He had laughed.
Soft. Confident.
Certain of himself.
“Ah, Vincenzo...” he said, like I was still a boy he could mold, still something unfinished. “One day, you’ll understand.”
A pause.
Then the final lie. “Family forgives.”
The memory faded.
The mountain returned. Cold the way it had always been, and just as indifferent.
I stepped forward again, stopping just in front of him as he choked and bled at my feet.
Family.
My gaze hardened.
No.
Family remembers.
The fool never understood.
Not really.
Not even now, kneeling in his own blood, choking on the consequences of a life built on rot.
He thought the reason I had distanced myself from him after my studies abroad—the reason for the rift between us—came from the cellar.
From the chains.
From the scars carved into my back and memory.
He was wrong.
Those things... they had broken me.
But they hadn’t turned me into this.
No.
That had come later.
The reasons came in ink—written in trembling handwriting across thin sheets of paper that carried the faint scent of fear and desperation.
Loretta’s letters.
They reached me during my time abroad, in fragments—smuggled by one of Ottavio’s soldiers who still had a heart.
After I was rescued at twelve, I was brought back to my father’s estate. But he never seemed happy to see me—if anything, it felt as though he wished I had never returned.
I remember running to him, my body still aching, desperate for comfort. But he turned away, instructing his men to take care of me instead.
And barely two days later, he sent me abroad—to “school,” as he called it.
