Chapter 2 #2
I turned away from him—away from the blood on his shirt, the storm in his eyes—and toward Dario.
My hands shook so badly I had to press my wrists together to steady them before I signed.
“Please. Get me out of here.”
I mouthed the words too, exaggerating each syllable, my ruined throat straining around the shapes.
I needed him to see it—not just the words, but the fracture running through me. The threadbare edge of my control.
Dario’s jaw locked. He shoved both hands into the pockets of his tailored trousers, a habit he’d picked up years ago when he needed to keep himself from breaking something—or someone.
His shoulders were rigid beneath the dark suit jacket, muscles coiled tight.
“We know we made an agreement,” he said to Ruslan, his voice low and edged with something lethal. “But we want it nullified.”
The air in the room shifted.
“Elena cannot stay with you,” Dario continued. “She needs time. Real time. Doctors we choose. Security we control. Space to heal. Away from...” His gaze flicked to the blood staining Ruslan’s shirt. “...all of this.”
Ruslan didn’t look at Dario.
Not once.
His eyes remained fixed on me as if the rest of the room had dissolved.
“I know where your father lives,” he said.
The words sucked the oxygen from my lungs.
For a moment, I forgot how to breathe.
“The man who orchestrated the plane crash that killed your mother and your little brother.”
The past didn’t return gently. It detonated.
My mother’s laughter in the kitchen. The way she used to brush my hair back from my face and call me her stubborn star. My little brother—seven years old, gap-toothed, clutching his toy airplane in the terminal, waving at me because I’d refused to go on that trip after a stupid teenage argument.
The news footage of a plane explosion that took my little brother and my mother.
Five of us once — my father, my mother, my elder sister, me, and my little brother.
Then three. My sister, my father, and me.
Then two — just my sister and me.
Then...
Only me.
I had believed my father died in the plane crash alongside my mother and brother.
I had mourned him as if he were already gone.
I had cried until my body gave out, believing he had been inside that aircraft too.
Until Ruslan, with that same detached calm, told me the truth months ago.
He hadn’t died.
He had planned his disappearance.
To this day, I cannot understand why a father would fake his death and leave behind children who had no one left.
My hands trembled violently as I signed.
“I have no business with him.”
Ethan translated, voice tight.
“Or with you.”
That part I signed slower. Sharper. So there would be no misunderstanding.
I stepped closer to Dario and gripped his forearm.
His sleeve was cool beneath my fingers, the solid muscle under it grounding. I half-hid behind him without shame. I had fought enough battles alone.
Ruslan’s mouth curved into something predatory.
“She cannot leave me,” he said softly, “unless there is a divorce.”
I peeled myself fully out of Dario’s shadow.
Not hiding. Not shrinking.
Even if my knees threatened to fold again, even if fever blurred the edges of my vision, I forced my spine straight.
I still clutched Dario’s hand—his grip warm, steady, grounding—but I stood on my own.
My fingers cut through the air with fierce, deliberate strokes.
“Then I want a divorce. Right now.”
The demand vibrated through my bones.
Ethan translated immediately, his voice carrying the steel I could no longer produce. “She wants a divorce. Now.”
Dario’s jaw tightened until the muscle feathered sharply beneath his skin. He didn’t look at me; he kept his eyes trained on Ruslan.
“Maybe send the papers to New York,” Dario said evenly. “We’ll make sure she signs them.”
Ruslan didn’t respond right away.
Instead, he moved.
Slow. Measured. As if every motion were calculated for effect.
He crossed the polished marble floor and lowered himself into a cream armchair opposite us. The pale upholstery was immaculate—until his blood-slick hands rested on the armrests.
Dark red drops fell.
One.
Two.
Three.
They soaked into the fabric, spreading outward in uneven blooms like grotesque roses.
Harlan’s blood.
My tormentor’s blood.
My rapist’s blood.
A vicious, secret corner of my mind whispered that I wished I had seen it. Wished I had watched Harlan beg. Wished I had seen the fear in his eyes when he realized he no longer controlled the narrative.
Wished I had been there when someone stronger than him finally closed in.
The thought disgusted me.
And yet it lingered.
Ethan stepped forward. His voice was controlled fury—quiet, but vibrating.
“Be considerate for once, Ruslan. She was in prison nine months. Kidnapped for two more. Tortured. Violated. And you still expect her to stay in the house of the man who set the entire nightmare in motion?”
Ruslan’s bloody palm slammed down against the armrest.
The wet slap echoed violently through the high-ceilinged room.
“Shut the fuck up.”
