“She was beautiful,” Chiara continued brokenly. “Not just pretty. Beautiful in the way people stop talking when someone walks into a room. Soft voice. Soft hands. She smelled like roses and vanilla all the time.” A small, devastated laugh escaped her. “Sienna barely remembers her now.”
I heard her swallow hard. “But I do.”
My hand tightened against the door.
“She used to cry after Papa punished us,” Chiara whispered. “Not in front of him. Never in front of him. But later.” Her voice trembled harder. “She’d sneak into our rooms afterward and apologize like it was somehow her fault.”
The image hit harder than I expected. A woman trying helplessly to comfort bruised children while trapped beside a monster. I already hated Lorenzo Ventura. Now I wanted to kill him with my bare hands instead of the poison circulating his blood stream.
“One night,” Chiara said, her voice growing thinner, “Papa hit Aurora for talking back. She was always his favorite, and he never touched her before then.” A shaky breath. “Mama finally snapped.”
I closed my eyes briefly.
“She screamed at him,” Chiara continued. “I’d never heard her scream before. She told him he was evil. Told him he was destroying us.” Her voice broke apart completely. “And for one second I thought maybe he’d listen to her because he loved her once.”
A terrible silence followed. “He beat her anyway.”
The words landed like stones. Inside the bathroom, Chiara started sobbing openly now. Not trying to hide it anymore.
“He just… kept hitting her,” she cried. “And I tried to stop him.” Her breathing turned ragged with panic, like she was back there again. “I grabbed his arm and screamed and begged him to stop, but he shoved me away like I was nothing.”
My jaw clenched so hard it hurt.
“She couldn’t even stand afterward,” Chiara whispered. “I remember blood on the floor. I remember Sienna crying so hard she threw up. Matteo trying to protect Aurora because he thought Papa would hurt her next.”
Her voice shattered entirely. “She died three days later.”
The silence afterward felt monstrous. I stared at the door without seeing it anymore.
“He told us she was weak,” Chiara whispered. “Papa said love makes people weak. Then he forbade us from ever speaking about her again.”
My chest felt unnaturally tight.
“If we mentioned her,” she continued, “he’d beat all of us. Together.” A broken sound escaped her. “So we stopped saying her name.”
I shut my eyes. Jesus Christ.
“I haven’t talked about her in a long time,” Chiara admitted. “Not out loud. Not to anyone.”
Something sharp twisted through me hearing that.
“I held it in because I had to,” she whispered. “Because if I cried, Aurora cried. And if Aurora cried, Sienna cried. And Matteo…” Her breath hitched violently. “Matteo always looked at me like I was supposed to fix everything.”
Another sob tore out of her. “But I couldn’t fix any of it.”
I leaned my forehead against the door again, anger burning hot beneath my skin now. Not at her. At him. At the idea of her as a little girl standing in blood, trying to save her mother while that pathetic excuse for a father destroyed everything around him.
“You saying that word…” she whispered shakily. “It reminded me of her.”
Understanding hit me all at once. Not fear. Grief. Raw and rotting and buried alive inside her for years.
“I don’t know how to hear it anymore without feeling like something is being ripped open,” she admitted. “And I hate that you saw this.”
Something inside my chest shifted painfully. “Chiara, baby.”
“No,” she whispered quickly. “Please don’t say anything nice right now. I can’t survive it from you.”
That silenced me completely. For the first time in a very long time, I had no idea what to do. But I needed to be close to her. Something inside me snapped. Not anger. Something worse.
