As of tonight, her life was his. He’d given up everything so she could live.
Her life was his.
He didn't know what he would do with it. But it was his.
“Come with me, boy.”
The Boss’s voice reached him. No. Not the Boss. He’d been the Boss to his father. And his father was dead.
Tristan Caine was dead too. In his place, someone else was born. Someone who looked up at Lorenzo Maroni and the gleam in his dark eyes dispassionately.
He kept quiet, everything inside him detached except for the strange, bitter sensation he felt when he looked at the girl. The men around him were considering him, all bigger than he was, with heavy weapons and the power to scare him.
He wasn’t scared anymore.
This was the last time, he vowed to himself, that he'd be scared.
Never again.
He was going to become the scariest of them all.
Saving her had destroyed him. One day, he vowed as he watched a man pick up the little girl and take her away, his blue eyes on her, he would collect his debt.
Morana.
Present Day.
She didn’t know this, this coiled knot of emotions in her chest.
It just hurt.
Everything hurt. Every-fucking-thing.
Her trembling hands, her trembling lips, her trembling heart. All of it.
She couldn’t breathe. The air was trapped somewhere in her chest, close to her bleeding heart. Her throat was tight, locked down; a weight settling low in her stomach as the noise from the airplane flying overhead filled the death in the graveyard.
The airplane came and went.
And it still hurt.
She hurt.
In a way she’d not thought herself capable of hurting. In a manner she’d never known a person could hurt.
Eyes stinging, Morana blinked rapidly, years of training herself not to shed a tear in front of anyone not allowing her the liberty to let a single drop fall. But would it have stopped at a single drop? Would it have stopped at all when the weight on her chest seemed to get heavier and heavier with each passing breath?
She wanted to screech until her throat pained as her heart did. She wanted to become hoarse until the sound faded away into the nothingness inside. She wanted to scream but couldn’t find her voice.
She was innocent.
Completely innocent.
She had done nothing wrong except exist.
Yet, her very existence made her want to weep. Her very existence made her want to break bones.
She existed because of him. She was innocent but he had been innocent too. She was innocent, and yet she was stained with blood.
His blood.
The blood of his father.
The blood he had shed to save her; the blood he had marked her with trying to clean her.
People who knew the story thought he’d made a claim in that gesture. But she knew, she knew he’d just been a sweet boy trying to wipe the blood off the face of an innocent baby.
Pain and rage, hate and turmoil, compassion and heartbreak, amalgamated inside her in a knot she could feel in her throat, transfused in her blood that beat in every inch of her body, came together in a way she couldn’t distinguish one from another, didn’t understand which was directed at whom.
She closed her eyes, her body starting to shake, unable to bear the conflict inside her very soul.
“Morana.”
Amara’s broken voice made her eyes flutter open. Unlike herself, the other woman was crying openly, the pain in her eyes reflective of her own. Morana owed the other woman so much, so much she couldn’t even begin to comprehend it, for simply telling her the truth that had been stymied from her at every turn, for breaking her vow and putting her faith in her.
“Do you want me to stop?”
Morana shook her head immediately, her voice lost within her, tangled in the mass of emotions assaulting her, her jaw hurting from how hard she kept clenching it. She needed to know. She needed to know everything there was to know about him, her soul hungry for the knowledge that it had been denied. She needed to know, to understand him. She’d been locked for years from the truth and he had always been the key.
She needed to know.
Wiping her cheeks with small hands, her nails painted a green that matched her unusual eyes, Amara continued, her voice trembling like a leaf in the wind.
“I met Tristan when Mr. Maroni brought him to the house that day…” her beautiful, swollen eyes glazed over, lost in the memory she was speaking of, making Morana grit her teeth harder at the image of the aftermath.
“He was wearing this white long-sleeved t-shirt, splattered with drops of blood, one entire hand completely bloodied, his hair a mess. He was just two years older than I was but he seemed so much older. His eyes… god, his eyes, Morana… they were so dead,” Amara shuddered, looking into space, goosebumps erupting over her arms.
She rubbed them slowly. “Mr. Maroni told everyone he would be staying at the compound. He talked about Tristan but Tristan just stood there, not moving, not reacting, his eyes moving over everyone. But he didn’t look at anyone, he looked right through them… as though he was seeing nothing... It was so terrifying coming from such a young boy.”
Morana tried to find the congruence in what Amara was telling her what she’d seen for herself. She’d seen him look that way at other people – at the men in the casino, at the people in the barn, at the crowd in the restaurant. She’d even remembered him looking that way at her that first night in Tenebrae when he hadn’t known who she’d been, and her own knife had been pressed against her neck by his hands.
Now that she knew, she realized he’d evidently never, not since then, looked at her with nothing. There had always, always been something in those blue eyes of his. He’d always looked at her, in that intense way that seared her.
Amara’s voice broke through her thoughts, a gust of cool breeze lifting a strand of her dark hair, chilling Morana.
“I remember asking mama about him that night. Nobody in our world knew why an outsider had been brought into the family, more so to live on the compound. That had never happened before. But a few days later, there were rumors.”
Morana wrapped her arms around herself, a chill settling in her bones as she waited for Amara to continue.
“My mama told me she’d heard whispers among the servants about him. The servants always knew what happened at the compound, but they never spoke of it because of fear – for their families, for themselves, some even from loyalty. But they did talk among themselves, and Tristan had created quite a stir. Mama told me about those whispers, about how he’d murdered his own father in cold blood in a room full of men, about how dangerous he was, about how they said he was going to be the most feared of all men when he grew up. She told me to keep my distance from him. Everyone did. And I’m ashamed to admit, I kept my distance, shunned him like everyone else because of course, I was a little scared.”
“You were just a child,” Morana spoke up before she could help herself, her voice rusty and small.
Amara smiled sadly, fidgeting with the hem of her top. “So was he, Morana. We all forgot that so was he.”
Morana swallowed the lump in her throat, gripping her top with her fingers.
“Him being such a terrifyingly silent boy just fed the wariness everyone felt for him even more. People talked about him, and I’m certain he knew, but he never uttered a word. Nothing. The first time I actually heard him speak was years after he’d come to live there.”