Chapter 37 Sera
SERA
My arms are killing me. That’s the first thing I’m aware of.
The second is the smell. Like dead fish and mildew. I keep my breathing shallow, wincing as I force air between blood-crusted lips.
Cazzo. It’s not just my arms that hurt. As consciousness returns, I register that almost every part of me is in some sort of pain. My groan cuts short when I remember what happened.
The car crash.
The woman’s voice.
The agony of being dragged from the wreck and hauled into another car.
Memories flash behind my eyes, compounding the ache in my skull. My throat is painfully dry. I need to find water. I try to move.
That’s when I realize I can’t. And why.
I’m strung up, my wrists bound and pulled high above my head. Panicked, I move my legs, terror swelling when my toes just barely brush the ground.
“Finally. You’re awake.”
I crack open my eyes, searching for the source of that voice. One I’d recognize anywhere. “Mom?”
My vision is blurry but out of the darkness in front of me, a form appears.
Tall but curvy. Hair long and dark. Feet forced into the kind of high heels I’ve always refused to wear.
I blink fast and want to cry when my mother’s face appears.
She’s the epitome of beautiful. Clear, smooth skin.
Plump, red lips. Expensive clothes tailored to hug every sensuous slope of her body.
Martina di Salvo is the kind of beauty I’ll never be.
The kind women envy and men want. It’s not until you look in her eyes—green, so similar to mine—that you see she’s nothing but ugliness wrapped in a pretty package.
Perched on vicious stilettos, she crosses her arms and looks at me. “You took your precious time waking up. Always such a lazy girl.”
It’s an old line. No matter how active I was or how many soccer games I won, my mother always called me lazy because I wasn’t spending my time the way she wanted. In a way she understood or could benefit from.
If she’s trying to insult me, she’s going to have to work harder than that. “I need water.”
“Is that how you ask your mother for something?”
“Please,” I force myself to say, lips stinging. “May I have some water, please?”
Martina’s smile is deceptively delighted. “No, Serafina. You may not.”
Rage, fear, despair. They roll over me in waves. To be tormented by one parent is bad enough; two in the same day is the kind of thing even the best therapist is going to have a hard time helping me rally from.
That’s when another voice sneaks into my head. Whispers, moya voitelnitsa.
Alik has seen me at my weakest and still calls me a warrior. I need to be one now. For me, for him. I force myself to replay the sound of his voice, let it settle over me like armor. I’ve gotten this far. I’m not going to let my bitch of a mother break me now.
“What do you want, Mom?” I tug at my ropes, making the anchor above jangle. Feel a spark of hope when the hardware connecting the ropes to the ceiling starts to wiggle. “Why am I here?”
Martina gives me a once-over, head to toe. “You’ve gotten fat,” she says, ignoring my questions. “But still no hips or tits to speak off. Where did the genetics go wrong, I’ll never understand…”
“And I’ll always be a disappointment. I get it.
It’s been the same old story for as long as I can remember.
” I brace myself on my toes, keeping my body as still as possible.
The less I move, the less everything hurts.
“Did you string me up to bore me to death with your disappointment? Is that why you dragged me from the car?”
“Oh, Serafina.” My mother shakes her head at my obvious stupidity. “How little you understand.”
“Then tell me, Mom.” I choke on the word, but it seems to trigger something in the woman opposite me. “Tell me what it is you want with me. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to pay.”
If I was standing, her answer would’ve knocked my legs out from under me. “Pay? For what?”
Her expression turns cruel, no amount of beauty able to hide all the evil underneath. “For taking him from me.”
Him? “Who?”
My cluelessness makes her furious. Martina clenches her fists at her sides, rage radiating off her thousand-dollar outfit. “Renzo, you stupid bitch. You took him away from me and now it’s time you accept your punishment.”
“What the hell are you talking—oomph…” She cuts off the rest of my question with a baseball bat to my side.
I lose my voice and my breath and, for a second, my ability to see.
When I’m able to blink away the stars, I find the woman who gave birth to me winding up for a second swing. “Stop,” I pant. “Stop. Wait a second.”
“So you can beg for your life?” she says a little too gleefully.
