Chapter 3 #6
Yannis climbed in first, scrambling across the leather seat and settling in the middle like this was any ordinary day—like his father hadn’t just married a woman drenched in blood and secrets.
He buckled himself without prompting, humming softly under his breath, a tune Maria used to sing.
Elena hesitated on the curb.
The veil fluttered in the breeze. Blood had crusted dark at her temple. Her lip was split, swollen. She looked like a woman who had run through fire and somehow survived.
I leaned closer, my voice low enough that only she could hear.
“Get in,” I said. Not unkindly. Not gently. Simply inevitable.
Her eyes lifted to mine.
Fear lived there. Real fear. Not the theatrical kind. The kind that seeps into bone and never leaves.
She obeyed.
Every movement was stiff, measured—like someone stepping into a cage that hadn’t yet decided whether to lock or bare its teeth.
She lowered herself into the back seat beside Yannis, careful not to brush against me as she passed, as though contact alone might provoke something irreversible.
Petros slid behind the wheel without a word. I took the front passenger seat, needing the distance, needing the space to keep my hands from doing what they wanted to do. The door shut with a muted thud—solid, final, coffin-heavy.
The Ferrari pulled away from the curb.
In the side mirror, St. Maribel’s Chapel shrank, its white stucco glowing deceptively pure in the afternoon sun. Then it vanished behind a bend in the road, swallowed by palms and traffic and consequence.
Silence rushed in to take its place.
Not a peaceful silence. The kind that presses on the eardrums, waiting for something to break.
Then—
“Elena,” Yannis said softly from the back seat.
My heart stuttered.
Once would’ve been a miracle. Twice in a single day felt like the universe mocking me for every prayer I’d ever screamed into the dark.
After three years of nothing—no words, no sound, just silence so absolute it felt like punishment—his voice cut through the car like light through a crack.
“Sweetheart,” she answered.
The word came out gentle. I caught her reflection in the mirror as she reached for his hand, her thumb brushing over his knuckles in a slow, soothing motion.
The exact same way Maria used to.
My jaw tightened.
“Do you like my dad?” Yannis asked.
The question was innocent. Pure. Unfiltered curiosity, the kind only children possess before the world teaches them better.
The air in the car turned to glass.
Elena froze.
I saw it in the mirror—the way her shoulders locked, the way her breath caught like she’d been struck. Her mouth opened, then closed. No sound came out.
Instead, her free hand lifted.
Her fingers moved—quick, fluid, precise. Sign language. Not hesitant. Not learned from a book. Natural. Fluent.
Yannis’s face lit up like dawn breaking.
He signed back immediately, hands flying, expression animated, alive. The conversation flowed between them like water over stone—effortless, intimate, excluding everyone else in the car.
Including me.
I gripped the edge of the seat, nails biting into the leather.
I had tried.
God, I had tried.
After Yannis’s mutism began, I bought books on sign language. Watched hours of instructional videos. Hired tutors who spoke softly, who praised every small attempt as if encouragement alone could mend what had been shattered.
But grief had already hollowed me out, and rage had taken residence where patience should have lived. Every lesson collapsed into frustration. My hands felt clumsy—stupid—refusing to obey me. The signs slid through my mind like smoke I couldn’t grasp.
I caught maybe one word in ten.
Enough to know they were talking about me.
Enough to know they were shutting me out.
Enough to know she had reached my son in hours where I had failed for years.
Petros glanced sideways at me, eyes sharp, waiting for an order. Waiting for permission to intervene, to end this exchange before it dug any deeper.
I said nothing.
The Ferrari devoured the coastal highway, engine growling low and restrained, a predator forced to heel.
Palm trees blurred past in streaks of green and shadow.
To our left, the ocean stretched endless and glittering—beautiful, indifferent, uncaring of kings and blood and vows made under duress.
In the mirror, Elena looked pale, bloodied, exhausted.
But her eyes never left Yannis.
When he signed something that made him giggle—a soft, breathy sound that punched straight through my chest—she smiled.
Not wide. Not triumphant.
Small. Broken. Real.
The sound echoed in my skull, unwanted and unbearable. I hadn’t heard that laugh since before Maria’s funeral, since before the world had gone quiet and sharp and cruel.
Something darker than hate burned behind my ribs.
Whatever spell she had cast on him, I would break it.
Whatever lies she had fed him, I would tear them out one by one and scatter the pieces at her feet.
We were married now.
She was mine—legally, irrevocably. Bound to me by paper and witnesses and a ring she had slid onto my hand with shaking fingers.
I turned my gaze forward, jaw set, eyes hard.
Home was twenty minutes away.
Twenty minutes until the mask came off.
Twenty minutes until Elena Vasquez learned exactly what kind of husband she had chosen.