Page 113

I let him.

His voice dropped. “Isabella, if that fire reaches the dungeon before you do, you could be the one who kills Lachlan.”

The last of my anger collapsed.

For one horrible second, I saw it.

Smoke pouring into the dungeon. The door locked. Lachlan still cuffed to that chair while flames spread through the house.

“No.”

The word barely came out.

Rafael took the lighter from my hand.

“What the hell am I supposed to do, then?” My voice cracked as tears burned my eyes.

I hated that.

I hated all of this.

Another groan carried faintly through the walls.

I covered my ears.

“I can’t keep listening to this.”

“Isabella—”

“I can’t.”

Rafael set the bottles and lighter on a shelf and reached for me, but I backed away.

“Do you have any idea how many times I’ve heard someone screaming beneath my floor, knowing they’re going to die down there?”

His face went still in that way it did when something worried him.

“I don’t know their names. They were all people Father decided had betrayed him. Men who owed him money. Men who knew something he wanted. Sometimes even women.”

My breath hitched.

“I’ve lain in bed and told myself there was nothing I could do. Because there wasn’t. I was a child. Then I wasn’t a child anymore, but there were still guards and locked doors and men with guns, so I kept telling myself the same thing.”

Rafael came closer.

I shook my head.

“Every time someone screamed, I lost another little piece of whatever made me believe people could be good.”

“Mi niña.”

“I learned to sleep through it.”

That admission cut me to the core.

“I learned how to eat breakfast the next morning while everyone acted as if nothing had happened. I learned which sounds meant someone was being beaten and which meant Father had brought out something worse. I learned to wait until it stopped.”

Tears blurred Rafael’s face.