Chapter 023 Isabella
The silver charm is cold against my wrist. I twist it, the metal digging into the tender skin of my inner arm, a nervous tic I can’t suppress. It’s a half-heart, tarnished and cheap compared to the diamond tennis bracelet I usually wear, but for weeks I haven’t been able to take it off. I found it in my old room at the estate, a relic from a life I don’t remember, and it’s clung to me since like a burr.
From the study down the hall, Viktor’s voice is a low, steady rumble. He’s speaking Russian, the cadence sharp and clipped. Business.
"No," he says, the word distinct even through the wall. "Closed casket. I don't care what the tradition is."
He’s arranging his mother’s funeral.
Yesterday, he was on his knees on the porch, sobbing into my stomach, broken open by a grief so raw it terrified me. Today, he is Viktor Sokolov again. Efficient. Lethal. Handling death like it’s just another logistics problem to be solved.
I pull my knees to my chest, curling tighter into the corner of the dusty velvet sofa. The lakehouse is silent mostly, just the settling groans of old timber and the wind coming off the water. It’s barely dawn, the light gray and weak, but I haven’t slept. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the lake. Dark water.
My feet throb. The cuts from the woods days ago—or was it weeks?—haven’t healed properly, and the cold air in the room makes the aches sharper. I should get up. I should make coffee. I should go into the study and touch Viktor’s shoulder, offer the comfort I promised him yesterday.
But I can’t move.
There is a pull in the air. A magnetic drag centered on the hallway.
Dimitri’s room.
The door has been shut since we arrived. Viktor hasn’t gone near it. He told me the house was preserved, that his father never let anyone touch Dimitri’s things after he died, but knowing it and feeling it are different. The air around that door feels heavy. Charged.
I stare at my coffee on the side table. A film has formed on the surface.
I stand up. My body moves before my mind agrees to the action. The floorboards are cold under my bare soles, biting into the scabs on my heels. I walk softly, avoiding the creaky spots by instinct, a habit learned from years of sneaking out of a house full of guards.
The hallway is shadowed. The door to Dimitri’s room is cracked open an inch, just enough to see a slice of darkness inside.
I push it open.
The hinges don’t squeak. They glide, well-oiled, as if someone expects him to return any minute.
I step inside, and the air changes. It smells of cedar, pencil shavings, and a cologne I haven’t smelled in eleven years. Green Irish Tweed. Too expensive for a teenager, but he bathed in it. The scent hits me in the back of the throat, triggering a gag reflex I have to swallow down.
The room is a museum of a dead boy.
Dust motes drift in the shafts of pale light cutting through the heavy curtains, swirling in slow, deliberate patterns. It’s quiet here. Dead quiet.
Shelves line the walls, floor to ceiling, packed with books. Introduction to Structural Engineering. The Architecture of Gaudi. Modernist Bridges. The spines are cracked, white creases running down the dark bindings. He actually read them.
I move deeper into the room. My fingers trail over a drafting table in the corner. It’s covered in models made of balsa wood and glue. There’s a bridge that curves like a ribbon, defying gravity. A tower that spirals upward in a helix. A concert hall with a roof like glass wings, delicate and impossible.
He wanted to build things.
I stare at the glass wings, a sudden pressure building behind my eyes. He was a Sokolov, born to break bones and run rackets, and he spent his nights gluing together pieces of wood, dreaming of glass wings.
The tragedy of it sits heavy in my stomach. I sit on the edge of the bed. The mattress springs protest with a rusted squeak. The quilt is plaid, faded navy and green. I run my hand over it.
I shouldn’t be here. This is Viktor’s grief, not mine. I’m just the spectator.
But the closet door is ajar.
Just like the room door, it feels staged. Waiting.
On the top shelf, a cardboard box sits slightly askew. It’s labeled in black marker, the Cyrillic letters faded but legible. Lichnyye veshchi. Personal items.
I stand up on the mattress to reach it. My balance wavers, my injured feet complaining at the uneven surface, but I grab the box and pull it down. It’s lighter than I expected.
I sit back down, the box on my lap.
Inside, there is tissue paper that has yellowed with age. It crumbles when I brush it aside, disintegrating into dust that coats my fingertips.
There are letters. Bundles of them, tied with string. Photos of people I don’t know—a smiling woman who looks like Viktor, a man with cold eyes who must be their father. And at the bottom, something metallic glints.
I reach in.
