A sharp gust of wind swept past, tugging at the thin blanket draped over the figure beside me.
Loretta.
She sat in her wheelchair, unmoving, her small frame almost swallowed by the fabric wrapped around her legs.
The wind played with loose strands of her dark hair, brushing them across a face that had seen far too much for someone her age.
Her skin was pale, almost translucent in the mountain light.
Her cheeks hollowed by years that had taken more than they had given. But her eyes—
Her eyes were still there. Large. Brown. Steady.
They held no confusion. Only certainty.
I turned my head slightly, studying her in silence.
Once, those eyes had been filled with questions. Endless curiosity. Laughter that echoed through long hallways and sunlit gardens.
Now, they held something quieter. Something harder.
Loretta—my only sister, the one person I still count as family—had suffered in ways no one should endure.
She was left broken, reduced to a shadow of herself.
At the hands of the man kneeling in the dirt before us—Ottavio Orsini, my father.
My fingers tightened around the gun, as though the barrel were breathing back at me.
I forced them to loosen.
I took a step closer to her, then crouched—bringing myself down to Loretta’s level.
The world seemed to still around us.
Even the wind fell quiet, as if the mountain itself was holding its breath.
“Do you remember,” I said quietly, my voice rougher than I intended, “when you asked me if the moon followed us home?”
Her gaze shifted to me, and for a moment—just a moment—I saw it.
A flicker.
A ghost of the girl she used to be.
“You were convinced,” I continued, a faint breath of something almost like amusement brushing my words, “that it was chasing you. You cried for an hour because you thought it wanted its cheese back.”
Her lips twitched.
Not quite a smile. But close.
“You told me...” she murmured softly, her voice fragile but steady, “that it followed you because you were special.”
The memory hit harder than I expected.
It was three days before my ninth birthday—Loretta was eight.
We were on a rooftop in Tuscany that day. Warm tiles beneath our backs, melted gelato slipping through our fingers. Her laughter mixed with the hum of cicadas in the dark.