“S-so-so you can tell me what I did that was so wrong.” My mother and I have never been close, but if there’s one thing I know she loves almost as much as inflicting pain, it’s telling people how much they’ve fucked up.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Two words that hold more hatred than I ever thought possible. “Where do I even begin?”
Martina leans in so close my next inhale is more expensive perfume than air.
“You’re the reason he left,” she hisses.
“You were supposed to be beautiful, dutiful. An asset to the family. A prize desired by so many men they’d be fighting for you, promising a fortune if they could get their hands on you. ”
“You wanted to sell me in exchange for money and power, you mean.”
She presses the end of the baseball bat against my jaw. “It’s the way our world works. You’re not an idiot, Serafina. You know this.”
“I know you shouldn’t treat people like possessions. Like things to be bartered and sold.”
“Then you’re more of a failure than I realized.” She grinds the hard wood into my chin. “It’s no surprise you ended up here, like this.”
For a woman in five-inch heels and a tightly tailored dress, she moves fast. She swings and I barely have a chance to brace for impact before the bat connects with the upper part of my side, just below one of my upstretched arms. Fire explodes across my ribs and down my back and I bite my tongue to hold in the scream.
“Renzo was so disappointed in who you were, nothing like the daughter we imagined having. He couldn’t look at you. Then, he couldn’t bear to be around you, so he left. He left me,” she hisses, “because he hated you.”
“Or maybe,” I force through broken breath, “he left because he hated you.”
That earns me another crack across the ribs. Of course it does. This time, though, Martina hits my other side, spreading the agony evenly.
“What would you know. You know nothing about him.”
I swallow hard, taste blood. I must’ve bit the inside of my cheek on that last hit. “I know he was happy to hand me over to a man who was going to rape me and eventually kill me. I know he thought I was disposable. That’s not going to earn him any parenting awards.”
“You aren’t listening,” she says, knuckles white around the bat. “That’s your fault. All the horrible things he did after you were born, that’s all down to you.”
There is no winning this argument, I know that. With every blow she lands, the more I know I have to get out of here. Otherwise, I’m going to die.
I let the tension go out of my arms and legs, sag into my bindings. Martina needs to believe she has the upper hand long enough for me to distract her. The best way to do that is to keep her talking. She’s wants to vent about everything that’s gone wrong, I’m going to let her. Loudly.
From under lowered lids, I scan the room. It isn’t very large and it’s not as dark as I originally thought. It looks like a cabin of some kind. Maybe a fisherman’s hut, judging by some of the paraphernalia shoved into one corner of the room. “What is this place?”
My mother stares at me for a second before answering, “It belonged to your grandfather. He used to come here to fish and fuck his mistresses.”
She scans the dingy space, contempt clear on her face. I let my body sag even more, feeling the dead weight pull at my shoulders. It hurts like hell, but I wrap my fingers around the ropes and pull. Between that and my weight, I feel the anchor above me give a little more.
“He disposed of bodies here too,” she’s saying. “Always said the smell of the fish helped cover the stench of decaying corpses. And I have to agree; it makes the perfect spot.”
My mother’s last comment catches my attention. “What do you mean?”
“That last whore of your father’s. The little toy he stole from the Albanian,” she says, so casually. “She’s buried here and your grandfather was right. I barely covered her with six inches of dirt, and you still couldn’t smell her. Too much damp. Too many rotting fish.”
Tiny bits of dust drift down from the ceiling as my mother’s comment sinks in.
Rina is here. Oh my, God. Alik’s sister is buried here. The ache in my ribs has climbed to meet the fire in my shoulders and the pounding in my head, but I force myself to focus on the heinous woman in front of me. “What did she do to deserve that?”
“She was like you, only worse.”
It’s impossible not to flinch in the face of so much unvarnished rage. The involuntary movement makes the anchor slip a little more. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“She took Renzo from me in the worst way possible.” Martina is seething with emotion, her chest heaving with it.
“He fell for her. Wanted her. Was obsessed with her. Renzo, that fool, he took her from the Albanian. He said he borrowed her, that he was just playing with her, but it was such a lie. He wanted that Russian bitch all to himself and he refused to give her back. Even when I begged, he just laughed at me. Told me no.” Her voice is so whiney it’s almost unrecognizable.