Ashes In Us

Ashes In Us
“Aria stop,” Ethan said, sitting carefully on the scattered cushion.

He looked like a man who had just survived a car crash, only to realize he was still bleeding internally. His voice was low, a command that had no power behind it. The living room was a wreck, a mirror of the destruction happening between them. The vase was broken, the flowers dying on the expensive rug, and the woman he loved was standing there, but she wasn't the woman he knew.

Aria didn't stop. She couldn't stop. The dam had broken, and twenty years of silence were rushing out like a flood. She paced to and fro, her bare feet stepping dangerously close to the shards of glass on the floor. She looked wild. Her hair was messy, her eyes red and swollen, her chest heaving with every ragged breath.

She stopped in front of Ethan. She looked down at him, and for the first time, he saw hate in her blue eyes. Not the playful annoyance she used to show when he teased her, but real, burning hate.

“Huh….” she let out a breathy, humorless laugh. “Do you care? No, you don't care at all….”

Ethan looked up at her, his eyes pleading. “Aria, please. You know I care. You know I love you.”

“And why would you care, you're Malcovich,” she said while tears flowed freely on her cheek.

The name sounded like a curse word coming from her mouth. She wiped her face aggressively, smearing the blood from her split lip across her cheek. She was tired of protecting her guard. She was tired of being Norah, the polite, perfect fiancée. She wanted to be Aria. She wanted to be the girl who was angry. She wants to let it out.

“You are all the same,” she spat. “You sit in your towers, you drink your wine, and you don't look down at the people you crush. You are a Malcovich. It is in your blood to destroy things and then forget they ever existed.”

Ethan flinched. Her words were like physical blows. He felt sick. The room was spinning slightly. He pressed his palms into the soft fabric of the couch, trying to ground himself.

Ethan said almost feeling down, “My father told me your family died in a fire accident Aria. What do you expect me to believe? I was a child. I was ten years old.”

He looked at her, desperate for her to understand. He hadn't been part of the plan. He had been a victim of the lie too.

“I was sent to Switzerland, without knowing when to return,” Ethan said almost like he held his forehead almost having a migraine.

The pain in his head was blinding. It was the pressure of his entire reality cracking open. He remembered that day. He remembered the black car taking him to the airport. He remembered his father’s cold hug. He remembered waiting for a letter from Aria that never came.

“I wrote to you,” Ethan whispered, his voice breaking. “I wrote letters for a year. They told me you were dead. They told me there was no one left to read them.”

Aria stared at him. Her expression didn't soften. If anything, it got harder.

“An accident,” she repeated, her voice dripping with venom. “That is what they told you? A tragic accident? A faulty wire? A gas leak?”

She stepped closer, leaning down until her face was inches from his. He could smell her perfume, mixed with the metallic scent of blood and the salt of her tears.

“That was what they played on the news,” Aria said. “That was what he made everyone see. The tragic end of the Delaney family. The whole city cried for a week and then moved on. But I was there, Ethan. I didn't watch it on the news.”

She straightened up, her eyes staring past him, staring at a ghost in the corner of the room.

“Mr Norman Malcovich, your father, shot my mom and dad straight to the face while I watched behind the curtains.”

Ethan stopped breathing. The air left the room. He stared at her, his mouth slightly open, unable to process the horror of her words.

“No,” he whispered. “No, he wouldn't… a gun? Aria, that’s…”

“Graphic?” she cut him off. “Brutal? Yes. It was. I was hiding. I was playing hide and seek. I was behind the heavy velvet curtains in the living room. I heard the door open. I heard your father’s voice. He wasn't shouting. He was calm. He was talking to my father like they were discussing a golf game.”

Aria’s voice trembled, but she didn't stop. She was reliving it. She was dragging Ethan into the nightmare with her.

“My father begged him, Ethan. He begged him to remember they had a child. He begged him to remember that they were best friends. He just wanted us to leave. But Norman… your father… he laughed. He said loose ends make bad knots. And then he pulled the trigger.”

She made a shape of a gun with her hand and pointed it at Ethan’s head.

“Bang. Bang. Just like that. Two seconds. And my world was gone.”

Ethan felt bile rise in his throat. He clutched his stomach. He could see it. He could see his father, the man who taught him how to tie a tie, the man who sat at the head of the table, standing over two bleeding bodies.