It’s a necklace. Or what’s left of one. The chain is broken, the links snapped by force. Dangling from it is a charm.
Silver. Cheap metal, tarnished almost black in the crevices.
A half-heart.
My breath hitches. The sound is loud in the silence.
I look at my wrist. At the bracelet I found in my room. The one I’ve been twisting for weeks.
My hands start to shake. A fine tremor at first, then a violent shudder that rattles the box on my knees. I fumble with the clasp of my bracelet, tearing it off my wrist. It falls into my palm.
I hold the two pieces of metal up to the light.
The jagged edges where the heart was split. The curve of the lobe. The cheap, stamped silver.
I bring them together.
Click.
They fit.
Perfectly. There is no gap. No mismatch. They are one piece of metal, broken in two.
The room tilts.
The floor drops out from under me.
It’s not a trickle of memory this time. It’s not the hazy, dreamlike fragments of a garden or a Russian lesson.
The wall in my mind—the one Rocco said was there to protect me, the one that’s been cracking for weeks—doesn’t just crack. It explodes.
The memory hits me with the force of a physical blow. I gasp, doubling over, clutching the two halves of the heart so tight they cut into my palm.
- The air is cold. October in Chicago. The smell of burning leaves and the acrid smoke of a guard’s cigarette drifting from the main gate.
I’m fifteen. I’m shivering in my coat, hiding in the shadows of the trellis near the north wall. Waiting.
“Isabella.”
He’s late. Dimitri is never late. He stumbles out of the darkness, his face pale, sweat sheeting on his forehead despite the chill. He looks sick.
“Misha?” I step forward, reaching for him. “What’s wrong? Did your father—”
He grabs my hands. His grip is wet and trembling. “This changes everything, Isabella. Everything.”
“What are you talking about? You’re scaring me.”
“My father is planning something,” he whispers. His eyes are darting around the garden, checking the shadows. He’s terrified. I’ve never seen him terrified. “Tomorrow night. At the meeting with the Morettis.”
I freeze. My father is hosting the meeting. It’s supposed to be a peace treaty. A negotiation over territory lines.
“What kind of something?” I ask.
Dimitri squeezes my hands so hard my knuckles grind together. “A massacre, Isabella. They’re going to kill everyone. Your father. Your men. The Morettis. Everyone.”
The world stops. The sound of the wind in the trees vanishes. All I can hear is the frantic rasp of his breathing.
“No,” I say. It’s a stupid thing to say. “No, they’re signing a deal.”
“There is no deal. It’s a trap. My father has men positioned in the warehouse rafters. As soon as your father sits down…” He makes a cutting motion across his throat.
Nausea rolls over me.
“I have to warn them,” I say. I try to pull my hands away. “I have to tell Papa. I have to—”
“NO.”
He yanks me back. He’s stronger than me, desperate. He pins me against the trellis.
“If you warn them, they’ll know there’s a leak,” he hisses. “They’ll know it was me. I’m the only one who saw the plans. The only one.”
“Misha, I can’t just let my family die!”
“They won’t all be there. Just your father and the senior men. But Isabella, listen to me—”
“My father will be there! Matteo is going with him!”
“If this gets traced back to me, my father will…” His voice breaks. The terror in his eyes is bottomless. “He’ll kill me. Slowly. You know what Viktor Sokolov is. You know what my father is. You’ve heard the stories.”
I have. We all have. Stories of men skinned alive. Of fingers sent in boxes.
“There has to be another way,” I plead. Tears are hot on my face. “We can make an anonymous call. We can—”
“They trace everything! There is no other way.” He presses his forehead against mine. He’s crying too. “Promise me you won’t warn them.”
“I can’t.”
“Promise me!” He shakes me. “Please, Isabella. I’ll find a way to stop it. I’ll save your father. I’ll do something. Just give me time. One day. Promise me.”
“Misha…”
“Do you want me to die? Is that it? Do you want him to butcher me?”
“No!”
“Then promise. Promise you’ll stay home. Promise you won’t say a word.”
I look at him. The boy I love. The boy who gave me half a silver heart and promised to take me to Paris. I see the absolute certainty of his death in his eyes if I speak.
“I promise,” I whisper.
-
I gasp, sucking in air like a drowning woman breaking the surface.
I’m on the floor. I don’t remember falling. My knees are jammed against the hardwood, the pain distant and dull compared to the agony ripping through my chest.
I promised.
The realization is a physical weight, crushing my lungs.
I knew.
