Page 98 of When She Unravels
But it doesn’t feel good. My stomach roils.
I’m starting to believe Damiano really could offer me protection, but that protection would be wasted on me, wouldn’t it?
Noises of a commotion break out below. It sounds like Damiano is kicking his guests out. I consider going down there for a moment but quickly decide to stay put. I’d only get in their way.
I should take the glass out, but I don’t want to see more red. If someone ever wrote the story of my life, it would be written in blood. Sometimes when I close my eyes, all I can see is me bathed in it. Did I feel empathy for Nelo when he screamed just now? Or did I do that thing again? The one I’d gotten so good at down in that damp basement…
The noises cease, only to be replaced with rapid footsteps. My fingers tense around my foot just as the bedroom door swings open and Damiano barges inside.
He finds me sitting on the floor and releases a heaving breath. “Vale.”
“Hi.” My voice is a whisper.
He kneels beside me and lets his gaze fall to the sole of my foot. His heavy breaths make his shoulders fall up and down as his brows pinch together. “You hurt yourself. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“No.” I hunch over, hiding my injury from him.
He frowns at the movement and then sighs. “I wish you didn’t have to see that. It must have been a shock. There was a lot of blood.”
My body jerks.
I turn away from Damiano, but he won’t let me move far from him. A hand curls around my shoulder. “Talk to me.”
“It wasn’t a lot.”
It takes him a heartbeat to catch on. “Of blood?”
“It wasn’t a lot. You must’ve missed the radial artery. If you’d hit it, he would have bled out all over your kitchen floor. Then again, if you went through it completely, the body may have sucked it up and stopped the flow.”
The air in the room compresses to a point. “How do you know all this?” he asks slowly.
I look at my right hand, the one that would always hold the knife. Keeping a secret doesn’t become easier over time. The weight of it accumulates, until you’re faced with a choice—crumble beneath it or let it go.
I don’t want to crumble.
“I learned a bunch of anatomy after it started,” I say. “I thought maybe I could find ways to kill them quickly, so that they wouldn’t feel so much pain. It worked for a few. I learned all the arteries, and I’d nick the closest one in whatever area he told me to cut. He caught on and told me the next time they died too early, he’d do to me what I was meant to do to them.”
“Lazaro?” Damiano asks, his voice so low it feels like a tremor inside my heart.
“I often thought the thing he got off on the most was watching me decide. Would I follow his commands? Would I abandon my empathy for other people? No, not even abandon, just push it aside, turn it down to zero. It was interesting to him, I think, because he always gave me the illusion of a choice. I could tell him no. But it was just that, an illusion. If I didn’t kill whoever he brought to me, he’d kill someone I loved, like Lorna, our housekeeper. At the end of the day, blood would be spilled.”
“He made you kill people?”
“First he made me torture them. Cut off their fingers and toes. Mark their flesh with words. Skin them alive. He liked doing it himself but for some reason he liked watching me do it more.”
Damiano’s skin loses all its color.
My memories of those nights are blurry. I know what I did, but my brain has tried to hide the details away.
I run my hand down the side of my neck. “To do such a thing to a person, you have to stop viewing them as a person. You have to dehumanize them so that they become a bag of bones and meat. Not real. Not people with lives and families, flawed as they may be. You have to pretend they're just a physical object that can’t feel real pain. To be capable of that kind of disassociation is an awful thing. It makes you disassociate from yourself as well.
“Very quickly, I stopped feeling like I was human. I stopped seeing my family. It felt really important to menotto see them, even if I couldn’t really explain why at the time. In retrospect, it was because I was afraid of a few things. I was afraid I’d hurt them. I didn’t know how or why I’d do it, but it felt like a real possibility. And I was afraid they’d see the truth about me. They’d look me in the eye and see I had no soul left. I didn’t want them to know that, even if it was the truth.”
He drags his hand from my shoulder to my wrist. “Vale…”
I meet his shattered gaze. “He made me do awful things. He sat the very first man he brought to me down on a chair the wrong way around. He tied his wrists to his ankles so that he was immobile. The man had this fleshy back covered with marks and tattoos. Lazaro said he liked one of the tattoos and wanted me to give it to him. I didn’t understand. He explained he wanted me to cut it out for him.
“It didn’t really compute. I stared at him while the man in the chair started to beg. This big, burly guy you wouldn’t want to get into a fist fight with begged Lazaro—and me—not to cut out his tattoo. I said to Lazaro I couldn’t do that. I thought maybe my new husband had a dark sense of humor that I really didn’t understand, but he gave me a knife and very calmly told me to be careful, that he liked the tattoo, and he wanted to admire it while holding it in his hand.”
