The Crack Widens
POV: Evie
The shower is the only room I trust. Not because it’s safe.
“Safe” is a childish word people use when they want doors to feel moral.
I trust it because I’ve checked properly, thoroughly, without rushing.
Every angle, every seam, every place a camera might hide if someone cared enough to install one.
There’s nothing. No visible lens. No decorative vent positioned at an ambitious angle. No mirror with suspicious depth. No electrical fitting where electrical fittings don’t belong. No hollow echo behind the tile that suggests something hidden just beyond it.
If the Vitale family has invested in waterproof espionage, it’s better than anything I’ve seen before.
The window is too high to reach, too small to matter, and sealed into the wall like a decision that won’t be undone.
The glass is frosted into uselessness. The drain is ordinary. The vent hums badly enough to be real.
The lock is simple.
The room is small enough that secrets have nowhere elegant to stand.
So, the shower. That’s where I go when the house becomes too loud.
Not loud in sound. The Vitale estate rarely wastes sound.
But loud in its architecture. Doors that know things.
Corridors that change their minds halfway through.
Guards who arrive one minute too late and one second too early, like they’re correcting for something I can’t see.
Teresa, not helping.
Luca, not stopping.
Alessandro…
I stop there. No. Not yet.
The house has become a conversation conducted entirely in locks. And I am answering it constantly. Every step. Every pause. Every turn measured against what the house will do in response. It’s exhausting.
And that’s the problem.
Tired is dangerous. It makes bad ideas feel merciful. It softens the edges of things that should remain sharp. It makes stillness look like safety and surrender sound reasonable.
I turn the water on, too hot, not by accident. And step under it before the steam finishes rising. The heat hits the back of my neck hard enough to feel like punishment.
My body reacts first. It always does. My shoulders drop. My breath loosens. My hands unclench from fists I didn’t realize I’d made.
Rude.
A woman should be consulted before deciding to relax.
I press both palms against the tile and lower my head. Water runs over my hair, down my face, into my mouth. It tastes faintly metallic. Or maybe that’s memory, insisting on dramatics.
Two weeks. No. More now. Time has shifted into something less precise. It doesn’t measure itself in days anymore, but in adjustments. In moments where something changed and didn’t change back.
Long enough for my father’s death to become something people discuss in lowered voices instead of immediate ones.
Long enough for black dresses to stop feeling like costumes and start feeling like uniforms. Long enough for the house to learn the sound of my steps. Long enough for me to refuse a way out.
That last one settles differently. I close my eyes.
Immediately… the street. Wet stone, slick with rain. Blue police lights staining everything the wrong color. The air sharp with something metallic and wrong.
My father’s hand beneath the sheet.
Not his face. His hand. That’s what I remember. The ring still on his finger, worn smooth along one edge where he tapped it against tables when he was thinking. The small scar across his knuckle from when I bit him as a child because I didn’t yet understand the difference between play and pain.
Dante’s name missing from every official mouth.
Alessandro’s face controlled. Empty in the way that suggests too much, not too little.
I open my eyes. Tile. Steam. Water.
No street. Good.
I breathe once. Then again.
Then I count.
Door. Window. Vent. Drain.
No. I stop. That’s ridiculous.
There are no exits here. Not real ones. The door, yes. Locked from my side. A lock that would hold against politeness and fail instantly against intent.
The window is decorative. The vent is decorative. The drain leads nowhere but down, which is thematically appropriate and otherwise useless.
So… one exit.
Unless I include the mirror.
I laugh. Just once. It disappears into the water before it can become anything else. The mirror isn’t an exit. The mirror is a witness.
I turn and look at it through the steam. My reflection is blurred, broken apart by rivulets running down the glass. Pale face. Dark hair plastered against my skull. Eyes too large, too sharp, too aware. I look like someone who has been holding something heavy for too long without putting it down.
Door. Window. Vent. Drain. Mirror.
Five.
If I count the door, that makes six.
There. Six exits.
Brilliant. I’ve solved imprisonment through arithmetic and delusion.
I sink slowly to the shower floor. The tile is cold at first, then warms beneath the water. My knees draw up without permission. My arms wrap around them as if this is something the body understands instinctively, even if the mind refuses to acknowledge it.
The water beats against my shoulders. Then my back. Then the side of my face when I shift slightly. I can feel my skin already reddening from the heat.
I don’t move.
Six exits. In a shower.
My father would be so proud.
No. He wouldn’t.
He’d be furious.
At me. At himself.
At Dante.
At Alessandro.
I press my forehead against my knees, hard. The tile grounds me. The heat burns just enough to feel real. And then the weight comes. Not grief. Grief would be simpler. Cleaner. Something with edges you could hold.
People talk about grief like it’s a wave. Which is how you know most of them have never experienced it properly. A wave rises. Breaks. Recedes. There’s rhythm to it. Cruel, but predictable.
This isn’t that. This is an entire structure. Load-bearing. Invisible until something cracks.
My father is dead. That’s the foundation.
Dante killed him. That’s a wall.
Alessandro knows. That’s the ceiling.
I’m inside Alessandro’s house. That’s the locked door.
I refused the exit. That’s the key I put down myself.
No metaphor survives this much structure.
I breathe in. Out. In again.
It doesn’t help.
I haven’t cried yet. Not on the street where it happened. Not when Rory stood in front of me, offering escape like it was something I could still choose. Not when I said no to it.
Not after Alessandro’s office—
I stop that thought.
Too late. It’s already there.
The door closing. The shift in the air. The moment a line was crossed.
My body remembers it differently than my mind does.
I haven’t cried; I haven’t cried since I was twelve. That was the year I learned tears made men either gentle or impatient, and both responses were worse than silence. My mother had been dead three years by then. That grief had already been folded into me, stored somewhere out of reach.
But one of my father’s men came back from a failed collection with his face open and his shirt soaked red, and I saw bone where bone was never meant to be seen.
I cried in the pantry. Quietly. Completely.
My father found me. He didn’t comfort me. He closed the door, sat on a flour sack, and waited. When I was finished, he handed me a cloth.
“Wipe again if you need to,” he said. Then: “Wash your face before anyone sees.”
That was kindness. That was love.
I try to cry now. God, I try. I want something to break. Something clean. Something visible. But nothing comes.
My chest tightens. My throat burns.
My eyes stay dry.
This isn’t the kind of weight that leaves. This is the kind that stays. Settles. Becomes part of the structure.
I lift my head slowly. Water runs into my eyes. I blink it away.
The mirror stares back. Same woman. Same crack. Better hidden.
I push myself to my feet. Control is a choice. And I have already made too many irreversible choices.
The water runs a moment longer. Then I turn it off. Silence fills the room.
I step out. Dry my face. Steady my hands. I don’t look at the mirror again. I already know what it will show.
A woman carrying something she cannot put down. A woman who chose to stay. A woman who will survive this, whether it breaks her or not.
I unlock the door and step back into the house, where everything is still exactly where I left it.