The fire in his eyes gutters. The certainty falters. He searches my face, looking for an answer to a question he never thought to ask himself. Why is he so upset? If I am nothing, my silence should be nothing. My contempt should be an annoyance, not a torment.
He releases my throat abruptly, turning away to grip the balustrade, his knuckles white. He lets out a long, ragged sigh, the sound of a man defeated by a war he doesn’t understand.
“Just tell me,” he says, his voice quiet now, drained. “Tell me what you want. There must be something. Something I can give you, something I can do. Name it.”
The words are out of my mouth before I can even think them. They are the truth, the deepest, most ancient wound. “No amount of money can ever rectify the wrongs you have done to me and my family.”
He goes very still. I see the shift in his posture, the subtle straightening of his spine. He is a businessman, a strategist, and suddenly it’s like he thinks he found a lever. He turns back to me, and his eyes are different now. Calculated. Sharp.
He narrows his eyes. “I can take you to see her.”
The world tilts on its axis. The birds stop singing, the wind ceases to blow. Everything focuses down to his face, to those seven words.
I go perfectly still. A rabbit sensing a trap. This is a trick. It must be. To see her, to know she is alive and real… it is the one desire I have never even thought of, never dared to.
“Her?” I whisper, afraid to even say the word.
“Your mother,” he says, the words deliberate, weighted. “I can take you to her. I can let you see her. Talk to her. If that is what it takes. If that is what will…” He can’t bring himself to say ‘make you love me again.’ “…make you forgive me.”
My heart betrays me. This is not a gift; it is a transaction. My forgiveness, my compliance, in exchange for a glimpse of the woman whose life he destroyed alongside mine. The math of it is obscene.
I look at him, at the desperate hope in his eyes now. He truly believes this will work. He believes he can buy my soul back with this one act.
“I will never forgive you,” I whisper, the words absolute. “But it would be a start.”
It is all he needs to hear. A start is enough, a crack in the door is all a man like him needs to believe he can kick it down completely.
A wild, frantic energy seizes him. He grabs my hand, but this time it’s not a caress or a punishment. It’s a claiming. A seal on a deal. “Then we go. Now.”
He pulls me back inside, already barking orders on his phone. “Get the jet ready. Now. No, I don’t care about the schedule. Clear the airspace. We’re leaving for England within the hour.”
He’s a whirlwind of purpose, the torment of the last few days sloughing off him as he moves into action. He has a problem, and he is solving it. He thinks he is fixing me.
As he shouts into his phone, his back to me, my mind begins to whirr.
He is taking me to my mother. To Oblivion.Thisis happening.
He turns back to me, his eyes alight with triumphant purpose. “Get ready. We leave in thirty minutes.”
I nod, a slow, careful movement. I school my features into something he can interpret as grateful anticipation as I let him see what he wants to see.
Inside, my mind is a vortex of fear and a terrifying, fragile hope. He is taking me to my mother.
And for the first time, I am not thinking about how to survive being with him.
I am thinking about how to get her out.
The air here is the first thing that tells me I have descended into hell. It’s not the damp, cold stone I expected but a cloying, sumptuous scent that lures you in, that makes you believe this is not a prison but a place of luxury, at least for visitors.
It’s a lie. I know it is. It’s a thin, pathetic veil over the truth of rot and misery that exists here.
Antonio’s hand is a firm, possessive bracket on my lower back, guiding me forward, his touch now a brand of ownership I can no longer mistake for anything like affection.
The corridor is wide and the walls are a dull, grey stone that is easy to wash down. At regular intervals heavy, riveted iron doors break the monotony. From behind some, I hear nothing but a profound, aching silence. From others a low, broken sob, a muffled plea or the faint, metallic clink of a chain shifting. Each sound is a shard of ice driven into my soul.
We stop before a door indistinguishable from the others and a cold dread, sharper than any I have ever known, washes over me.
Antonio nods to the hulking guard who shadows us. The man steps forward, a heavy ring of keys jangling in his grasp. The scrape of the iron key in the massive lock is the most horrifying sound I have ever heard. It echoes down the corridor with a promise of finality.
