Sensual Redamancy

Chapter 25

•SOFIA•

I could feel Teodoro's eyes burn holes into my soul, demanding I looked at him whilst we danced.

I kept my eyes focused on his shoulder blade, my mind wandering to the safest way of escaping without alarming neither him nor his guests and giving the impression of a hostage, hell-bent on fleeing.

"You're quite the attention grabber, aren't you, Sofia?" he spoke, moving across the floor with me in a swift dance, his hand on my back.

I didn't give him an answer, afraid of how he'd react to my unfiltered rudeness. If I'd learnt anything over the past couple of weeks I'd been studying him, then it was how easier he was to deal with when obeyed and unchallenged. I could use peace for the night.

Teodoro was having neither my silence nor failure to look at him, deepening his voice authoritatively. "My eyes are up here, Sofia," he cautioned, "and your silence is beginning to put me in a very sour mood."

I heeded without much thought, mustering enough courage to look up at him. My eyes met his piercing blue pair, cold, distant and void of any warm feeling.

I hadn't looked at him so up close before and making eye contact with him and seeing his lips curl up slightly into something other than a horrid smirk or cynical smile gave me chills.

I didn't like his smile because it disguised the devil inside him, giving him off as a simple, kind-hearted man he pretended to be around honourable people.

That small smile radiated a fraction of him I'd always wondered ever existed or still existed inside him. The idea of humanity.

"Who hurt you?" I found myself asking him, swallowing away the disgust rising in my throat. "Who hurt you so bad you have nothing but pain and cruelty to give to the world?"

Unless he'd been born with evil inculcated within him, he had to have something that'd turned him into what he'd become. I knew the concept of pain and how deep it could sink and change so many things. Maybe he was just hurting and broken and hatred was the only thing he had left to give.

Teodoro's smile seemed to widen a little. "Your father did," he responded calmly and straightforwardly.

His response felt like the most sincere response he'd given me since we'd met or was it just I knew my father well enough to believe it?

"My father wasn't a saint," I managed to choke out, memories of our ugly encounters spiralling inside my head as I averted my eyes from Teodoro's.

For a while, I'd forgotten about him and even forced myself to forget we were in this turmoil because of whatever his feud with the Bernardis was. I knew it went deeper than falsely stolen money, something beyond the scenes we couldn't get a grasp of.

Darius Martel had been a man capable of nearly anything, sometimes wearing the mask of the devil himself. It was kind of hard guessing how he could have wronged someone so badly that he probably sent him to an early grave and took his family for torture.

"He was pure evil in every aspect of the word," Teodoro ascertained firmly, "and I know of his atrocities towards his own daughters, especially you."

Hearing someone say it out loud made my gut twist. He didn't go around telling people like it was a normal thing to do, did he?

I knew they'd shared a close relationship at some point and perhaps they'd had time to bond over their perversion.

"Did he tell you that?" I asked him out of curiosity. "Did he share his wicked habits with you?"