And if he left her alone to get help—she was in very real danger of hurting, or even killing herself.
There was only one choice; try and talk her though it. He’d done it more than once, with Luciano. If he could just get her attention fixed on him—
“Rosanna—” Now was not the time for “Milady Dorma”; she wouldn’t respond to that. He slipped her farther down so that she was lying against his upright knee and slapped her cheek, lightly. “Rosanna, say something. Tell me you hear me.” He slapped her other cheek. “Tell me! Talk to me!”
Her eyes wandered, seeing things he couldn’t; tears poured down her ashen cheeks.
“Rosanna! Talk to me!” He shook her, and dredged up her few, hysterical words, looking for a clue to get into her dream. “Rosanna, if you don’t talk to me, Ernesto will get very angry with you!”
Her eyes focused on him for a moment. “L-Lorendana? Lorendana Valdosta?” She faltered, her face twisted, her mouth a slash of pain. “Lorendana, stop them! They’re your friends—they’re killing Ernesto—”
God and Saints—she thought he was his mother. That must have been what threw her into this in the first place! Ernesto—that must have been Ernesto Dorma, Petro’s father. He’d wondered about the portrait in the study, so like Petro, but plainly older; Petro had identified it, then said something about his father dying from an accidental fall.
Gods—could she have seen something no one else did? Is that why—never mind. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have involved my mother. She was murdered months before Ernesto Dorma died. I’ll get her out of this first, then worry about Dorma secrets.
There were only two ways of dealing with lotos dreams—direct the dream, or break it—
And somehow Marco knew if he directed the dream from the nightmare she was in into something pleasant, she’d never leave it again.
“Ernesto is dead, Rosanna,” he said savagely. “He’s been dead more than a year. You know he’s dead. And you can’t change the past. You think you can, but the past you create is a lie. And Ernesto doesn’t like lies, Rosanna.”
Her eyes widened, and she whimpered in the back of her throat. He continued on, as stern and unyielding as Saint Chrysostom, his morning’s religion lesson giving him another weapon to break her out of her hallucination. “He’s very angry with you, Rosanna. You’re muddying his trip through purgatory, trying to hold on to him like this. He sent me to tell you that if you really loved him, you’d let him go!”
She cried out in denial, freed her hands from his, and tried to push him away. At the end of the corridor another door opened and closed, and there was the sound of a footstep—two. Marco didn’t dare look up—he had Rosanna’s attention now, and if he broke eye contact with her, he’d lose it.
“No—” she moaned, as a gasp from the direction of the door reached him; he heard running footsteps. “No, Ernesto would never say that! Ernesto wouldn’t—”
“He would, and he did—you’re hurting him, Rosanna, you’re holding him back.”
Angelina’s voice, sharp and shrill. “What are you doing with my—”
“Shut up, Angelina,” he hissed, regaining Rosanna’s wandering attention by shaking her again. “Get the doctor—”
She at least had enough sense not to argue with him. Running feet retreated, and the door slammed against the wall as witness to her hasty passage.
Rosanna beat at his face and chest with hard, bony fists; her blows were wild, but she got him a good one in the nose and just under the left eye. Marco tried not to wince; ghosts feel no pain.
“I don’t believe it!” She was crying. “I don’t believe you! Ernesto would never believe such—”
“Ernesto is in purgatory. Do you want to be responsible for dragging him down?” The religion lesson having given him the barb to use on her, and forced to be cruel by desperation, he dug it in. “Do you want to be the one who forces him to stay there longer? If you die, if you lose yourself in opium dreams, Rosanna, that’s what will happen, and it will all be your fault.”