All Chapters of Love's Darkest Cage: Chapter 51 - Chapter 60

ElioThe doctor came out of Dove's room and closed the door softly behind her, and I made myself stand still and let her speak.My hands were still split across the knuckles. There was my brother's blood dried in the creases of them, and I hadn't washed it off, and I wasn't sure I intended to."She's stable," the doctor said. "She's in and out — she'll surface, say something, go under again. That's the drug. It'll do that for a few more hours.""Was she—" The word wouldn't come. I had to go around it. "How badly.""She wasn't assaulted." She said it plainly, professionally, and watched me take it. "There's bruising. Her face, her wrist, and the older injuries from the fall — but nothing else. Nothing happened, Mr. Visconti. You got there in time."The hallway tilted very slightly and then righted itself.In time. Minutes. Maybe seconds. If I'd sat at that table for one more minute and let my father hand me an empire. If I hadn't stopped in front of the last door. If I'd walked past it

DoveHe kissed me, and something in my body came apart.I don't know how else to say it. Whatever the drug had done — whatever wall it had built between me and my own skin — when Elio’s mouth found mine, the wall came down and everything came flooding back at once. I could feel everything. I could feel his hands on my face and the heat of him and the roughness of his stubble against my cheek, and after hours of lying in a body that wasn't mine, being able to feel anything at all was so overwhelming that I made a sound against his mouth I'd never made before.He laid me back on the pillows and came over me, and I let him, and I pulled him down after me.Every place he touched came to life. My jaw, my throat, the pulse under it. His hand slid into my hair and mine went up his chest, over the hard planes of him under his shirt, and I couldn't get close enough, I couldn't get enough, and I understood with a wild, dizzy clarity that this was what all of it had been building toward — the b

ElioShe'd finally gone under sometime around six.I know because I'd been counting, lying awake in the gray light with her small hand fisted in the covers over my chest, feeling her fight it. She'd held out an unbelievable length of time. Hours past when the drug should have taken her, hours past when anyone in her state had any business staying conscious, and every time her breathing started to slow, she'd jerk herself back and dig her fingers in and force her eyes open again, furious with her own body.I won't fall asleep, she'd told me. And she hadn't.She'd stayed awake for all of it. She'd kept the whole night.And then, somewhere in the thin dawn light, she'd simply run out — the fight going out of her all at once between one breath and the next, her hand going slack, her face turning into my chest — and she'd slept.She was still sleeping now.I lay there a while longer than I needed to. There was a war on the other side of that door, business and damages to attend to, and I l

DoveI woke up alone.The space beside me was empty and cold. I reached for him before I was even properly awake, my hand going out across the sheets on instinct, and found nothing but rumpled sheets where a body should have been.I sat up too fast and the room tilted. My head throbbed. My cheek ached where Gio had hit me, and my whole body felt like it had been taken apart and put back together by someone in a hurry.But I remembered.That was the thing I checked first, before anything else. I closed my eyes and made myself walk back through it, terrified there'd be a hole. The gold dress. The coat check. The bull mask. The fake smile. The velvet couch and the sound of tearing silk and the door coming down and Elio, standing there. His arms were around me. His jacket. Him sitting with me on the bed. Him kissing me. Him tying my wrists above my head. And him giving me my very first órgasm.The indescribable feeling of it. I remembered it all.And then his voice was cracking. Not like

DoveI cried myself to sleep.I don't say that to be dramatic. I lay in that bed and sobbed until my ribs ached and my eyes swelled shut and my throat was raw, and the whole time — the whole time — I kept my eyes on the door.He'll come. He’ll come back.That was the thing I told myself, over and over, like a rosary. He'll come for me. He's doing something. There's a reason why he’s acting this way. But he'll come up here when the house is quiet and he'll sit on the edge of this bed the way he did the night I fell, and he'll explain, and it will make sense.Because it had to be a reason. It had to be. After everything that happened last night. After everything — how could it be that he'd simply stopped caring?I watched that door until the sky went gray.But he never came.* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *And then it was morning, and the house just went on.That was the part I couldn't bear. Maria came with a tray. The maids came for the sheets. Someon