“And what the hell am I supposed to do with that, Pia?” His voice breaks, then rebuilds itself out of something hard and jagged. “You walk into my life with your mouth and your skin and your goddamned secrets—and now my little brother has nightmares with your face in them.”
I open my mouth.
Nothing comes.
He’s already bleeding. I won’t insult him with bandages.
“You’re everything my father pushed into this family,” he says. “Every promise. Every war. Every lie that killed my mother and buried my brothers long before their bodies ever hit dirt.”
I take a step back without meaning to.
Not from him.
From the reflection of myself in his eyes.
“I didn’t come here for this,” I whisper. “I didn’t come here to tear you apart.”
His laugh is short and bitter.
“Damage doesn’t give a shit what you came for.”
Silence swells between us, thick and suffocating.
No wind.No noise from the city.Only us, standing in the fallout of something neither of us knows how to fix.
He turns away again.
Not from me.
From trying.
And that’s when it finally hits me—
low and brutal, beneath my ribs.
I’m not the woman he hates.
I’m the woman his father built and dropped into his life like a fucking bomb.
And that means forgiveness will never come as easily as survival.
I press my tongue to my teeth until I taste blood and swallow.
“I never wanted to be your nightmare,” I say.
He doesn’t answer.
And in that silence, I understand what I’ve been dodging my whole life:
Not every villain is one.
Some of us survive long enough to realize we’ve become the thing that changed everyone else’s story.
And there’s no erasing that.
Only walking away when the damage refuses to let go.
Emiliano’s Return & The Judgment