I sat at dinner that night. I watched my father eat Maria’s lasagna. I watched him drink his wine. He kissed my forehead before he left.
“Be good, principessa. Don’t wait up.”
I watched Matteo check his gun in the hallway. He was twenty-two. He winked at me.
I knew they were walking into a slaughterhouse.
And I said nothing.
I bit my tongue until I tasted copper. I went to my room. I sat on my bed and stared at the clock, counting down the minutes until they would be dead.
Because Dimitri asked me to.
Because I thought I was in love. Because I thought one day would make a difference.
Seventeen men.
The number flashes in my mind like a neon sign. Seventeen Rosettis. My father. My uncles. Cousins. The driver who used to sneak me candy bars.
They died because of me.
I didn’t just fail to save them. I signed their death warrants.
The memories of the aftermath flood in, no longer held back by the dam of trauma. Waking up to screaming. Gianni’s hands covered in blood. Enzo, dragged back days later, his throat ruined, his voice stolen forever because he was tortured for information he didn’t have. Information I had.
Rocco coming home from the war to find a graveyard instead of a family. Rocco, who turned himself into a monster to protect what was left of us. Who trained me, hardened me, made me into a weapon so I would never be a victim again.
If he knew.
God, if he knew.
I am not the victim. I am the architect of our ruin.
I look down at my hands. The silver hearts are cutting into my skin. Blood wells up, dark and thick, dripping onto Dimitri’s floor.
I thought I betrayed Dimitri. All these weeks, as the memories trickled back, I thought the guilt I felt was because I failed him. Because he died and I lived.
The truth is so much worse.
I chose him. I chose the Sokolov boy over my own blood.
I killed my father.
The nausea hits me like a rogue wave. I scramble up, stumbling over my own feet, and barely make it to the en-suite bathroom. I collapse in front of the toilet and empty my stomach.
There’s nothing in me but bile and acid. My body heaves, convulsing, trying to purge a rot that is bone-deep.
I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. My reflection in the mirror above the sink catches my eye.
Hollow cheeks. Dark eyes. Lips swollen from Viktor’s kisses.
Viktor.
He’s in the study. The son of the man who ordered the massacre. The brother of the boy who made me promise.
And he loves me. He thinks I’m strong. He thinks I’m a survivor.
"Isabella?"
His voice comes from the hallway. Closer now. He must have heard me running. Or maybe the silence stretched too long.
"Kotyonok, where are you?"
Panic spikes in my chest, sharp and white-hot.
I can’t see him. I can’t look into those pale eyes—Dimitri’s eyes—and see the reflection of what I am. If he knows… if he knows I knew…
He’ll see it on my face. He reads me too well. He’ll see the monster.
"Isabella!"
Footsteps. Heavy. Coming toward the room.
I scramble backward, away from the door. I grab my jacket from the hook on the wall, shoving my arms through the sleeves. I don’t bother with shoes. I can’t find them. I can’t think.
I bolt for the back door of the bedroom, the one that leads to the wraparound porch.
I burst out into the cold morning air.
"Isabella!" His voice is louder now, alarmed. He’s in the room. He sees the open box. The blood on the floor.
I jump off the porch, hitting the dirt hard. My ankles scream, but I ignore them. I run.
The lake is a sheet of black glass to my left, but I turn right, toward the tree line. The woods are dense here, a tangle of pine and scrub oak.
I dive into the shadows.
Branches whip my face. Brambles tear at my pajama pants, snagging the silk, scratching my legs. I don't feel it. I feel nothing but the screaming in my head.
Traitor. Murderer. Whore.
I run until my lungs burn. Until the air tastes like iron. Until the lakehouse is gone, swallowed by the trees.
I killed them.
I killed them all.
Every time Matteo looks tired, it’s my fault. Every time Enzo touches his scarred throat, it’s my fault. Every time Gianni loses his temper, it’s my fault.
I am the cancer in the Moretti family. I have been rotting us from the inside out for eleven years.
My foot catches on a root. I go down hard, slamming into the earth. The impact knocks the wind out of me. I lie there, cheek pressed against the decaying leaves, gasping for air.
I reach for my wrist. Instinct.
It’s bare.
The bracelet. The half-heart.
Gone.
Dropped in the room. Or lost in the woods.
The symbol of my betrayal is gone, but the truth is branded into me now.
I curl into a ball in the dirt, shivering violently. I am miles from the house. I am barefoot, bleeding, and freezing.
But I can’t go back.
I can never go back.