Your Monster (Boston Blood #1)

Prologue

Lily

They say Mom is at peace now.

That the pain is over, that she’s with God. That I should be happy for her, that I should cherish only the good memories.

But they don’t know what it’s like to hear her scream into a pillow because the pain is too big. They don’t know how her voice turned into whispers at night, or how her hands shook when she tried to braid my hair.

They don’t know what it’s like to lose the only person who ever stayed.

I sit in the front row in the black velvet dress Mom picked before she got too sick to care. She said it made me look like a proper young lady. Now it just makes me feel small. Cold. Alone.

When the car pulls up to the curb, I already know it’s for me. It’s long and black and too shiny, like it doesn’t belong in this sad, cracked parking lot behind the church. A man steps out, tall, dressed in black from his coat to his gloves. He doesn’t look around. He looks right at me.

“Lily Moretti?” he says.

I nod. My throat feels tight.

“Your father sent me.”

I almost want to laugh. Now he remembers. No one talked about him, ever. But I know who he is.

Mom told me everything. She never lied, not about things that mattered.

She said his name is Francesco Bianchi, that he belongs to the kind of people who make their own rules and leave bodies in the dark.

She said he left before I was born and that he never looked back.

That was the first time I saw her cry and not try to hide it.

‘He’s not a father,’ she told me. ‘He’s a man who ruins things.’

And now he is all I have left.

“Why?” I ask, even though I already know the answer.

“Because you’re his blood. That makes you his. You are a Bianchi now.”

Not his daughter. Not his family. Merely his blood. Like a responsibility, a debt.

Mom said he would never come for me, that I was safer without him. But she’s gone, and I’m standing in a parking lot full of people who are already forgetting my name.

I don’t want to go.

But I don’t have anywhere else.

So I get in the car, leaving my childhood behind, buried in the cold earth with Mom.