6
Rafael
Itossed back another whiskey, lifting my leg into my lap so that I could continue pulling the glass from my foot. If Isa hadn't pissed me off so much with her refusal to admit she knew our relationship was more than just a physical connection, I would have gladly let her finish.
Her delicate fingers touching my ankle to hold me still as she worked diligently had been greatly preferable to doing it myself. I wanted her to take care of me in the way I cared for her, but that seemed to be too much to ask ofmi princesa.
I knew it was unfair of me to even expect it. The logical part of my brain knew I was being too demanding of her, that I pushed her too far and would risk breaking everything we had building between us. The knowledge of that did nothing to stop me from the reality of wanting to push her farther. Of wanting to get to the bottom of her resistance and understand the fundamentals of it.
Just like the day I'd pushed her in the waterfall, I knew the truth would come out when Isa met her limit. She was only ever truly honest when I didn't give her a choice. In the same way she wasn't ready to know the truth about my occupation, I had to wonder if I was ready to know how she felt about me.
"Oh, would you stop it?" Regina said as she wrapped up Alejandro's leg. She'd gotten quite skilled at bullet removal over her years of being married to my father. Fixing the consequences of his raging anger in the men who'd done no wrong to him and suffered for their loyalty.
Some might compare us, but I used my anger and my penance to rule over my men with order, while his had been nothing but chaos.
She moved from her place next to Alejandro on one of the chairs in the back patio. There were no cushions, making it far too simple to hose the blood away and into the earth, never to be seen again. Kneeling on the stone, she took the tweezers from my hand and worked to remove the smaller shards that were impossible for me to see. "You should have let Isa finish," she scolded me. "If she's to be your wife, you must be able to let her do these things for you."
"She was doing it just fine. That wasn't the problem," I grunted, pouring myself another drink and downing it. The pain in my foot was barely an irritation compared to some of the injuries I'd suffered, but knowing that it came from Isa and that it should have been her soothing the pain she'd caused somehow made it worse.
"Then what was the problem, exactly?" Regina asked.
"She was dismissive about our bond," I said, shrugging my shoulders. I knew she would disapprove of the words, and so did Alejandro as he chuckled in the chair across from me.
"Excuse me? Did that poor girl not wake up in a strange bed just a few hours ago, after being brought here while she was unconscious?" she asked, pinching me with the sharp ends of the tweezers.
I narrowed my eyes at her. "I don't recall asking for your opinion."
"Well, you're getting it anyway. You must find a way to forget your anger. She left you. She doesn't understand what's at stake. She is young, and she's scared. You set her up to think that your relationship would never be anything more than a fling on her vacation, and then you ripped the rug out from under her and changed the rules. Give her time."
"I don't have time. I already know what it was to have her as mine. I can't just forget that," I grunted, watching as she set the tweezers on the table beside me.
"Of course you can't. You love her,mi hijo. This too shall pass, but not if you abuse her in your anger," Regina said, standing and moving to drop into one of the empty chairs across from me.
"I don't love her," I grunted. Men like me weren't capable of love. Obsession wasn't love, and as mad as it drove me, I would never be able to return the emotion I demanded from her.
She was my everything, but to love was to lose. I couldn't risk that, and I wouldn't even if I could. I still remembered the sensation of my heart being torn from my body, of watching the only person who had ever truly loved me burn on the pyre for her husband’s insanity. The boy my mother loved had died with her.
Any traces of goodness she’d managed to instill in me as a child had been lost as I listened to her screams and my father forced me to watch her body turn to ash in the wind. He’d succeeded in making me a monster.La criatura,a man with no heart beating in my chest.
There was nothing that could love Isa as she loved me.
“I can’t,” I said, staring at Regina’s mischievous smile and reiterating the point as if she had any say in what my body and soul determined was impossible. Of all the people onEl Infierno, she would be the one who interacted with Isa more than all the rest.
She needed to understand her place in my life just as much as Isa did.
"You keep telling yourself that,mi hijo," Regina laughed, raising an eyebrow at me mockingly as I pulled my phone out of my pocket and strode back toward the house.
I might not be ready to know if my obsession loved me in the way I needed her to, but that didn't mean I wasn't ready for other answers.
"Rafael!" Regina called. I turned back to her, watching as she considered her next words. "You are not your father. Show her how you feel about her. You're the only one besides her who doesn't know that you are absolutely head over heels in love with that girl."
I ignored her, storming my way through the house to get to my office. I was grateful for the fact that it was on the other side of the house, as far away from Isa as I could get. I needed the clarity that distance brought, and yet as I sat at my desk, I brought up the camera feed from our bedroom.
Isa wasn't in bed but curled up in the chair. Her head leaned on her shoulder as she slept. I'd need to remember to change the bedding when I brought her food in a little while. The blood clearly made her uncomfortable, and I could imagine it would take some time for her to get as used to it as I'd become at a young age.
I wouldn't flinch at the sight of blood, but even I wouldn't want to sleep in a bed stained with it.
I picked my cell phone up off the desktop, dialing Ryker's number and waiting for Matteo's famed executioner to answer the phone. It was early evening in Spain, meaning that Ryker wouldn't want to kill me for calling since it wasn't as early as it would have been had I called when I first wanted to.