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“Ah, come on now, I don’t want to do that. We’re having a little sibling rivalry is all, right?” He stands and comes toward me. I flinch back, but he only takes my arm and pulls me to my feet. His grip is firm, but not hard enough to hurt, and he’s smiling as he does it. “Come on, right this way.”
He leads me to the back bedroom, the one with the bars over the windows, and gently pushes me inside toward the bed. I turn, heart racing, panic rising, as he stands in the doorway.
“You can’t keep me here,” I say, on the edge of losing my mind. “Fynn’s going to start looking for me. He’ll realize you have me.”
“Let him realize. If he truly does care about you the way you seem to think he does then you’re even more valuable than I thought.” He takes a step forward, all menacing and violent. My anxiety peaks, and I take a step back, hands trembling. “Don’t try to escape. If you make life hard, I will shackle you to the bed and let my men fuck you senseless. You think I wouldn’t? You’re my half-sister, love, not my real sister. If you scream, if you make a fuss, I will personally pin you down, gag your pretty mouth, and watch my soldiers run a train until you’re wrecked and ready to give me what I want. Do you understand?”
I sink down onto the edge of the bed, heart racing, hands trembling. He’s giving me that flat, terrifying stare again, and I can only nod.
His face lights up in a smile.
“Wonderful. Stay here and keep your mouth shut. Think about my offer. If you spy on the Bruno family, I will make your life so much better than you imagined it could be. There’s no reason for this sibling rivalry to keep on going the way it has. We can be close, Mirella, if you want to be.” He turns and steps out of the room. “Think about what I said.”
The door shuts. I hear a lock thunk into place on the opposite side of the door, leaving me alone to fight the horrible thoughts he planted in my mind, the image of a group of men raping me into submission. Tears roll down my cheeks as I pull my knees to my chest and sob so hard I think I might throw up.
It’s hard to keep track of time without any clocks. Crying passes the time, but slowly, like molasses through a sieve. The sun slowly dips outside until twilight falls heavy. I smell something in the other room, something delicious—I hear someone banging around in the kitchen. Cooking dinner, if I had to guess. One of Cillian’s soldiers with orders to keep me fed and alive.
He can destroy me, one way or the other.
There’s nothing in the room. After he left, I checked every inch. Nothing under the mattress, in the drawers, beneath the bed. Nothing I can use as a weapon, nothing that can help. The bars over the windows are solid and don’t bend when I put all my strength into pulling on them.
I’m alone and all I can think about is Fynn.
His lips against mine. His voice in my ear. Even the hours we spent in the gym together going through his workout routine, getting him back into shape. God, what I wouldn’t give to be back in that gym again. I’d happily deal with his ridiculous comments if it means not being trapped in this damn room.
If it means my mother isn’t in danger.
It’s strange how this was all set into motion years and years ago. Mom had an affair with a handsome stranger and I was born nine months later. That stranger had a son, and that son ended up taking over an Irish mafia family, and now we’re all tangled up together in a sick web of deceit and violence. I want to untangle myself, if at least so I can look Fynn in the eye.
But right now, I feel sullied. I feel used and broken. I keep thinking all of this was orchestrated by Cillian somehow, although I don’t know how he would’ve convinced my father to get involved. I’m now sure that Dad never betrayed the Bruno Famiglia, and at worse he was an unwitting stooge, doing Cillian’s dirty work for him by getting me hired as Fynn’s PT.
Most likely though, Cillian’s only taking advantage of a situation created by other people, and I’ve become the center of all these schemes, the thread holding it all together.
And it makes me want to scream.
The delicious smell gets stronger as more time passes. Night falls and crickets chirp and coyotes howl in the distance. It smells like ginger and garlic and browned meat. Soon, I hear footsteps outside in the hall, and my heart’s racing so fast in my chest that I feel like I might be sick, and the lock keeping the door shut clicks open.
