As soon as Dante left, my parents arrived.
They came through the station's back entrance, the one reserved for families with enough influence to bypass the front desk entirely. Salvatore Moretti walked half a step ahead of his wife, his overcoat still buttoned, his jaw set in the particular way it always was when he considered an errand beneath him. Elena Moretti followed with her gloves still on, her fingers laced in front of her like a woman attending a funeral she had not wanted to attend. Neither of them looked at me the way a parent looks at a child found in a holding cell. They looked at me the way a Don looks at a failed arrangement.
Their faces were full of disappointment. Their voices cold and sharp, without a trace of sympathy.
"Bianca," my father said, and the single word carried the weight of a sentencing. "Admit your mistakes. Only then will Dante release you."
I couldn't help but give them a bitter smile.
Since the day they brought me home, I had been forced to admit fault for everything. If I scored higher than Serafina on an exam, that was my fault, because it embarrassed the daughter they had chosen to favor. If I won recognition in anything, a recital, a school prize, a whispered compliment from a visiting capo's wife, that was my fault too, because the light was supposed to fall on Serafina and nowhere else. If I didn't perform the same theatrical helplessness Serafina wore like a second skin, if I stood too straight or spoke too clearly or failed to shrink myself down to an acceptable size, that was the worst fault of all. The Moretti household had a single unwritten law more binding than any oath: Bianca exists to make Serafina shine, and any deviation from that purpose is betrayal.
But now, I no longer wanted to bow my head or admit to anything.
Swallowing the bitterness in my heart, I asked them calmly, "What's the point of admitting anything? Should I admit that I didn't push Serafina hard enough?"
The words had barely left my mouth when my father's hand struck my face with a loud smack. The sound was sharper in the concrete-walled room than it would have been at home, amplified by the bare floor and the steel door and the silence that followed. Pain stung my cheek, spreading hot and immediate from the point of impact up through my temple. Salvatore Moretti did not hit like a man losing control. He hit like a man correcting an error in a ledger, precise and without hesitation. I felt the heat bloom across the side of my face, felt the skin tighten where the bruise would form, and I held back my tears. I lifted my chin stubbornly and let out a cold snort.
"I was taken. Snatched right off a street that your soldiers were supposed to be watching." My voice came out steadier than my hands. "But you only worried about Serafina. Now she stages a fall so clean it wouldn't fool a child, and you force me to confess again." I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the familiar sting, held it. "Am I just some piece of trash you picked up off the street?"
My parents didn't even flinch. They stood shoulder to shoulder and stared at me as if I were a vicious enemy threatening their beloved daughter. Salvatore's thumb tapped once against the edge of the metal table between us, that single, measured tap he always made before reducing family to numbers. Elena smoothed the front of her coat where no wrinkle existed, her fingertips brushing the fabric as though flattening something invisible, something only she could see, a version of this moment she was already rewriting to protect herself.
"Bianca, you're being ungrateful," my mother said, her voice thin and final. "Just stay here then."
They did not look back. Salvatore held the door for Elena, and she passed through it without a word, and the door closed behind them with a mechanical click that sounded nothing like a lock and everything like one. Meanwhile, the Neris ignored my protests and shoved me into a small cell at the end of the corridor, the kind of room that existed in every precinct house touched by Family money, the kind of room where people who inconvenienced the right families were kept until they stopped being inconvenient. The room was pitch black, with only a thin beam of light slipping through a narrow window set high in the wall, barely wide enough for a hand.
My body trembled uncontrollably as my breathing turned shallow and ragged. The walls pressed inward, not literally but with the absolute certainty that only claustrophobia provides, the sensation of the ceiling lowering, the air thickening, the darkness acquiring weight and texture until it lay against my skin like something alive. My claustrophobia surged, choking me with terror that had nothing to do with the Morettis or Serafina or any human threat. This was older. This was the panic that lived in my chest like a second heart, beating only in enclosed spaces, only in the dark.
Instinctively, I called Dante's name. The syllables left my mouth before I could stop them, before pride could intervene, before the rational part of my mind could remind me that calling for the man who had put me here was its own kind of defeat. Yet there was no answer. Only endless darkness pressed down on me, heavy as earth, and the faint drip of water somewhere in the pipes behind the wall, and the distant sound of voices that did not care.
I had no idea how much time passed before the cell door swung open.
A group of tall, rough-looking Sisters stepped inside. There were four of them, broad-shouldered and hard-eyed, dressed in the kind of plain clothes that suggested they had been brought in from outside, not pulled from any holding area. Their eyes gleamed with malice under the fluorescent light that spilled in from the corridor, and they moved with the coordinated ease of Sisters who had done this before.
"Is that her?" The first one spoke without lowering her voice, without any concern that a Neri might hear. "Miss Moretti said to teach her a lesson."
Miss Moretti. Not even the courtesy of a first name to distinguish which Moretti daughter had paid for this. But I knew. I had always known. The order carried Serafina's particular cruelty, the kind that hired others to do the bleeding so her own hands stayed clean.
As one of them spoke, a short-haired woman cracked her knuckles and stepped toward me. Before the first hit, the Sisters cracked gum in relay, one after the other, the sound popping through the small cell like a countdown. My heart dropped. I backed away until my shoulder blades hit the far wall, but another one grabbed my hair and slammed me to the ground before I could escape. The impact drove the breath from my lungs, and then the fists came, and then the kicks, and each blow sent sharp waves of pain through my body, layering on top of injuries that had never been given time to heal.
