Chapter 3
ALLEGRA
It’s so dark down here. The kind of dark where you can’t tell if your eyes are open or closed. The kind of dark that turns me into a claustrophobic mess. It’s like I’m suffocating in a box. A box under the ground.
Sobs come as I scratch at that door, trying to find some way to open it.
I’m mumbling, muttering. There is no way out.
I know that. And with every breath I take I smell that old smell of wine bottles broken years ago.
I don’t know if it’s my mind playing tricks on me, if they’re memory or if the smell is real.
Focus. I need to focus. I need to not go mad.
Before Rami left, he switched out that one lightbulb. They’d left the light on before. We’d only been plunged into darkness that first night. Then, the man in charge had said we could have the light.
My mom was missing the first of her fingers by then and even then, she was thanking him. Cradling her hand in a filthy, bloody cloth, she was thanking him.
My breath trembles as I press my back into the metal and let myself sink to the ground.
There are shelves in the room. A wine cellar.
Are any bottles left? I’d wanted to make a weapon out of one, but my mom, she knew what was coming.
She knew it was pointless. I think she was trying to save me.
I know she was. She knew what they’d do to her, and she was trying to save me.
Had they killed the Maestro by then? I don’t know. No. Malek said he burned alive. But Malek’s a liar.
In the end, I was in this room for a total of ten days.
On the eleventh day, my father came for us.
I didn’t know the count then, only after.
I didn’t know until after that that they took one finger for each night.
The little hope she had they broke her of.
She knew what was going to happen. Maybe it’s like Malek said.
For a pianist, to lose your fingers is the worst of fates.
She didn’t even try to fight it, not for herself. She only tried to save me.
My throat closes up
That’s probably why they’d taken me, too. If it was just her, she’d have laid down and died. With me, though, she had something to fight for. To stay alive for. To suffer for.
And Malek’s right about who was behind it all.
Cassian was right.
How did he guess it? Or maybe it’s how he thinks. How all men like him, like my father, like Malek, think. Look for weakness. Exploit it. Snuff out any light. Any hope. Crush it underfoot until it turns to ash.
My father ordered her kidnapping.
My father ordered her slow dismemberment.
Did he order her murder? No. He didn’t order it, but not because he didn’t want her dead.
He was angry when she died, but it wasn’t because they killed her.
It was because she didn’t suffer enough in his eyes.
Malek isn’t lying about that. He wanted more from her.
He’d already taken her beloved teacher, the man he thought was her lover, but I don’t think he was.
He’d already taken all her fingers. It wasn’t enough for him, though.
It wasn’t enough for my butcher father. He wanted to steal her soul.
Did he know he’d already killed her before she took her last breath?
I think by the end, he hated her.
But to hate, one must first love. I’m not sure my father was capable of love.
Malek was telling the truth.
And it was so easy. Just a whisper here, a whisper there.
Mom had her piano lessons on Tuesdays and Thursdays before she came to get me from school. She’d been doing it for a while, and she was happier than I ever recall her being.
I was a pretty normal fifteen-year-old girl in that I was more interested in myself than anyone else, but mom and I were close.
She was a lot younger than dad and almost more of a big sister than mother to me.
There was something other-worldly about her.
Always just out of reach of all of us. She loved us, Michael and I at least, but she was never ours.
There was something about her or in her that we could never touch.
I think that’s where the music came from.
From those darkest parts of herself. She let herself be seen in her music.
Sometimes I wonder what horrors my mother lived before she met Malek, before she met my father, to make the music she made.
My throat closes up at the thought of it.
My father felt it too, that she was different.
That no matter what, she was as out of reach to him as she was to us.
And it didn’t make him sad like it did me.
It didn’t make him try harder to understand or accept her or take only what was given without grasping for more.
It just made him angry. And over the last year of her life, he was full of rage, a jealous, violent rage.
My mother didn’t know her parents. Her only memories were of the orphanage.
She was entirely on her own. When her talent for piano was discovered, though, it paved the way for her future.
She wouldn’t be allowed to fall by the wayside.
It was a fairy tale in a way. A benefactor took her from the orphanage and placed her in a boarding school where she was trained by the best teachers.
She was giving concerts by the time she was twelve.
