25. Pietro
Pietro
She hasn’t said a word since I woke her.
I watch her across the terrace. Steam coils from her untouched coffee, her fingers curled around the mug like she needs the heat to tether her. Her gaze isn’t on the courtyard below. It’s somewhere else. Somewhere I can’t follow.
Yet.
“Bad night.” I say gently.
She flinches—barely. Most wouldn’t notice. But I’ve memorized the language of her silences. This one speaks louder than a scream.
“I’m fine,” she says. The lie lands soft but brittle.
She’s not fine.
Her body is awake, but her mind still dreams.
I sit beside her, close but not touching.
She doesn’t move away. That’s something.
“Tell me what’s wrong.”
A pause.
Then: “It’s just a dream.”
I wait.
She shakes her head. Still staring at nothing.
“I don’t usually remember them,” she whispers. “But this one… it felt like a memory. Like something that had been waiting to surface.”
Her voice cracks on the last word. I turn toward her fully.
“What was it?”
“I was strapped to a chair.” Her voice trembles now. “In a white room. There was a woman with a red streak in her braid. She called me the failsafe. Said I wasn’t meant to be ordinary. That someone—my mother—put something inside me.”
Her throat works as she tries to swallow it down. The fear.
I reach for her hand.
She lets me take it.
“I woke up,” she says, voice barely there. “But part of me didn’t. That dream—it knows something I don’t.”
She looks at me then. Really looks. And that’s the moment I feel it—her walls thinning. The breath she didn’t know she was holding. The question she’s too scared to ask.
“Am I losing my mind?”
“No,” I say, firm. “You’re finding it.”
She draws in a shaky breath, like my words gave her permission to believe them.
“I don’t want you to think I’m weak,” she murmurs.
“Valaria.” I lean in, resting my forehead against hers. “There is nothing fragile about a woman who faces the dark inside her and doesn’t run.”
She closes her eyes.
And for a few stolen seconds, she rests her weight against me.
But I don’t rest.
Because if this dream is a memory…
If someone implanted a program into her brain?—
If someone wants her back?—
Then this isn’t over.
She won’t face it alone.
Not while I’m breathing.
And she never has to know just how far I’m willing to go to protect her.