Aria POV:
I woke to the sound of music. Laughter. The chime of crystal against crystal. It was a world away, a life I no longer belonged to.
It was Serafina's eighteenth birthday.
My leg was a column of fire, but I refused to hide in the shadows they'd assigned me. I forced myself to the small, cracked mirror, splashed cold water on my face, and pulled my knotted hair back. I would not be a ghost in my own home.
My arrival in the main courtyard froze the party mid-laugh. The air thickened with a hostility so palpable I could taste it. My mother's smile faltered, collapsing into a mask of tight-lipped horror. My father's expression simply hardened into one of cold dismissal. Lia, my younger sister, glared with an open fury that felt like a punch to the gut.
Then Serafina, a vision in a white gown that cost more than I'd seen in seven years, glided toward me. She placed a delicate hand on Dante's arm, her eyes widening in a theatrical imitation of concern.
"Oh, Elara, you came," she murmured, just loud enough for everyone to hear. Elara. A name I no longer answered to, a ghost they insisted on seeing. She turned her face up to Dante, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "For my birthday, my Don, could you grant me one wish? Protect me from her. Her presence... it's unsettling."
I felt nothing. Just a vast, cold emptiness.
I turned to leave, but Serafina wasn't finished. She switched to the old Sicilian dialect, a language of secrets and power, meant to exclude and insult.
"You see how she is?" Serafina's voice was sweet, but the words were poison. "So bitter. So ungrateful after all Dante has done for her."
My mother joined in, her voice laced with a familiar, weary disappointment. "She was always a difficult child. A bad seed."
My father's voice, the Consigliere's voice, was the final blow. "She brings shame on this Family."
What they didn't know, what no one knew, was that I'd spent my seven years in hell mastering dead languages. It was a way to keep my mind sharp, a way to break the codes of my captors. The old dialect was one of them. I understood every venomous word.
"I'm tired," I said in plain English, my voice flat. I turned my back on them.
"Good," my mother's voice followed me, back in the dialect. "Her presence sours the air."
That final insult didn't land as a blow, but as a release. A cold, absolute calm settled over me. This was the first day of my new freedom.
Nine days.
