Soulless (Starcrossed Lovers Trilogy 2)

“I can hear your brain ticking,” he told me. “Forget it. It’s my business, not fit for a Morelli, let alone a Constantine.”

My brain sure was ticking.

“The other Morellis don’t know, then? You didn’t tell anyone?”

He poured a coffee, and he was bristling, frustrated, but he wasn’t all set to kill me, not like he had been when he came through the door.

I waited quietly as he took a sip of his drink, wondering just what other secrets his body was holding tight.

Maybe we were both creatures of secrets. Maybe there was more in common between us than I’d have ever believed.

I watched him, trying to understand. I tried to imagine what it must be like in a body like his, so perfect but so oblivious to pain. What must it be like to watch everyone around you crying out when things hurt them, but not having a clue how on earth that could feel?

I got a shiver as I began to realize just what that might mean for a man like Lucian . . . just what that could lead to . . . such natural sadism . . . such natural need to hurt people . . .

“So that’s why, isn’t it? That’s why you’re such a fucking psycho?”

That riled him. He jabbed a finger of his bloodied hand at me.

“I told you to mind your own fucking business,” he snarled.

But I couldn’t. My heart was racing too fast, because I was right and I knew it. I was right. He was fixated on causing people pain . . . and he would be . . . of course, he would be . . . he’d be fixated on causing people pain because he had none of his own . . .

“It makes you a sadist, doesn’t it?” I pushed. “Really, Lucian, it makes you a damn sadist.”

“Jesus Christ, shut your mouth!” he snarled under his breath. “I’ve got no time for your bullshit questions. I should have finished you off the very second I walked in tonight. You’re nothing but an annoying little bitch.”

He was trying to convince himself as much as me. I could see it all over him. I was like a bitch with a bone as I edged up closer to the monster.

“It makes you a sadist,” I said aloud. “You’re fascinated by how it might feel, and I get it. I really get it.”

His stare made me shudder when it landed on me again – a whole load of layers glistening through the surface, like a moth in the darkness with the faintest of color in his pitch black wings.

“You’ll be getting into trouble for asking me these dumbass fucking questions,” he told me. “Believe me, sweetheart, every single hint of a secret you hear from my mouth is one hell of a step away from you ever making it out of here alive. Think wisely.”

My heart leapt at the potential . . . the potential I might ever make it out of here alive. I should’ve shut my mouth with every resilient little scrap of my soul, regardless of whether or not I really did want to survive this place, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.

I was too interested in Lucian Morelli’s dirty deep secrets to back away.16LucianI was the most private person in all creation and always had been. I loved the power that keeping yourself dark and deep and separate from everyone else around you brought. The inequality in knowledge. The tip of the scales between their weaknesses and yours.

I didn’t have weaknesses. I’d never had weaknesses.

Even if I had weaknesses as a boy, they were fast chased out of me by my father. The Morelli heir had to be a monster of utter perfection.

Still, despite my lifetime of privacy, part of me wanted to tell Elaine my history. I wanted to see the shock in her pretty eyes as I told her the true Lucian Morelli story.

I wanted to see her open mouth as I told her about the very early days when Father noticed my insensitivity to pain, and how he’d tested my limits with his gritted jaw.

“Can you feel this, boy? Tell me when it hurts . . .”

His hand, then his belt, then the nasty cuts. The way he twisted my flesh and held me down and thumped me hard enough that it sent me flying.

I didn’t feel a thing.

Part of me wanted to. I wanted to know what it felt like to have my body so abused and broken.

He took me to the doctor, and then a specialist after him, on pain of death if they so much as recorded my results. Their reply was quick and definite. Congenital insensitivity to pain. My body had no concept of what hurting meant.

Father told me that it would be a sin against the Morelli name to tell a soul about my condition, even my mother. He told me that he’d be ashamed of me forever if I breathed a word of it to anyone in this world.