She only met the benefactor a handful of times.
He was an old man, a kind man. A sad man, she’d said and what he wanted from her was music. Only music.
My father didn’t care so much for the music. He was only interested in possessing her. As far as love, I suppose he loved her like someone loves a beautiful object they can display behind glass, in a gilded cage.
I don’t know how she first met the Maestro.
I met him a few times on those Tuesdays and Thursdays I didn’t have school or was too sick to go so Mom had to take me with her.
It was either that or she’d have to miss the lesson.
I never felt like I was unwanted those days.
The opposite. I saw a side of my mother I’d never seen before.
With him, she was like a child. She would laugh.
Laugh like I’d never heard her laugh before.
With him, she shone bright, so bright it almost blinded anyone who saw her.
I liked him, the Maestro. He was kind to us. And mom was special to him. They weren’t lovers. They loved each other, but it wasn’t a sexual love. It was more than that. Where my father wanted to possess her, the Maestro simply loved her.
But no one believed that. It’s why they brought us down here.
What they wanted was her confession. She wouldn’t lie about it, though.
It’s what my father wanted to hear, but she wouldn’t say it because it wasn’t true.
Even when they took the last of her fingers.
Only when they started on mine did she say what they wanted her to say.
Only then did she lie to stop them from taking more.
And by then, she was finished. Did they know that each time that butcher’s knife came down they cut away a piece of her soul, killing her slowly.
One finger at a time, taking her beloved music as they mutilated her. Let her life seep out of her.
Sound from above calls me to the present.
I turn to where it’s coming from and remember the small window in the back corner of the cellar.
I don’t get up. I don’t bother. Being here now, it’s like those days five years ago.
Not like the first day when I believed my father would come and save us.
No. It’s like the last days when all hope was gone.
When I held my mom because she was unable to hold me any longer.
I remember now that window. The glass was busted out back then, too, and we could hear them when they went outside to smoke. We could smell their cigarettes.
I remember when I smelled my father’s cigar.
And it was so easy. Just a whisper here, a whisper there.
Malek’s words are on repeat in my head.
The sound of tires on gravel comes from the window.
A little bit of light. Headlights. I wipe the last of my tears and crawl toward where the window was, cutting my hands and knees on the old glass, the broken bottles, the filth of this place.
I listen as car doors are opened then closed and I hear Rami.
“This way,” he says roughly.
A man whose voice I don’t recognize instructs someone to stay with the car. Says he’ll only be a few minutes.
Cigarette smoke. I guess his driver smokes. A moment later, music. Not loud. Must be the car radio. It doesn’t matter. I’m just grateful he doesn’t shut off the car, so I have that light. I turn to look at what it illuminates.
A portion of the cellar was used to store wine and although most of the wine was cleared out, I see there are a few bottles left. I crawl to it and reach up to take one. I wipe the dust from it.
Mom didn’t fight them. I understand why. But I’m not my mother. I swore after what happened that I would never play good little victim again. I told Cassian as much. I won’t be that for Malek. I won’t be that for anyone.
Footsteps outside. Whoever came is leaving. He meant it when he said he wouldn’t be long. I stand up, walk to the window, but it’s too high and although I can’t see, I can hear. I don’t scream for help. I know better. Anyone who is here is not here to help me.
“Let me be very clear. There’s only one reason I’m keeping quiet. It’s not to help you.”
I don’t know the speaker.
“She’s stubborn. I need time,” Malek says.
“You don’t have it.”
“Don’t forget what I can do.”
The stranger sighs. “I’m well aware. But there’s only so much I will do. You make your bed, you lie in it.”
Malek mutters a curse. “I’ll take a page out of Moretti’s book then. By the time he finds her, it’ll be too late.”
A car door closes and the light changes.
Tires on gravel. I hold the bottle by the neck, raise it and smash it against the metal door.
The smell of old red wine makes me dry heave.
It’s fully dark again as Malek and his soldiers march back into the house.
I lay my hand over the broken bottle, feel the sharp edge of glass.
My mother didn’t fight them. She knew she was lost and couldn’t risk losing me.
Me, though? I have nothing to lose.
And I’ll fight like hell.
I’ll fucking murder Malek Lombardi.