Chapter 18 #3
My heart seized, a cold dread sinking into my bones.
She was gone.
Taken.
The fear in her eyes earlier, her nervous glances in the rain—it hadn’t been paranoia.
Someone had come for her, and the signs screamed of violation, of rape, of a fate too horrific to name.
My foster parents—those monsters who’d killed my father—were the only ones vile enough to do this.
Had they found her, hunted her down to silence her forever?
I pressed a trembling hand against the wall, my blood mixing with hers on the cracked paint. “No,” I whispered, the word cracking apart in my throat. “No, no, no...” My knees buckled, and I hit the carpet, the pain in my leg flaring white-hot, but I didn’t care.
The world blurred through tears and shock.
Today had already been a nightmare—Penelope’s betrayal, the guards’ beating—and now this? It couldn’t get worse. It couldn’t.
She’d found me. She’d finally found me after all those years — and now she was gone.
Taken.
I forced myself upright, my entire body shaking, and limped out of the room, stumbling down the corridor.
The elevator was too slow, so I half-fell down the stairs, gripping the railing to keep myself upright, the metal slick with my own blood.
The lobby lights burned too bright when I burst through the doors. The night clerk — a middle-aged woman with weary eyes — jerked upright behind the counter, startled.
“My mother,” I gasped, slamming my palms on the desk, leaving bloody prints on the wood. “Someone broke into our room — she’s gone! You have cameras, you must’ve seen—”
Her expression changed. Not fear, not confusion — composure. Practiced. Controlled. She looked at me the way a doctor looks at a dying patient — pitying, detached.
“The Romanos left a message,” she said, her voice flat, each word falling like a stone. “They said you trespassed on their property tonight. You’re alive because of who your foster family is — because of the men in Lake Como who would’ve avenged your death.”
My pulse froze. “What are you saying?”
Her gaze flickered — not cruel, but resolute, as though she wished she could lie but couldn’t.
“They couldn’t kill you,” she said quietly, “so they took your mother instead.”
The world stopped. My breath came in shallow bursts.
My heart pounded so hard it felt like it would crack my ribs open.
I leaned forward, voice shaking with rage and disbelief. “Who ordered it?”
For a moment, she hesitated — then she spoke the name that ended whatever innocence I had left.
“Penelope Romano.”
The room tilted.
My pulse stuttered. “No... no, that’s—” I choked on the rest, shaking my head like I could undo the sound of it. “You’re lying.”
My vision swam, the room spinning in a blur of blood, neon, and disbelief.. “She couldn’t—she wouldn’t—”
But the image came unbidden. Her in another man’s arms, skin against skin, the warmth of her body pressed to someone who wasn’t me. My stomach turned. My knees nearly gave out.
“She’s just fifteen,” I rasped, half to myself, half to the world that had stopped making sense. “She can’t be that cruel... she can’t.”
The clerk didn’t flinch.
Her eyes were flat, her tone stripped of mercy. “Cruelty doesn’t wait for age. Especially not in their world.”
The clerk’s tone was flat, practiced, like she’d rehearsed this conversation before. “She only dated you to plant a tracker,” she said. “A bug, in your jacket, your backpack—somewhere close enough to trace you when you went back to Italy. The Romanos wanted to map your foster family’s operations.”
“You were leverage, Dmitri. That’s all.”
I blinked, my heart hammering. “No... she’s fifteen,” I said, shaking my head, as though saying it aloud could make it true. “She doesn’t even know what a bug is. She—she reads poetry. She cries when pigeons die. She—”
“She’s a Romano,” the woman cut in sharply. “In that world, innocence dies before childhood does. They use their children the way normal families use prayers.”
I stared at her, searching for any flicker of doubt, any sign she was bluffing. But she only reached into a drawer and slid a scrap of paper toward me, her fingers steady, her expression grim.
“Here.”
The paper was creased, smudged with ink and fingerprints. An address scrawled in hurried Cyrillic letters bled across the page.
“I shouldn’t be giving you this,” she said, lowering her voice. “But I’ve seen the footage. They took your mother alive. They want a confession before they finish the job. If you move now, you might make it in time.”
For a heartbeat, the world stopped moving. I could hear nothing but the faint hum of the fluorescent light above us and the roar of blood in my ears.
Then everything snapped.
I grabbed the paper, my bloody fingers smearing the ink, the letters dissolving into a crimson blur.
My pulse was pounding so hard I could barely breathe.
I turned toward the exit, limping, unsteady. The woman’s voice stopped me.
“Don’t go unarmed,” she said quietly.
I didn’t answer. Didn’t look back.
My broken body moved on instinct — pain was irrelevant now. Rage was stronger. Fear sharper.
I slammed through the doors, into the night, into the downpour that hadn’t stopped since the world began falling apart.
The car door stuck for half a second before giving way, and I fell into the driver’s seat, breath ragged.
The smell of iron filled the cabin — my blood on the upholstery, my sweat on the steering wheel. The engine coughed, then roared.
I reversed hard, tires shrieking, the car fishtailing on slick pavement as I shot out of the garage.
My ribs screamed, my vision wavered, but I kept going.
The city blurred — red lights, headlights, sirens in the distance — all meaningless noise.
“Mom,” I whispered, my voice shaking, my teeth chattering from pain and adrenaline. “Stay alive. Please... just stay alive.”
The paper sat on the dashboard, the ink half washed away by my blood and the rain, but the address burned in my mind.
“I’ll save you,” I swore under my breath, again and again, the words turning to a rhythm that drowned out the pain. “I’ll save you. I’ll fucking save you.”
A car honked. Someone shouted. The light turned red, but I didn’t stop. The city didn’t matter. The cops didn’t matter. My life didn’t matter.
Only she did.
My mother — the only person who had come for me.
And Penelope Romano — the girl I’d loved with every piece of my ruined heart — had betrayed me deeper than anyone ever could.
The road ahead was a black river of rain and vengeance, leading to a reckoning I wasn’t sure I’d survive.
But if I didn’t — I’d make sure she remembered my name before I died.