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“I’m Sable, by the way,” Sable mentioned as she tucked the new set of sheets in. “You’re Ottavia, right?” She glanced up at me, her dark eyes gleaming in the bright lights.
I nodded, but didn’t reply.
Sable tugged a quilt from the rapidly wilting duffle bag and spread it out over the bed. She ran a hand over the quilt as it settled into place. “There! Good as new. I’ll take these old sheets to the laundry room… or maybe the incinerator.” She eyed the dirty sheets with pursed lips before shrugging and dropping them in a heap by the door.
She clapped her hands together. “Okey dokey! Time to get you…” She eyed my disheveled form, still covered in blood despite being in clean clothes. “…well, maybe not clean, but cleaned up. Injury-wise, anyway. Will you come sit over here?” Sable patted the foot of the bed.
I made my way back over to the bed, following the same spots of clean floor I had as before, then settled in on the edge of the mattress. My body was tense, ready to strike at any moment even though Sable appeared to be disinterested in harming me. She was grabbing the foam tray of wrapped food and humming lightly to herself. Again, oddly at ease with the situation
I frowned. “This doesn’t bother you?” My words weren’t rude, but the tone wasn’t polite. Despite that, Sable still had a slight smile on her face.
“Hm?” When she glanced my way to catch my meaning, I pointed at the graphic gore laying mere inches from her sneakered feet. “Oh! I’m an emergency room nurse. Blood, guts, and death? Par for the course.”
“Besides,” she shrugged as she brought the food over to me and set it on my lap before taking a seat herself. “I’ve been here at Eoin’s for… gosh, ages now. I know how he operates.” Going by the open and gentle expression on her face as she opened up the medical kit, this operation didn’t bother her one bit.
Which again made me wonder if she was compelled to be this chill amidst all the nefarious activities surely happening here.
She cleaned up my wounds in silence for some time, encouraging me to eat here and there, but I just picked at the wrapped gas station sandwich on the tray. My stomach jumped, giving a sharp pang of hunger, but my mind was too muddled to eat.
My brain was still stuck on something, like a record player vinyl stuck on a needle.
“And you’re just… okay with this? With him murdering people all the time?” My voice was incredulous.
But Sable just chuckled. “You’re throwing those stones awfully close to your own glass house, girl.” With efficiency, she placed two butterfly bandages on the gash on my temple before gathering the trash of the gauze and cleaning utensils and throwing them back in the duffle. She slung it onto her shoulder before heading toward the door.
“You can sit here and pretend Eoin is the devil all you want, but at the end of the day, he doesn’t do anything differently than your father. They’re both men, in powerful positions, that use violence to secure their place in the world. You’re just on opposite sides of the war, so you think Eoin is somehow more evil than your picture-perfect daddy.
“My advice to you? Stop fighting. You wouldn’t have even been injured if you hadn’t killed that guard and fought so hard against the rest. You’re just battling yourself, Ottavia. No one has hurt you, and no one has plans to. If Eoin planned to kill you, he’d tell you outright. He’s not the kind of man that keeps his intentions hidden.” Sable was staring at me with pleading eyes, the dark brown endless pools of emotion.
But her words made me reel back. “Are you kidding me? I’ve been kidnapped. Taken against my will by the goddamn enemy of my father. And you expect me to not fight for my life? You’re fucking delusional.” A bitter laugh escaped me even though I found no amusement in the situation.
She sighed, hand resting on the doorknob. Sable appeared to be contemplating whether or not to engage in a battle of wills with me before ultimately deciding not to. She knocked twice on the door. The guard slipped the lock open and Sable opened the door a smidge before looking back at me over her shoulder.
“I could be your friend, if you’d let me. But you need to let go of that attitude. You know what they say about pride, right?” I glared at her without answering. “Don’t let it be your downfall, Ottavia.”
The look Sable sent me was a mixture of exasperation and grief, like she was exhausted by me already and sad because she knew this was how I’d go down: fighting, to the bitter end. With a yell, I flung the foam tray at her—food and all—but it landed embarrassingly short, way off target, into a puddle of blood.
Sable’s disappointed sigh as she closed the door behind her stayed with me long after she left. Somehow, it hurt more than the hunger pangs in my stomach and the pounding of my head.
Ottavia
Chapter Eight
Sleep never found me, despite my eyes burning with the desperate need for it. I couldn’t tell how much time had passed as there was no clock and no window, but it seemed like an endless amount of time had gone by, with only corpses to keep me company.
After Sable had left, I had scoured the bodies for any sort of weapon but apparently, at some point, Eoin or his men had removed all the weapons from the cadavers. My hands were newly anointed in old blood, and I rinsed them in the sink. The red stains stuck to my cuticles and under my nails without anything to scrub at the skin with.
I huddled on the bed, doing my best to avoid looking at the dead bodies on the floor. Electricity buzzed in the overhead lights, obnoxiously loud after hours of deafening silence. It seemed like the noise was almost echoing off the stone walls, reverberating back to my ears until all I could hear and see and taste was that sonorous fizzing. The constant drone ate away at my nerves until I was a frayed thing, my jagged edges caught on the truth of who I was before my capture and what I was becoming during my captivity.
Emotions rolled within me, turbulent and aching. Aggravation and sadness, a hundred other fleeting emotions I couldn’t name before they melded into something else. I was drowning in myself. Suffocating under the weight of my thoughts and the what-ifs and the had-beens.
Despite growing up in the gilded cage of the La Rosa mansion, I had never been truly alone until now. I always had my brother, Tommaso, by my side. When he left onfamigliabusiness, Luca would be standing guard close by, and I always had Alessandro to keep me entertained. I never had true friends, but I had people within thefamigliaI’d trusted. Now, all of that had been ripped away from me the same week Tommy had died.
I was alone, drifting anchorless in a tumultuous sea of emotions.
At every turn, Eoin outwitted and overpowered me. Yet, I refused to stand down. Giving in felt like giving up, and surrender was not in my vocabulary. What was that saying about insanity? You do the same thing repeatedly, expecting different results?
Well, maybe I was insane, because even though my prior track record of success in this house of horrors was zilch, I would not stop trying to escape.
