hand on the edge of the rocks so that I could support both our weights for the moment. “Besides, you’re mine to hurt. Aren’t you,mi princesa?” As much as I wanted her to cling to me, it would be a struggle for me to support both our weights as I swam. My feet didn't touch the bottom in the same way they had in the pool.
I'd known taking Isa here would be more of a challenge than if I'd pushed her in the pool at the hotel. But I knew she wouldn't want to reveal her fear in front of others, and clearing out the pool at a busy luxury hotel wouldn't change the fact that we'd have witnesses. The ocean was no place to learn how to swim, with its endless horizon looming as a threat. Even the calmest waters of Ibiza would be more intimidating.
These pools were deep, but they still had boundaries.
Prying one of her hands off my shoulder, I pushed through the urge to forget the purpose of the day when she whimpered. Her fingers scrabbled along the rock, looking for something to hold on to as I turned her in my arms so that she faced it. I pressed into her back, placing my hands next to hers on the rock and feeling her body tremble as she panted for breath.
"I can't," she whispered, shaking her head.
"Why, Isa?" Something lurked in those fears, something far deeper than what I imagined had to be normal for a drowning accident in her childhood. I reached a hand down her leg, my fingers gliding over the raised skin of the scar on her thigh. She jolted in my arms, moving as if to climb out of the water. But my body at her back prevented her from getting the leverage she needed to pull herself out.
I was a bastard. I was cruel. I was everything she should have avoided.
I couldn't walk away from what I'd started, even as I felt her unravel in my arms. Her fear was like a tangible poison, clouding the clear waters with darkness as she was lost to whatever trauma gripped her from her memories. "What happened in that river?" I asked, digging my fingers into the flesh of her thigh lightly to use that quick flash of pain to draw her back to the present.
She shuddered in my arms, shaking her head quickly. "I drowned."
"Then where did you get this scar?" There was nothing else in her history to indicate she'd had any other accidents. Not one hospital visit. Not a strange injury on a doctor's report.
Nothing.
She paused, her voice barely a whisper when she finally spoke part of the truth that tore her up inside. "My mother said it was barbed wire."
"You got caught up in barbed wire in the river?" I asked, trying to keep my voice light despite the agony tearing me up inside. To be five years old and be caught in the currents must have been terrifying enough as her lungs filled with water and set her insides on fire, but to survive all that while being caught in something that literally tore into her skin?
I exhaled, wondering why there'd been no record of the injury in the emergency report. I couldn't very well ask her, given that I shouldn't have ever seen the fucking thing. I made a mental note to have Matteo track down the people responsible, so that I could find the full truth of what Isa didn't say.
Her choice of words was unique. As if she herself didn't believe her mother.
"You don't think that's what it was," I observed, looking down to watch how still she kept her legs. Even for someone who didn't know how to swim, natural instinct in water was to move. To feel the fluidity of movements that we couldn't achieve on land.
Isa didn't move. She was as stiff as a log from her torso down, the only part of her that dared to move being what was out of the water.
"It was barbed wire," Isa corrected herself, clenching her eyes shut. "It couldn't have been anything else."
I knew better than most what it was to be haunted by spirits, by the tricks of shadows and light and what they could cause in our memories. Shadows had danced off the flames as my mother burned, looking like demons coming to raise hell on earth, to a child who watched his mother die a cruel death. They’d swallowed her whole until there'd been nothing left of the only woman I'd ever cared for.
Until Isa.
"What did you see in the water, Princesa?" I asked, waiting as the rest of her body went solid in my arms.