His voice was no longer quiet.
He leaned forward, forearms braced on his thighs, eyes glittering like shattered glass.
“We had a deal,” he said, each word clipped. “A deal that must be honored. My wife remains with me.”
He let the words linger.
“Divorce?” A harsh, humorless laugh tore from him. “Keep dreaming. I will never divorce her.”
The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees.
Dario stepped forward half a pace.
“You think we’ll just leave her here?” he said softly. “And let our sister continue suffering at the hands of a man consumed by revenge until she breaks?”
The word sister was intentional.
A line drawn.
Beside him, Ethan’s hand drifted toward the concealed holster at his hip. Subtle. Controlled. But unmistakable.
Ruslan noticed.
Of course he did.
His gaze flicked downward for a fraction of a second before returning to Ethan’s face.
My other four brothers—Luca, Marco, Nico, and Vito—remained a few meters back, silent and still.
They had changed into fresh suits, but nothing could disguise what they were. Tall. Broad-shouldered. Controlled violence wrapped in tailored fabric.
Deadly men.
My men.
Seeing them like this dragged me backward through time.
I was six the day Father brought them home.
Six boys from the orphanage. Fatherless. Motherless. Angry at the world in quiet, different ways.
Dario had been fourteen then—already carrying responsibility like a second skin. He’d knelt in front of me that first evening, lowering himself to my height so he wouldn’t tower.
He had held out a small, chipped marble.
“For luck,” he’d said slowly, carefully.
I had clutched that marble so hard my knuckles turned white.
I still had it.
Another memory surfaced.
Summer. Two years later.
The backyard was chaos—nine children screaming, laughing, running. Luca had grabbed the garden hose and turned tag into full-scale war. Ethan, even at fifteen, had organized teams with military precision.
“Defenders on the left! Attackers on the right!”
My little brother and I had been on Ethan’s team. The older boys let us win on purpose, pretending to fall dramatically when we sprayed them.
We collapsed afterward in a wet heap on the grass, devouring stolen popsicles. The six boys formed a loose circle around my sister, my brother, and me without even realizing it.
A living shield.
Luca—quiet, thoughtful Luca—had braided tiny yellow flowers into my hair while Nico told the worst jokes imaginable until we were gasping with laughter.
The house of nine children and two adults had felt indestructible.
Until I was fourteen.
Until the crash.
Until everything burned.
I woke one Saturday to silence.
Not the gentle kind that comes before dawn. Not the peaceful hush of a sleeping house.
A wrong silence.
No footsteps pounding down the staircase. No doors slamming. No Luca shouting that Ethan had stolen his shirt. No Nico arguing about whose turn it was to cook breakfast. No Dario’s deep voice corralling chaos into something that almost resembled order.
Just... nothing.
I padded down the hallway barefoot, heart already racing for reasons I couldn’t explain. The house felt hollow, like a body without a pulse.
Father stood alone in the kitchen.
He wasn’t cooking. Wasn’t reading the paper. Wasn’t even pretending normalcy.
He just stood there, hands braced on the counter, staring at the marble backsplash like it might offer him absolution.
“Where are they?” I signed instinctively, panic rising.
He didn’t look at my hands.
“They’re gone,” he said flatly.
Gone.
The word didn’t make sense.
“Gone where?” I whispered back then—I still had my voice at fourteen.
“Better opportunities,” he replied. “New York.”
No apology.
No explanation.
No goodbye note taped to my bedroom door.
Just gone—like they’d never been ours.
The grief had been physical.
My sister stopped eating for three days.
She sat on the edge of her bed staring at the door as if sheer willpower would make them walk back through it. My little brother cried until he vomited, clutching the hem of Dario’s old sweatshirt like it was oxygen.
I wandered the empty rooms touching everything they’d left behind.
Dario’s dog-eared books, margins filled with notes in precise handwriting.
Ethan’s sketchpads—pages of cityscapes, battle strategies disguised as doodles, faces drawn in shadow and light.
Luca’s half-repaired motorcycle helmet.
Marco’s old boxing gloves.
Nico’s worn deck of cards.
Vito’s chessboard, pieces mid-game as if he’d planned to return.
I slept in Dario’s room that first night. Curled on his bed. Breathing in the faint scent of soap and cedar that hadn’t yet faded.
By the end of the week, Father had packed everything away.
“We need to move on,” he said.
We blamed him.
Blamed him for trading six boys like they were inconvenient furniture.
Blamed him for ripping our family down the middle.
I thought I would never see them again.
Then, two months ago, the prison gates opened.