Inside, my own demons are furiously thrashing. I see her flinch when I move too fast, hear the hesitation in her voice when she says my name. I want to take all of it away. I want to kill the memories that keep her locked behind the prison walls she erected to keep herself safe from Roberto’s cruelty.
I want to see her whole again. I'd give fucking anything for it. Even my life.
The next day…
The first thing I notice is the warmth. The second is the faint hum of the heating vent and the rustle of the trees outside the window—that’s it, the only sound.
My eyes blink open to the same soft ivory walls as yesterday, but they feel… different now. Not home, not safe, but familiar enough that the panic doesn’t hit all at once.
We had dinner last night—Raffael and I. If you can call it that
He ate, while I pushed food around my plate until he gave me a look that made me eat. He was polite and careful, like every movement was planned in advance, every word chosen so I wouldn’t break.
And I stillmight.
Everything’s a haze. Being here and not there. No Roberto.
His absence is so strange, I can’t wrap my mind around it. For three years, he’s been everywhere, his voice, his rules, his hands. He filled every corner of my life until I forgot what it was like to live without him watching.
Now the space he left is so big it feels like I could fall into it.
And then there’s Raffael.
The man I’ve loved quietly, stupidly, for years. More than five years, if I’m counting right from when I met him at sixteen. The one who stepped in back then, when I thought I might die in some dark alley. And now he’s done it again, only this time, he pulled me out of something worse.
I should feel… what? Grateful? Relieved? Happy?
I feel nothing like that.
I don’t know who I am without Roberto’s voice in my ear. I don’t know what I want, or if I even want anything at all. My skin doesn’t feel like mine, my thoughts keep looping back to the same questions, the same dark corners. Every time I look at Raffael, I see the man I used to imagine saving me. I see the man who finally did. And I don’t know if I can be the woman he thinks he rescued.
What if she’s gone?
What if there’s nothing left to save?
And then there's the fact that Raffael has Roberto.
I don’t know how to feel about that either.
Part of me wants to see him, just to look him in the eye and know he can’t touch me again. Part of me wants to watch him suffer, to hear him beg, to see him bleed until there’s nothing left but the memory of the pain he caused.
Another part of me just wants it over—all of it. I want to wake up one day and not feel him in the room with me, not hear his voice in my head. I want him gone so completely that I can forget there was ever a time I answered to his name.
But there isnopart of me that wants him to live. Not one.
And that scares me.
Because I don’t know if that makes me broken or finally sane.
I curl tighter under the covers, as if I can hide from the truth of it. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone, not like that. But I want him dead. I want him gone so badly it feels like a physical ache in my chest.
And then I think of Raffael.
Of what it will cost him to do it.
Of how much blood is already on his hands.
And I hate that I can’t decide which scares me more, the idea of Roberto breathing another day, or the idea of Raffael killing for me and the consequences of it. I sit up straight. Raffael attacked Roberto's mansion! He took a capo! This will not go unanswered. They will all come for him, every one of Roberto’s allies, every soldier who wants to earn their way up, every vulture who smells blood in the water. And they won’t stop until they’ve put him in the ground.
