And us, the Rovina family, we don’t ask for permission.We take what we want.Because time is always short and never on our side.
We’re cursed to always be ruined when we climb too high, have too much.Ruin is always waiting to strike us down when we achieve greatness.Whenever we get what we most desire.
Time’s not on my side either.Ruin has spared me until now.But once I reclaim my birthright, once I deal out the revenge I swore to bring to Dante Moretti and all of his, it will come for me too.
Then I will join the ghosts in the empty rooms of this house and Goldie will be free again.And that will be justice too.
Chapter2
GIANNA
I didn’t sleepafter he locked me in the room.I just lay in bed staring at the shadows cast by moonlight on the ceiling and tried not to think of anything but how pretty they were.
Because to think means losing my mind that much faster.Faster than I’ve already lost it.
Just a couple of weeks ago, I was falling in love with a beautiful stranger, a muscular, green-eyed god of a bodyguard who saved my life.Not once, but twice.First from a Russian mobster who drugged me.The second time by giving me the kiss of life after I almost drowned on a beach in Long Island.
All his kisses were life after that.And by the time I finally gave him all of me, I could already see us spending the rest of our lives together.
But then that beautiful god turned into a monster.He attacked my family, wounded my father, took me and my sister and locked us up.
I tried to hate him.
But he made me love him again.
Until my little sister was shot.
And he snatched me from her side and brought me here, locked me up again.
I tried to kill him last night.
Tried to end the nightmare he chained me up in.A nightmare so much more terrible because the dream was so good before.
I’ll never forgive myself for trying to take his life.
And I’ll never forgive him for taking mine.
I’m still floating between my love and my hate for him, unable to land on either end of that spectrum, slowly disintegrating somewhere in between.
Maybe one day I’ll just disappear.Then the pain would be gone too.And the joy.And the love.Just like hope is already gone.
Until dawn, thoughts like that plagued me.Made me shake, made my heart rattle in my chest until it was too tired to beat hard anymore.And the steel light of dawn was the worst thing I’ve ever seen.
The light made me feel like I was already gone.Already disintegrated.Nothing but particles that the whitish light was eating up.
But then the sun came up and shone on me.Bright, the color of light gold.And I was whole again.Ready to fight another day.
The room he has me locked in is huge, easily the size of the whole living room and kitchen of the apartment my father had kept me locked up in back in New York.Back when he was still the head of one of the five families that ruled New York.Back when I was still just his eldest daughter and my biggest worry in the world was that I was just a princess stuck in a pretty golden cage.
My whole life revolved around flying free of that cage.What I wouldn’t give to have that problem back today.I would give anything for my family to be safe again and for things to be as they were.
But they never will be.
My sister might be dying in a hospital on the other side of the country.Dying alone.
My father might soon be dead in Matteo’s stupid war.
As for my mother and other sister… I might never see them again.
