Page 79 of Just for a Taste

Once he was within arm’s length of me, he lowered to his knees, and I drew my legs into my chest. “I do not trust Basilio, or any of my family, for that matter. Least of all, my father. I cannot trust men with the same blood as me boiling in their veins. I thought you’d be safe here, but clearly, I was wrong.”

“Wrong? Surely they wouldn’t harm me.”

The words I spoke carried no weight behind them. They were, if anything, more of a desperate plea for reassurance. When Zeno gazed into my eyes and clenched his jaw, I knew it was a solace that would be denied.

“I know their cruelty firsthand. I have felt it in every sense of the word. You have seen the contents of the box. You have seen my scars. My father’s hand has been behind them all.” He slowly reached forward and caressed my cheek, sending a chill down my spine. “To them, you are little more than one of my birds. And when it comes to you, Cora, I am little more than a rabid dog. I shall act accordingly.”

“What are you planning on doing?” I managed to ask through quivering lips.

“I intend to do what any beast does to the vermin that nears its treasure,” he replied with a warm, sweet smile. “If they dare touch you, I will tear them limb from limb.”

Chapter 42: Ch’ella mi creda

Superficially, things between us remained the same for the next few days. We didn’t speak of any of it again—not of the contents of the box, not of his morbid words, not even of Leonore. We had our usual conversations and our usual banter. He brought me trinkets and clothes and sweets and fancy dinners from town. He held me close in his arms and whispered sweet words to me in bed every night.

I still cooked for him. While I was in the abbey, my hands had become soft and my technique poor, but I had luckily regained some of my former skills. Thetrullofelt the safest when I cooked, like I was in an entirely innocuous summer home. But when I caught glimpses of the scar on my hand from where the box had impaled it, the illusion was shattered.

Even if I couldn’t see the scar, the shadow that had overcome our household of two was undeniable. There was a tension beneath all of Zeno’s actions, and I became anxious whenever I was alone, which was becoming more frequent. Zeno left the house often, but for only minutes or, at most, an hour at a time. When he returned, there was always a strange weight upon his shoulders. I had plenty of chances to ask what he was doing, but I never did. He always brightened when asking me about my day, and I didn’t have it in me to deny him that bit of relief.

At one point, I wanted to go with Zeno into the city and go to a bookstore, hoping it would hearken back to old times. I wished for little domestic dates with him, those which thetrullohad stolen from me: walks in the park, boat rides, even just grocery shopping. But when I proposed such an idea, I saw his jaw tighten, his eyes following an imaginary line to where I had discovered Leonore’s body.

It wasn’t thetrullothat had stolen those small, prosaic dates from us, I remembered, but the Medici name that had lured me into this world in the first place.

“Not now,” he said. “But soon. It will be safe enough soon.”

I forced a smile and forced myself to remain optimistic, if not for Zeno’s sake, then for my own. I didn’t want to dig into the archive anymore, partially because I had everything I needed to support my thesis, but more because I was terrified of what I could find.

Unfortunately, that meant plenty of free time once I finished reading all the novels I had brought with us and run out of drawing supplies. Upon realizing this, Zeno furnished the corner of our bedroom into a small library, which comforted me quite a bit. He filled its shelves with a delicious variety of novels and provided me with plenty of canvases and paint. To my great joy, I began to paint Zeno again, often at night.

One of these nights would be my downfall.

Spring had fully ripened, and the flowers in the courtyard were fragrant in full bloom. The bushes, ever thriving, had become a pleasant challenge to maintain, growing every which way. I circled one of them to decide the best way to prune it while sparing every flower. However, the vibrant azalea consisted more of blossoms than leaves, and it was with a heavy heart that I acknowledged there was no way to spare them all. But how was I meant to choose a sacrifice when every bloom had such an elegant blush and spiced aroma?

I took a step back and noted that the shadow of the plant had grown longer and the tiles had taken on an orange hue. With a smile, I turned to the setting sun and thanked it for prolonging my choice.It’s too darkto see well enough to prune, I argued to my nonexistent detractors. I set my gardening shears aside and plopped beside my satchel to retrieve my sketchpad from its innards. I flipped to a loose sketch of Zeno from behind and filled in his figure with enough detail to become the base of a watercolor. Once it took form, I tilted the pad toward the skyline to imagine how the orange and pinks would play along his shoulder blades and glimmer in his hair, how the low sun would reflect on the edges of the scars revealed by the linen shirt I had chosen.

With a huff, I slammed it shut again. I hadn’t gotten the curls at the nape of Zeno’s neck correct, and no amount of collecting eraser dust would help. I tucked the sketchpad beneath one arm, carried the satchel with the other, and held the pencil in my teeth.

My model waited for me in the bedroom, sitting at a desk with his head curved slightly over a book. From where I stood, the angle and pose were utterly perfect. Even candlelight was hitting him at just the right angles.

The pencil hit the ground with my satchel when I opened my mouth to order, “Don’t move!”

Once I saw Zeno freeze per my command, I gathered my supplies and quickly got to work. The curls that had eluded me moments ago proved easy to capture, but now that he was in front of me, I realized I had gotten the borders of his scars all wrong. Squinting for that extra bit of detail, I neared Zeno, only to find the hues I had hoped to evoke were already present. The outer perimeters of large, yellow splotches freckled in reds and blues peeked out from his collar.

Were those . . . bruises?

How long had it been since he had drunk from me or had any sort of blood replacement? I counted the days on trembling fingers once, then again, getting two different numbers. I didn’t bother with a third time. Both numbers were far too large.

“When was the last time you got blood?” I demanded.

Zeno didn’t turn to me or give any sign he had heard me, but his forced stillness was evidence enough. I forced my hands under his arms and reached around his body. Zeno stiffened at first, then resigned himself to being cooperative as I unbuttoned his shirt and tore it off.

It was the first time I had seen his bare body in the light in weeks. A body which I thought I could have sculpted by memory, which I thought had been fully impressed upon my brain. How hadn’t I noticed before?

Beneath paper-thin skin was purplish-brown mottling. Bruises at various stages had pooled into a yellow gradient on his torso in a way that was impossible to produce with any sort of blunt trauma, and tiny fireworks of red bloomed from burst capillaries. I had seen such bruising once before on my mother, when her liver stopped producing clotting factors.

Just before she died.

Air rushed out of my chest, producing a staggered, horrified exhale. With my vision blurring and hot tears already forming, my arm was little more than a violently shuddering line in front of me. Depth perception rendered nonexistent, I overshot, fingers pressing into a fleshy spot beneath his shoulder blades. He recoiled at my touch, the first acute movement he had made since he returned.

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