Aria POV
Three months later, I walked out of the syndicate's subterranean prison. The memory of those days was not a narrative but a collection of sensory poisons: the iron-tang of a nail being pried from its bed, the scent of scorched flesh as current passed through a heart. Today, I was released into the cold.
The heavy iron gates slammed shut behind me, the sound a dull report in the damp, miasmatic air.
I stood on the cracked pavement, shivering in my thin clothes.
My thoughts were no longer a coherent stream but a swarm of buzzing insects, gnawing away at the certainties I once held.
Dante's armored SUV idled by the curb, a dark, hulking beast.
The tinted window slid down, revealing my brother's sharp, unforgiving profile.
He looked at my belongings—a single, thin-walled plastic bag holding a torn sweater and a grimy pink plush bunny—with a cold, clinical disgust.
"Get in the back," Dante commanded, his voice edged with the unassailable weight of his position.
I reached for the front door handle from habit.
"I said the back," Dante snapped, a flicker of something dangerous in his eyes. "The passenger seat is Chloe's. Do not make me repeat myself."
A slow, creeping cold, distinct from the night air, spread from my sternum outwards.
I opened the heavy rear door and climbed into the back, pulling my knees to my chest.
The leather seats smelled of expensive cologne and cordite—a scent that once meant safety. Now, it made my stomach clench.
Dante pulled the SUV away from the curb, his eyes catching mine in the rearview mirror.
I instinctively clutched a stale piece of bread I had smuggled from the prison, my knuckles white around the crust. A few dry crumbs scattered onto the pristine leather, and Dante's eyes narrowed at the movement.
"Stop that," Dante mocked. "Those habits you acquired in the syndicate's kennels are foul."
The leather of the steering wheel groaned, a sound that set my teeth on edge, as the skin over his knuckles stretched to a translucent, parchment-like white. "Remember your place at the bottom of the family, Aria, or I will return you to those cells to learn obedience."
My throat was a desert.
"How?" I asked, my voice a dry rasp. "You are the Don. You broke Omertà. You falsified the blood records to frame me."
A muscle jumped along his jaw.
"Chloe suffered on the streets," he said, his voice like ice. "Your sponsorship was a display of privileged condescension. You paraded your life before her while she had nothing."
He looked at me through the mirror again, his expression now a mask of granite.
"Forcing you to taste the gutter was a necessity. It is the only way you might comprehend her pain."
I looked out the window, the city lights smearing into streaks of yellow and red.
I remembered shielding Chloe from the brutishness of the lower-ranked Associates.
The Estate's security codes had been entered by my own hand for her. The closets of couture gowns, their tags still attached, had been thrown open for her use. I remembered the way her gaze would linger on Leo, a covetous heat in her eyes.
During a recent cartel crossfire, just before my birthday, Dante and Leo had moved as one to shield Chloe. They had left me exposed, to stumble and fall, driving the weight of my body down onto the leg whose tibia still held the three titanium pins from the accident where I had pulled Dante from a burning wreck.
I had dismissed the grinding ache then, trusting our bond.
I was a fool.
The armored SUV passed through the massive iron gates of the Estate, the tires crunching on the gravel.
Dante parked the car and got out, not bothering to hold my door.
I climbed out slowly, my right leg a dead weight in the cold.
I walked up the grand staircase, wanting only the oblivion of my own room.
The hallway was dark, the silence thick and heavy.
As I approached my bedroom door, I froze.
From the other side of the heavy oak came a series of low, intimate sounds—the rhythmic creak of my own bedsprings, a woman's breathless sigh.
I knew, before I even touched the door handle, what waited for me on the other side. The two men I had loved most in this world had already taken my freedom, my title, and my dignity. Now, they were about to take the last thing I had left—the belief that somewhere beneath the betrayal, a trace of the brother and the boy I once knew still remained. I was wrong.
