Chapter 17
The night was a shroud of misery, wrapping around me like wet cloth as I stumbled through the rain-soaked streets of Brooklyn.
My body ached with every movement, each step a dull echo of the torment I’d endured at my foster aunt’s hands—her punishments laced with sedatives that blurred the edges of my mind, that left me floating between pain and paralysis.
She’d locked me in her basement earlier that night, her touch a desecration I could never cleanse, her drugs a leash meant to keep me docile.
But she underestimated the one thing she could never drug out of me—my will to reach Penelope.
I’d broken free while she slept, slipping through a cracked window, barefoot and half-dazed, rain biting into my skin like penance.
The city stretched before me, endless and uncaring, but somewhere beyond the darkness, she waited—my only light, my reason for breathing.
Every Friday at 9:00 p.m., we met beneath the gnarled oak tree in the forgotten corner of her father’s estate, the one patch of earth untouched by his guards.
The tree’s twisted branches were our roof, its roots our altar. It was where her laughter softened the noise in my head, where her hands steadied the trembling that no one else could see.
Tonight, though, the rain came down in sheets, the wind howling like some vengeful spirit.
My thin jacket clung to me, heavy and useless, the cold biting straight through to bone.
The drugs still clawed at my system—making my vision tilt, my legs betray me—but I kept moving. I had to. I needed to see her. To remind myself that something in this world still felt like mercy.
When I finally reached the oak, its bark slick beneath my palms, I pressed my forehead against it, panting, half-delirious.
Rain trickled through the canopy, soaking my hair, my face, my clothes, until I couldn’t tell where the storm ended and I began.
Ten minutes passed.
Then twenty.
Then thirty.
Penelope was never late. She’d always come running—hair unbound, eyes bright, her laughter breaking through my darkness like light through a cracked door.
But tonight... nothing.
An hour dragged by, each second a knife.
The cold gnawed at my bruises until I could feel the shape of every blow my aunt had left on me. My fingers went numb. My body shook. Still—no sign of her.
That was when the thought slipped in, sharp and poisonous.
Maybe she wasn’t coming.
Maybe she’d finally realized what I was—broken, tainted, unworthy of her world.
Maybe I’d never been anything more than a secret she’d outgrown.
Desperation clawed at me like a living thing. I couldn’t wait any longer—not with the rain turning my clothes into a second skin, not with the drugs still fogging my veins, making the world sway at the edges.
I had to see her. To know she hadn’t forgotten me. That she hadn’t turned away.
Her father’s estate loomed ahead—a fortress of marble and iron, walled in by wealth and guarded by men who’d kill without hesitation.
Every light in that mansion was a reminder of how unreachable her world was, how far above mine she lived. But I didn’t care. If I had to bleed to reach her, I would.
The night pressed close, thunder rolling like the growl of some unseen beast.
I stuck to the shadows, my soaked shoes silent against the mud, my pulse hammering so loud I was sure the guards could hear it.
The Romano men patrolled in pairs, rifles glinting beneath the porch lights, their voices muffled by the storm.
I moved with them—like prey that had learned to mimic the hunter.
The rain blurred my outline, masking my ragged breathing, my trembling limbs.
I found the section of the wall I’d memorized from weeks of watching, the place where ivy climbed high enough to give me leverage. My fingers slipped against the wet stone, skin tearing, blood mixing with rain, but I kept climbing.
When I dropped into the garden, I landed hard, the breath knocked out of me.
I crouched behind a hedge, muscles burning, eyes darting toward the moving silhouettes of guards.
I waited. Counted their steps.
Their routines were mechanical—five seconds between each turn, a pause at the archway, then the soft scrape of boots against gravel.
I’d studied them for months. The pattern was my only chance.
When the moment came, I ran. Low, fast, my body screaming in protest but my mind locked on one thing—her window.
The second one from the east balcony. The one with the lace curtains she said reminded her of me because they were “soft but never still.”
Lightning flashed, painting the mansion white for an instant. I saw my reflection in the glass—half-soaked, half-mad, eyes too bright.
I barely recognized myself.
Still, I reached up, tapping lightly against the windowpane.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Our signal.
No answer.
I hesitated, the rain whispering against the glass, the world holding its breath with me.
Then, slowly, I slid the window open.