I tried to fight back. I drove my elbow into the nearest body, felt it connect with something soft, but my old injuries hadn't healed yet. The wounds from the kidnapping were still stitched and swollen beneath my clothes, and the first solid kick to my ribs turned resistance into agony. I was too weak to defend myself. All I could do was curl up and endure it silently as they vented their anger on me, pulling my arms over my head, tucking my knees to my chest, making myself as small as the room demanded.
They didn't stop until a Neri's voice shouted from outside the bars. "Enough! Stop right now!"
The shout came late. It came after the short-haired woman had pressed her boot against my spine and leaned her weight onto it. It came after I had stopped making any sound at all. Officer Neri stood in the corridor with one hand on his belt, and before he spoke again he rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand, the gesture of a man rehearsing the lie he had been paid to keep.
Finally, the Sisters backed away. They filed out without urgency, without fear of consequence, because there would be none. The Moretti name had purchased this hour the same way it purchased silence and loyalty and convenient blindness.
I was lying motionless on the cold floor. My body was covered in blood and bruises. The concrete beneath me had gone warm where my blood had pooled, and the smell of it filled the cell, copper and salt and something older, something that reminded me of the warehouse where Rocco Greco's men had held me. My back was torn open again, old wounds mingling with fresh ones, the stitches from the hospital split along their seams. Every move felt like my bones were shattering from the inside. Slowly, I lost consciousness, and the darkness that took me was not the darkness of the cell but something quieter, something that did not press down but simply erased.
After a long while, the cell door creaked open. I was dragged out by the arms, my feet trailing behind me, and their laughter echoed in my ears as they mocked me openly. But I didn't even have the strength to respond. The corridor lights passed overhead in a blur of fluorescent bars, and the words they said dissolved into sound without meaning.
A full day and night passed before they finally threw me out of the station. The morning air hit my face like a slap, and sunlight blinded me. I raised a trembling hand to shield my eyes, squinting against the brightness that felt violent after so many hours in the dark. Then I staggered to my feet and limped toward the family clinic on Via Serena, the one Dr. Ricci kept open for associates who could not afford questions at a proper hospital.
After my wounds were bandaged, the gauze pulling tight across the reopened gashes on my back, I turned to leave only to see Dante and Serafina walking toward me down the clinic corridor. He froze when he saw me. His eyes widened in shock, his gaze moving from the bandages visible at my collar to the bruises mottling the side of my face to the way I held my left arm close to my body because something inside it ground against bone when I let it hang. For a while, he was stuck in place, and I watched his right hand drift toward his signet ring before he caught himself.
"How… how did you end up like this?" he asked, frowning deeply as he looked at me with a flicker of heartache that surfaced and submerged in the same breath.
Dante tried to reach out, his hand lifting almost as if to help me, and for one fraction of a second the gesture looked real. However, I stepped back to avoid his touch. The movement sent pain screaming through my ribs, but I would have crawled before I let him steady me. Before I could speak, Serafina hurried to his side, clutching his arm like a devoted lover. She looked at me with fake worry swimming in her eyes, her lower lashes fluttering once too quickly, the way they always did whenever the lie mattered.
"Bianca, Dante arranged your release yesterday. Why didn't you come home last night?" Her voice was silk over glass. "And how did you get yourself into such a state?"
Then she turned to Dante and added, her tone softening into something almost maternal, "Don't blame her, Dante. Bianca probably just wants attention. Look at how badly she's hurt. Let's get her treated first, okay?"
Her gentle words worked like poison. The pain in Dante's eyes vanished in an instant, replaced by cold fury. The shift was so complete, so immediate, that I understood for the first time that Serafina did not merely manipulate him. She was the lens through which he saw me, and she could turn that lens whenever she wished. He glared at me coldly as he accused, "You're doing this again. Bianca, your lies are so obvious now. No one believes you anymore."
This time, I didn't answer. Instead, I just stared at him as I silently memorized the face I had once loved so deeply. The line of his jaw. The way his dark hair fell across his forehead. The shape of his mouth when it formed words designed to cut. His eyes were still beautiful, but now, they no longer held even a trace of love for me. Whatever had lived there once had been poisoned so thoroughly that he could stand in a clinic corridor, look at a woman covered in bruises his silence had permitted, and feel nothing but contempt.
Dante turned to Serafina, gently holding her hand, and spoke while looking at me. "If you have the strength to hurt yourself, then you have the strength to walk home."
He addressed the nearest soldier without raising his voice. "Watch her closely. Don't let her take a single shortcut."
After that, both Dante and Serafina walked away. His arm around her shoulder. Her head tilted against him. The picture of devotion disappearing down the corridor, past the clinic's front desk, through the door, and into the black car that waited at the curb.
Step by step, I forced myself to walk home. The Moretti estate was four miles from the clinic, and every step burned through the soles of my shoes and up through my shattered ribs and into the place behind my sternum where something had once been whole. The soldier followed ten paces behind, close enough to ensure I didn't deviate, far enough to make clear that helping me was not part of his orders. The city moved around me in its ordinary way, cars and voices and the smell of bread from a bakery I passed, and none of it touched me, and none of it mattered.
Every painful step burned the same words into my mind.
I would make them pay for this. All of them.
