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I was a monster they hadn’t chained down enough.

That last night… I changed.

I shed whatever I was before and I embraced what I knew I was.

I tell him how I cut myself until my ankle was slippery enough with blood to slide out of the chains. How the door to the room wasn’t even locked, because they never dreamed for a second that what they had down there wasn’t a little girl at all, but rage personified.

Vengeance incarnate.

And unafraid.

His hand squeezes mine so tight it hurts when I tell him how I made my way upstairs and went room to room with the scissors I found in the kitchen, slicing each of their throats open and then watching as they gurgled and flailed like dying fish, drowning in their own blood.

How my greatest regret is that that motherfucker was in the last room, and when he woke and heard his friends screaming, he jumped out the window and ran like a coward, assuming the fathers of the two mafia girls they’d taken had come for revenge.

But it wasn’t them.

I killed the bad guys. I got Ari out of that room and out of that house.

He listens when I tell him how I took her down the street in a weird sort of daze I’ll never forget, brought her all the way to the local NYPD precinct, sent her through the automatic doors into the lobby, then turned and walked.

And walked.

And walked.

I walked all the way from Queens to my parents' brownstone in Brooklyn Heights thirteen miles away, and didn’t realize until I rang the doorbell and my parents opened the door and fell to their knees crying and hugging me that I was covered head to toe in blood.

How they cried. How they held me. How Dad didn’t say a word as I went into his study, opened a drawer in his desk, and took out the pack of Lucky Strike cigarettes—a pack he’d kept since he quit smoking in his twenties, a talisman against taking up the habit again.

How they both sat with me and stayed silent while I smoked the whole fucking pack, because they saw me teetering on the razor’s edge between being able to live my life after what happened and never being able to leave the house again.

How they held me, and told me I would always be their girl, and they would always love me.

When I’m done, the whole world feels silent and still, like that frozen moment before a snowfall.

“I liked killing them,” I say softly, breaking the silence after who knows how long. “I mean, I enjoyed it. After that…” I shake my head. “Look, I don’t do what I do because of some stupid fucking unfinished business, okay?”

Damiano just nods, his dark eyes locked with mine.

“I’m not shell-shocked. This isn’t PTSD. I’m not still chasing that motherfucker who got away,” I choke out.

“I know,” he murmurs.

“I just…” I huff out a breath. “When I find pieces of shit like the ones who took Ari and me, and I cut into them, and watch them bleed, and watch their eyes at the moment they realize they’re not the predator anymore but the prey, I feel…”

“Like you just got a piece of yourself back.”

I slowly turn to look at him.

“Yeah,” I croak. “That.”

I exhale again, and it turns into a brittle, broken laugh.

I twist my head to look at him. My heart is ripping in two, but I know what telling him all of this means.

“We've always known this was never real, right?” I swallow heavily. “You don’t, like… I don’t need charity. I don’t need someone to⁠—”

“Bella.”