Chapter 5 - Bianca
BIANCA
I can’t breathe.
The words keep echoing in my head—he raped her, Giuseppe raped Sophia, nine months later you were born—and I feel like I’m drowning in them.
They’re filling my lungs and choking me from the inside out.
Giuseppe isn’t my grandfather. He’s my father.
And my father is…a rapist.
A monster who forced himself on my mother and created me.
And Matteo…Jesus Christ, Matteo isn’t my father at all.
“You’re not my father.” The words feel like glass in my throat, sharp and wrong and impossible. “You’re my brother.”
Did I say that already? I have no idea. But I keep tasting the words. They’re so bitter.
Matteo—because that’s what he is now, isn’t he?
Not Dad, just Matteo—looks like I’ve stabbed him.
His face goes completely white except for two spots of color high on his cheekbones, and his hands are shaking.
“Bianca, please—”
“Please what?” I’m screaming now, I think, but I can’t control the volume of my voice any more than I can control the thoughts spinning through my head. “Please pretend you didn’t just tell me that everything I’ve ever believed about myself is a fucking lie?”
Bella reaches for me, her face streaked with tears, but I jerk away from her touch like it burns.
She’s not my stepmother.
She’s my…what?
My sister-in-law?
The woman who married my half-brother and had kids with him while I played big sister to children who are actually my niece and nephew?
“Everything I am, everything I believed about myself—it’s all been a lie!” My voice cracks on the last word, and I hate how young I sound. How broken. “This whole time I’ve thought you were my father!”
“I am your father,” Matteo says desperately, taking a step toward me. “Biology doesn’t change that. I chose to raise you, I chose to love you—”
“You chose to lie to me!” The betrayal is like acid in my veins, burning through every good memory I have of him. “How could you look at me every day and lie to my face? How could you let me love you as a father when you’re my brother?”
The room feels like it’s spinning.
Every birthday where he gave me presents and told me he was proud of me.
Every time I called him Dad and he smiled.
Every family dinner where I sat at his right hand like the heir to his empire. Every moment of trust and love and guidance...
All of it built on a lie.
“Oh god.” A thought crosses my mind. “Mario. Mario is my brother too, isn’t he?”
Matteo’s face somehow goes even paler.
“Isn’t he?” I’m shouting again, my voice echoing off the office walls. “The man who kidnapped me when I was twelve, who put me in that shipping container and told me it was just a game—that wasn’t my uncle trying to kill me. That was my brother.”
Fuck, that makes it so much worse.
The memory crashes over me—being twelve and terrified, curled up in that dark metal box, thinking my uncle had lost his mind.
But it wasn’t my uncle.
It was another brother.
Another person who shared Giuseppe’s blood, Giuseppe’s violence, Giuseppe’s willingness to hurt anyone who got in his way.
Including me.
“How many more are there?” I ask, my voice suddenly quiet and deadly.
“How many other brothers and sisters do I have scattered around the city? How many other women did Giuseppe rape? How many other children like me are walking around not knowing the truth about what they are? That we’re all just products of a monster, which makes us monsters too? ”
“Bianca, stop.” Matteo’s voice is breaking, and there are tears in his eyes, but I don’t care. I can’t care anymore. “You’re not what Giuseppe was. You’re not a monster just because—”
“Aren’t I?” I laugh, and it sounds horrible even to my own ears.
Bitter and sharp and nothing like the laugh I used to have before five minutes ago when my world made sense. “I’m a rapist’s daughter, Matteo. I’m the product of violence and hate and everything evil about this fucking family.”
“No.” He steps toward me again, and this time I don’t back away because I want him to see the fury in my face.
I want him to understand what he’s done to me. “You’re my daughter. You’re intelligent and fierce and—”
“I’m Giuseppe’s daughter,” I cut him off.
“I have his blood. His DNA. His capacity for violence. And you know what the worst part is? I can feel it. I can feel something dark and angry inside me that wants to hurt people, and I always thought it came from you. I thought it was something you taught me, something I learned from watching the man I thought was my father.”
“Bianca, I have his blood too,” Matteo says desperately. “That doesn’t make me—”
“But you weren’t conceived in violence!” I explode.
“Your mother chose to be with Giuseppe. She married him, she loved him—or at least she tried to. You were wanted. You were the product of a relationship, even if it wasn’t a good one.
I’m the product of rape. I’m what happens when a monster takes what he wants by force. ”
Matteo draws back sharply, pain flashing in his eyes.
“But it didn’t come from you, did it? It came from him.
From Giuseppe. It’s genetic. It’s who I am at the most fundamental level.
” I’m talking faster now, the words tumbling out of me like water from a broken dam.
