Chapter One #2
I didn’t answer. I just sat there with his touch burning on my face and the future rearranging itself into something even worse than the present. And Mama was staring at the cheap ring on her finger like it might disappear if she blinked.
My little sister Camilla was born on a Thursday in the middle of a heatwave, when I was fourteen.
Dario wasn’t there. He was “handling business.” Mama labored for seven hours in the same apartment where the air always smelled like smoke and stale perfume.
I held her hand the whole time because the midwife Dario paid for looked more interested in the cash than in either of us.
When they finally placed the baby on Mama’s chest, something in me locked into place so hard it hurt.
Baby Camilla was tiny. Red-faced. Perfect.
A soft tuft of dark hair and fists that opened and closed like she was trying to hold on to something.
Mama looked at her for maybe ten seconds before her eyes glazed over again.
The craving was louder than the child in her arms.
I took Camilla before Mama could drop her. She was mine to keep alive from then on.
Mama’s use got worse after the birth. The money Dario gave her for “the baby” mostly went into her veins or up her nose. Some nights she didn’t come home at all. Other nights she came home with new bruises and glassy eyes and forgot Camilla existed until the crying got too loud.
I learned how to mix formula at three in the morning.
How to rock a colicky baby girl while finishing calculus homework with one hand.
How to hide the worst of the apartment when the social worker came by after a neighbor complained about the noise.
Camilla’s first smile was directed at me.
Her first word was a soft, slurred “Rena.” I cried in the bathroom afterward so she wouldn’t see.
I was so young and someone’s mother in every way that counted.
The night Mama died started like the others.
She stumbled in a little after midnight, pupils blown wide, scratching at her arms. Camilla was asleep in the small crib I’d moved into my room so I could reach her faster.
I was at the kitchen table trying to finish a scholarship essay I knew I would never use.
Mama mumbled something about needing to lie down. I watched her disappear into her bedroom and told myself she would sleep it off like always. An hour later, a strange silence.
I found her on the floor beside the bed, lips blue, a needle hanging from the crook of her arm. The spoon and lighter were on the nightstand like an unfinished ritual.
I don’t remember screaming. I only remember dropping to my knees and pulling her into my lap, the same way she had once pulled me close under a restaurant table when I was ten.
Her body was cooling. I pressed my ear to her chest and heard nothing.
I shook her. I begged. I told her baby Camilla needed her.
That I needed her. That she couldn’t leave us alone with him.
Mama never opened her eyes. I held her until the sun started coming up and my legs went numb underneath her weight. At some point I made a promise against her hair, voice cracked and raw.
“I’ll protect her,” I whispered. “I swear on everything left. Camilla will never end up like us. I’ll keep her safe. Even from him.”
Dario arrived mid-morning, summoned by the building manager who had finally gotten tired of the smell. He stood in the doorway of the bedroom, looked at Mama’s body in my arms, and exhaled through his nose like he was mildly inconvenienced.
“Fucking waste,” he muttered. Then his eyes moved to me, kneeling on the floor with my dead mother, and something colder and more interested settled into his expression.
“Guess it’s just you and me and the kid now, huh?” He stepped closer, toeing Mama’s limp hand out of the way. “Don’t worry, Morena. I got plans for you. Big ones. You’re worth a lot more than she ever was.”
He smiled then, the same smile he had given me the night he put the cheap ring on Mama’s finger. Camilla started crying from the other room, small and insistent. I carefully laid Mama down, smoothed her hair one last time, and went to my sister. Dario watched me the whole way, calculating.
My eighteenth birthday started with Camilla throwing up on my only good shirt and ended with blood in my mouth.
Dario came home early for once. That should have been the first warning.
He walked in carrying a small grocery-store cake with cheap plastic flowers on top and a bottle of something strong.
Camilla was in her pajamas, sticky-fingered and talking on the living-room floor.
I had been trying to get her to eat the last of the rice cereal before bed.
He set the cake on the table and looked at me for a long time.
“You’re eighteen now,” he said. “Time to start earning your keep.”
I knew what was coming. I had felt it building for months in the way his eyes lingered, in the casual touches that lasted too long, in the comments about how I was “wasted” on books and scholarships.
“I got the full scholarship,” I said quietly. “It covers everything. I can work part-time and still…”
“You’re not going.” His voice was flat. Final. “I told them you’re declining. College is for girls who don’t have responsibilities. You have responsibilities.”
Camilla chose that moment to pull herself up on the couch and crow “Renaaaa, I wanna play!” like it was the most important thing in the world. My heart clenched.
Dario stepped closer. The smell of his stupid cologne mixed with whatever he had been drinking.
“I’ve been patient,” he said, softer now. “Gave you time to grieve your mother. Let you play house with the kid. But I’m done waiting. You’re just a tool, Morena. Have been since the day I put that ring on your mother’s finger.”
His hand came up and cupped the side of my neck, thumb stroking once over my pulse. I jerked back so hard I nearly tripped over Camilla’s toy.
“Don’t.”
Something ugly flashed across his face. The next second his palm cracked across my cheek hard enough to snap my head sideways. Pain exploded through my face. The copper taste of blood filled my mouth where my teeth cut the inside of my cheek.
Camilla started screaming immediately, high, terrified, the kind of cry that meant she had never heard that sound before and didn’t understand it. Dario grabbed my jaw and forced me to look at him.
“You think you’re too good for me?” he snarled. “You think some scholarship makes you special? You’re nothing but leftover goods from a dead whore, and I’m the only reason you and that kid have a roof.”
I tried to shove him off. He was bigger, heavier, meaner. He slammed me back against the wall hard enough to knock the air from my lungs. Camilla’s screams got louder.
Then, just as suddenly, he let go and stepped back, breathing hard. He dragged a hand down his face and laughed once, low and bitter.
“Fine,” he said. “You don’t want to be owned that way? Then you’ll earn on your back in a different way. Or on a stage.”
I stared at him, cheek throbbing, blood in my mouth.
“There’s a club,” he continued. “After Dark. High-end place. Owned by one of the Morettis, Santino. They pay very well for pretty, untouched girls who know how to look scared and grateful. You’re going to dance there. Starting this weekend.”
The word Moretti hit me like a second slap. For one dizzy second I was ten years old again under a white tablecloth, watching a tall man in clean gloves end my world.
Leonardo Moretti.
Was it his club?
“No.” The word came out broken. “I’m not… I won’t…”
Dario moved fast. He snatched Camilla up off the floor. She screamed louder, reaching for me with both arms, face wet and red. He held her easily, almost casually, like she weighed nothing.
“You will,” he said, completely calm again. “Or I take her. I know people who pay good money for quiet little girls who won’t be missed. You fight me on this, Morena, and you’ll never see her again. Understand?”
Camilla sobbed my name over and over, hands opening and closing in the air between us. Everything inside me went very cold. I looked at my sister, the only pure thing left in my entire life, and understood there was no choice at all.
“I’ll do it,” I whispered.
Dario smiled, satisfied, and shoved Camilla back into my arms. She clung to my neck so tightly it hurt, crying into my shoulder. I held her and stared at the cheap birthday cake on the table, its plastic flowers tilting sideways.