The frame groaned, soft but sharp enough to slice through the night. I froze, listening—no footsteps, no alarm. Only the muffled hush of the storm and my own ragged breathing.
I peered inside.
And everything in me died.
She was there—Penelope. My Penelope. The girl who had once trembled in my arms under this very window, who had whispered that she loved me more than her own breath.
Now she was curled against another man.
His arm draped over her bare waist, his fingers splayed where mine used to rest. Her hair spilled across his chest, her lips parted slightly in sleep, their bodies tangled in the soft sheets like something holy and obscene all at once.
My body went cold. Not just from the rain—but from the realization that every reason I’d kept living had just turned to ash.
The world blurred.
My vision tunneled until there was only that bed, that skin, that betrayal. I pressed a hand to the windowsill to steady myself, the wood cutting into my palm.
I didn’t feel it. Couldn’t.
I wanted to scream. To shatter the glass, to drag her awake, to demand an explanation that could never exist. But no sound came. Only the storm outside, howling on my behalf.
A tremor ran through me—rage, heartbreak, disbelief all twisted together until I couldn’t tell one from the other.
I stumbled back, nearly slipping off the ledge.
Rage boiled under my skin until I could taste iron.
My fists clenched so hard my nails bit into my palms and the pain sang me back from the edge of something monstrous.
Every sane, civilized muscle in me wanted to snap — to drag that man off the bed and smash his skull against the wall until the room was cleaned of him and the image with it. I wanted him to stop existing.
But I didn’t move. I forced myself to breathe, to hold back the animal that wanted immediate blood.
Restraint felt weaker and meaner than mercy: proof that she’d been right to laugh at me as a secret, a foolish boyfriend with no future. She’d chosen him. She’d betrayed me.
The thought coiled through me, cold and bright — not an accident, not a mistake, but a decision.
That knowledge burned hotter than any blow.
I stared one last time, forcing the image into memory, into something that would haunt me long after the rain stopped.
Then I climbed down, one hand slick with blood from a torn palm, the other clutching the trellis as if it were the only thing keeping me alive.
By the time my boots hit the ground, I wasn’t the same person who had climbed that wall.
Something had broken—quietly, completely—and there would be no fixing it.
Rain sluiced the glass in long, furious lines.
My chest split open and I could feel the pieces cutting into my ribs. I pinched my arm until the pain was sharp enough to prove I wasn’t dreaming. It wasn’t a dream. Her shape on that bed was obscene in its calmness—Penelope, vulnerable and alive and folded into another man’s arms.
Anger detonated inside me. I slammed my fist into the window; the sound of cracking glass was like a gunshot. It spiderwebbed across the pane.
Blood slicked my knuckles, hot and real.
She was fifteen—too young for this, or so I thought—and there she was, every memory of secret letters and stolen nights collapsing into one filthy, intimate heap.
We’d never spoken of sex, our love pure, built on dreams of a future together, whispered promises of marriage and children under that oak tree.
We had promised each other a thousand small things beneath that oak tree; we had sworn we were each other’s only.
I’d sacrificed everything to see her, defying my aunt’s cruelty, sneaking out despite the risk of her wrath. And this was my reward? Her, in another’s arms, willingly curled against him, no sign of coercion in the way she nestled into him.
The betrayal was a knife, twisting deeper with every breath.
I had believed in her like a prayer.
Now the prayer was profane.
“Maybe not today, Penelope,” I whispered, each syllable a blade, “but someday, you’ll pay for shattering my heart.”
I stared at her window one last time, pain chewing through me from the inside out, then tore into the night, heedless of her father’s guards.
The rain lashed my face, cold needles against burning skin, and the full moon glared down like a mocking witness as I sprinted back toward the oak tree—our sanctuary, now the grave of everything I’d ever believed in.
I collapsed to my knees, the mud swallowing me whole, and the sound that ripped out of me didn’t sound human. It was a howl, low and broken, torn from someplace deep in my gut.
The storm drowned my sobs, but I screamed anyway, until my throat felt flayed raw.
Tears and rain blurred together as I slammed my fists into the earth, over and over, the bark and stones slicing my knuckles open. I welcomed the sting, needed it—because it was real, because it couldn’t lie to me the way she had.
“Penelope...” I gasped, the name tearing from me like a curse. “You betrayed me. You betrayed my love... my everything.”