“Every time I’ve wanted to hurt someone who crossed me, every time I’ve felt that cold satisfaction when I won an argument or got revenge on someone who wronged me—that’s not learned behavior. That’s inheritance.”
“Please, Bianca—”
“And the worst part?” I’m crying now, angry tears that I can’t stop.
“The absolute worst part is that you knew. You’ve known my entire life, and you let me believe in this fairy tale where I was your daughter and Sophia was pregnant before she met you but you married her anyway and Giuseppe was my grandfather who built an empire for his family’s future. ”
I wipe my face with the back of my hand, smearing tears and probably mascara across my cheek. “But that’s not what happened, is it? Giuseppe didn’t build an empire for his family. He built it for himself, and he took whatever he wanted along the way. Including my mother. Including me.”
“He didn’t take you,” Matteo says desperately. “You are mine. I told you this two years ago when you found out I wasn’t your biological father. The moment you were born, I chose to be your father. I am your father.”
“You chose to lie to me.” My voice is flat now, empty of everything except exhaustion and betrayal. “You looked me in the eye and lied about the most basic truth of my existence.”
“To protect you—”
“From what? From knowing that my real father was a monster? Newsflash, Matteo—I already knew Giuseppe was a monster. Everyone knows Giuseppe was a monster. You didn’t protect me from anything except the truth. The truth you were too cowardly to tell me.”
I turn toward the door, suddenly desperate to get out of this room, away from their faces and their explanations and their fucking sympathy.
“Where are you going?” Bella asks, her voice small and scared.
“I don’t know.” And I don’t.
I have no idea where to go or what to do or how to process the fact that everything I thought I knew about myself was wrong. “I need…I need to think. I need to figure out who the hell I am now that I know I’m not who I thought I was.”
“Bianca, please don’t leave,” Matteo says, and there’s so much pain in his voice that for a second I almost turn around and let him hug me and tell me everything’s going to be okay like he used to when I was little and had nightmares.
But then I remember that those nightmares were probably about Giuseppe—about my real father—and even my subconscious knew something was wrong with the story I’d been told.
“I can’t look at you right now,” I say without turning around. “I can’t look at any of you and pretend this is okay. That nineteen years of lies is something I can just get over because you meant well.”
“Bianca—”
“No.” I spin around, and the fury is back, hot and sharp and consuming. “You don’t get to ‘Bianca’ me anymore. You don’t get to use that voice—that father voice—because you’re not my father. You gave up the right to comfort me the day you decided to build my entire life on a lie.”
The words hit him exactly how I wanted them to, and part of me—the part that’s apparently Giuseppe’s daughter—feels satisfied by his pain.
Wants to hurt him more, wants to make him feel a fraction of what I’m feeling right now.
“You want to know what the real tragedy is?” I ask, swallowing against the lump in my throat. “It’s not that Giuseppe raped my mother. It’s not that I’m the product of violence. It’s that the one person in the world I trusted to always tell me the truth turned out to be the biggest liar of all.”
I turn and walk toward the door, ignoring Bella’s quiet sobs and Antonio’s uncomfortable shuffling.
“I need to get out of here,” I say to no one in particular. “I need to go somewhere where I can figure out who I am without everyone looking at me like I’m about to break.”
“It’s not safe,” Matteo starts.
“I don’t give a fuck about safe!” I whirl around one more time, and I can see him recoil at the language, at the fury in my voice. “Safe would have been telling me the truth. Safe would have been letting me grow up knowing exactly what I was instead of letting me live in a fantasy.”
“Please,” he whispers, and he looks so broken that for a moment I almost cave.
But then I remember that this is the same man who lied to me for my entire life, and the moment passes.
“I’ll come back when I can look at you without wanting to hurt you,” I say, and I mean it.
Right now, the fury is so bright and hot inside me that I’m afraid of what I might say or do if I stay. “But right now, I need to be anywhere but here.”
I walk out of the office and don’t look back, even when I hear Bella calling my name. Even when I hear Matteo’s broken voice saying, “Let her go. She needs time.”
Time. Like time is going to magically make this okay. Like I’m just going to wake up tomorrow and be fine with the fact that my entire life is a lie.
I grab my keys from the hall table and push past the security guards asking where I’m going.
I don’t fucking know where I’m going.
I just know I can’t stay in this house full of bullshit family photos and people acting like I’m some fragile little princess.
I’m not a princess.
I’m a rapist’s daughter, and apparently I’ve been too stupid to figure it out for nineteen years.
I need to drive. I need to get away from Matteo’s broken face and Bella’s crying and all these people who think they know what’s best for me when they’ve been lying to me my entire life.
I slam the front door and don’t look back.