25. Chapter 25
The next evening, I was mindlessly flipping through channels—desperate for the vapid distraction of reality TV to drown out my own thoughts—when the screen flickered, and the world ground to a sudden halt.
His face was staring back at me. Beneath his familiar, chilling features, a stark chyron flashed across the bottom of the screen:
COLD-BLOODED KILLER RELEASED ON PAROLE FOR GOOD BEHAVIOR
My blood turned cold. The room seemed to lose all oxygen, the ambient noise of the city outside dying away until there was nothing left but the phantom echo of his voice scraped against my memory.
Good girl.
On screen, a beautiful news anchor with a sharp black bob and red lips professionally delivered the terrible news: Ethan Vance, now forty-three, was being released from his life sentence. He had reportedly "found God" in prison, convincing the board that he was a changed man.
I watched in paralyzed, suffocating silence as she detailed the circus—three grueling sessions in a courtroom, backed by one of the state’s most expensive defense lawyers.
And just like that, the state of Pennsylvania had decided Ethan was no longer a threat to society.
I slapped the mute button. Total, deafening silence filled the room.
Then, something in me snapped.
I hurled the remote at the wall. When it bounced off the drywall intact, a blinding, white-hot fury took over.
I threw it again, and again, until my hands grabbed anything within reach—coasters, books, a glass that shattered into a million pieces on the floor.
Whirling around, I slammed my bare fist into the wall, a sharp, white pain radiating up my arm as the solid studs refused to give.
The physical pain finally cracked the anger, and I collapsed. I crumbled to my knees, sobbing.
Ethan Vance did not belong on the streets.
He belonged to one of the old-blood Italian mobs that ran the underbelly of this city—a tycoon insulated by a dynasty of corrupt lawyers and bought politicians.
Ten years ago, when I was just twenty and still safe within the cocoon of my family’s home while attending community college, he and his men had shattered our front door one night during dinner.
They killed my mother, my father, and my brother and left me behind to remember.
Ethan was a monster cloaked in the skin of a man who fed on terror.
Every buried, agonizing memory of that hour came rushing back, clawing its way to the surface.
I could still see his men forcing my family to their knees, executing them one by one on the living room rug, painting the walls of my childhood in crimson.
In the chaos, Ethan had singled me out. He trapped me against the drywall, pinning me in place.
“You’re a pretty little thing,” he’d murmured, his breath hot against my face. “Tell you what—if you let me have some fun with you, I might just let you live. Deal, or no deal?”
My agonizing wails echoed through my empty apartment as the past bled into the present.
In my mind, I was back on that floor. I heard my mother’s desperate, piercing screams, cut brutally short by a deafening crack.
Then came my brother, sobbing my name before the second bang silenced him forever.
Finally, my brave and furious father trying with everything in him to fight off the armed men—only to be caught by a bullet right between the eyes.
And for what? An error. They had been hunting a target who vaguely resembled my dad. It wasn’t until Ethan had finished tearing away my dignity and violating every part of me that his men realized their fatal blunder.
“Oh, well. Mistakes happen, boss,” one of them had muttered.
Ethan’s chilling, low laugh echoed like a phantom in my head. I could still feel the sensation of his fingers threading through my tangled, sweat-matted hair, the revulsion of his stubble as he gave my tear-stained cheek one last, sickening nuzzle.
“This one mistake led to some fun, I suppose,” he had replied.
The aftermath was a blur of shadows. My mind had mercifully fractured, turning the world to pitch black the moment my eyes locked onto the sea of blood and the crumbled, lifeless shapes of the people I loved most. But I remembered the wail of police sirens cutting through the night.
Someone in the neighborhood had actually possessed the rare courage to call 911 when the gunfire started.
“I’ll be seeing you again soon, baby,” Ethan had whispered, a promise meant to haunt me for the rest of my days, before he vanished into the night with his crew.
Back then, the universe had given me a singular ally: a fierce, relentless prosecutor named Victoria Sterling who had dedicated her career to bringing down the Vance dynasty.
She wanted nothing more than to see a monster from that family in a cage.
My tragedy was just one file among hundreds of their victims, but she weaponized my survival, wielding it to secure a life sentence without the possibility of parole.
We were supposed to be safe from him forever.
Until today.
Within minutes, my apartment was reduced to a war zone.
The furniture lay overturned and shattered, a physical manifestation of the violence howling inside my chest. Gasping for air, my hands shook so violently I could barely control them as I clawed blindly through the liquor cabinet, hunting for anything—wine, rum, poison—to stop the bleeding in my mind.
My fingers finally locked around the cool neck of a vodka bottle.
I ripped the cap off and tilted my head back, swallowing in desperate, heavy gulps. The liquid fire that should have scorched my throat felt like nothing more than ice water against the numbness spreading through my veins.
I drank with a frantic, suffocating urgency, chasing the numbness until the jagged edges of the room finally began to blur, and the welcoming darkness stepped in to swallow me whole.