She’d stop just long enough to let me collect myself before kissing me again. I focused on her scent and the way she touched me until I didn’t feel like puking anymore.
Then there was silence.
“A lot of time passed, and I still wasn’t suspicious—just confused. I checked my brothers’ rooms first. They were asleep. Then I heard a noise coming from one of my father’s restricted rooms.” I hesitated.
“Curiosity got the better of me. I stepped closer, everything in me telling me to turn around, to leave it alone, but I didn’t. I looked through the crack in the door, and my mom was on her knees.
“He was hitting her. I don’t—” I dragged a hand down my face. “I don’t know how long it had been happening before I got there. Once I saw it… I couldn’t stop watching, losing count of how many times he did it.
“The fear I had of him… it just—” I shook my head. “It disappeared. I was going to go in. I didn’t care what he’d do to me. My hand was already on the door when she saw me.”
My voice dropped. “He had moved away for a second, and she used it. Just that one second to shake her head, telling me not to come in.”
I swallowed hard. “I could fucking see everything, Lina. All of it. He had a knife, and when he finally opened his mouth, I understood. Our mom had been trying to get us out—away from him, away from this life. She wanted us safe from the monster we were forced to call Father.
“She was going to leave in the middle of the night. With nothing and no one, but at least we would have had each other.” My hands curled into the sheets.
“He kept talking about her betraying him. Everything he’d built.” My voice went flat. “He yanked her hair and said, ‘If only you would have stayed.’”
I paused.
“Then he slit her throat.”
Tears streamed down my face. I was barely holding on. Lina was touching me, moving as I moved, keeping me there with her.
“I was hauled into the room.” My voice came out rough. “My father stood over her like the devil himself. I dropped beside my mom, telling her over and over that I was sorry, that I loved her. She couldn’t speak, but she lifted her hand and barely touched my chin, trying to smile.
“And then she was gone.”
Tears soaked my face, and my breathing spiraled out of control.
At some point, Lina placed her hand over my heart. I pulled her close, terrified that letting go would feel like losing her too. Warm drops slid down my arm.
I tightened my hand on her shoulder. She wouldn’t look at me for a second, and I thought maybe it was pity or that she believed I deserved all of this pain.
When she met my eyes, she was crying. I had never seen anything so devastating—how she felt everything I did as if it belonged to her.
That only made my feelings for her stronger, and my emotions were everywhere. I held on, suffocating her against my chest. She clung to me the same way I had clung to her countless times.
If only we had made it out.
Chapter 54
ADELINA
My eyes were swollen, my skin damp with tears. Cezar was fighting himself, and all I could think to do was embrace him, hold him tighter, drag every inch of him into myself. I didn’t know how to fix this—there was no fixing this. Time would not heal these wounds. In our world, it never did.
It was soul-crushing just to exist like this.
This was the norm for us—swallow the pain until it devoured everything, and only once it hollowed us out did we get a moment of quiet. A moment that felt like freedom. To live the way we did, something had to be sacrificed, and nothing ever came without a price. Payment in blood for all we have done.
How would it feel to love him?
“Cezar…” I croaked. “Cezar…”
All I could do was squeeze him. Finally, with a slow breath, I forced the words out. “Your mother loved you so much. And she would be proud of you. Thank you for telling me what happened.”
I couldn’t explain how I knew. I couldn’t tell him the fragments of her I remembered. But I wanted to. I wanted to give him something—anything—that made the weight in his chest easier to carry.
