37. Pietro
Pietro
I’m crumpled on the floor, small and broken, like a bug at the end of its brief life.
Valaria stands at the center of the room. Hair slicked back. Eyes burning.
Not cuffed. Not weak.
She doesn’t startle. Doesn’t flinch.
She lifts her chin. Her gaze locks on mine with an intensity that steals the air from my lungs. There’s no relief in her expression—no desperation, no flicker of the woman I’ve risked everything to save.
Her pupils are pinpricks, black and bottomless. Her mouth forms a small, curious curve that might once have been a smile.
She tilts her head just enough to let the overhead light cast a blade of shadow across her cheek.
Behind her, the red-streaked woman watches me with the calm patience of a spider in its web.
For a heartbeat, I can’t remember where I am—who I am. My fingers go slack. This isn’t her. But some part of me can’t be sure.
“Valaria?”
She looks at me like something to study in a laboratory dish.
The cold certainty I’ve relied on my entire life fractures, hairline cracks spreading through my ribs. I’ve seen her terrified. But never…this. Never so hollow and unhurried, as if she’s already decided I’m irrelevant.
I search her face for any glimmer of the woman I knew—the woman who kissed me like she was starving. I don’t find her.
Maybe this is the price of my obsession: walking into hell to find she no longer wants saving. I tell myself she’s playing a role. That this is an act. But the words taste like a lie I’m too afraid to swallow.
If they’ve done something to her—rewired her mind—I don’t know if I have the skill to undo it. I can’t let her see the doubt. But it’s there, curling inside my chest like a parasite.
Valaria doesn’t move closer. Doesn’t say my name. She just studies me, like she’s cataloguing each ragged breath, every twitch.
I swallow, but it’s like trying to force glass down my throat.
Her eyes never leave mine.
A silence unspools between us.
For an instant, she is my Valaria. That look.
Or am I imagining it?
I don’t know if she’s stalling…
Or if they already got to her.