“He didn't stop there,” Aria continued, her voice dropping to a whisper. “He set the house on fire while I ran off for my life.”

“I smelled the gasoline,” she said. “He poured it over them. He poured it on the rugs. I waited until the smoke was thick. I waited until I couldn't breathe. I climbed out of the window and I ran. I ran into the woods and I didn't stop running for twenty years.”

She looked at Ethan, her eyes burning holes into his soul.

“Mr Norman stripped me bare of my father's Empire and left me with nothing. He took the patents. He took the contracts. He took the house. He erased the Delaney name from the history books and wrote Malcovich over it in blood. And you… you grew up rich on that money. You went to the best schools on that money. You bought this building with that money.”

Ethan didn't know how to react over this. He felt dirty. He felt like his skin was crawling. Everything he owned, everything he was, was built on a grave. He looked at his hands. They looked clean, but they felt stained.

He looked up at her. She looked like an avenging angel. She looked terrifying.

Ethan asked, “Do you want to pull my father down? Who's behind you all these while?”

He needed to know. She was a child when she ran. Someone had to help her. Someone had to turn the scared little girl into the spy standing in front of him. Someone had to fund the education, the new identity, the clothes, the lifestyle.

Aria looked at him with smiles that were dry and filled with sadness, “Do you want to fight me if I come for your father?”

It was a challenge. A line drawn in the sand. Choose, she was saying. Choose your blood or choose me.

But Ethan didn't answer. He couldn't. His brain was broken. He was just looking at her breathing softly, watching the rise and fall of her chest. He was looking at the woman he wanted to marry, and seeing the warrior she really was.

He wasn't even knowing if he was admiring the little Aria for the strength she has now or feeling pity for what she has passed through in his father's hand. She had survived hell. She had walked through fire and come out the other side with a plan.

Aria continued, turning away from him. She walked to the window, looking out at the city she had tried to conquer.

“Marcus has been behind all this,” she said.

The name hung in the air. Marcus.

Ethan blinked. Marcus Gerry. His father’s business partner. The man in the wheelchair. The man who had smiled at him at the gala.

“Marcus?” Ethan repeated, confused. “Why would Marcus help you? He is working with my father on the Horizon project. They are partners.”

“It was all part of it….Marcus isn't a friend,” she said. “He hates your father more than I do. He used me. He found me when I was starving. He gave me a name. He gave me a face. He trained me to be Norah. He sent me to destroy your father because your father stole from him too.”

Ethan squinted his eyes. The puzzle pieces were slamming together, forming a picture that was ugly and sharp.

Now it had made sense why that luxury Aria has been flaunting. The expensive clothes. The penthouse. The job at VernBuilds. It wasn't her money. It was Marcus’s war chest.

The collaboration with the Malcovich corporation was a plan to get close to Malcovich. It was a Trojan horse. And Aria was the soldier inside.

“Oh… Marcus has been behind you all this while,” Ethan whispered.

He felt a new kind of anger rising. Not at Aria, but at the men who had used them. His father had used violence. Marcus had used manipulation. And he and Aria were just the children caught in the crossfire.

But then, a darker thought crept in. A thought that had been nagging him since he found the photo in her bag.

He looked at Aria. She was sitting there, looking tired, looking defeated. But was she?

She had lied for so long. She was an expert at it. She had slept in his bed, whispered promises of forever, all while reporting to Marcus.

Ethan took a deep breath and continued. He needed to know the one thing that mattered more than the money, more than the murder.

“Tell me Aria have you ever loved me or you wanted revenge all this while.”

His voice was quiet. It was the most important question he had ever asked.

Aria turned to look at him. Her eyes widened slightly. She opened her mouth to speak, to tell him about the conflict, to tell him about how she fell in love against her will.

But Ethan didn't let her answer. He was too hurt. The doubt was eating him alive.

Ethan smiled dryly. It was a sad, broken smile.

“Oh least I forget,” he said, his voice trembling. “You wanted our last baby named Nathan, so why won't it all be about revenge.”

Aria froze. The color drained from her face.

Nathan. Her father’s name.

She had suggested it at the Old Estate. She had sat in his lap, kissing him, and told him she wanted to name their last son after the man his father murdered.

To Ethan, it looked like the ultimate twist of the knife. It looked like she was planning to plant her father’s flag in the middle of the Malcovich family tree. It looked like a victory lap.

“You wanted to name him Nathan,” Ethan said, tears filling his eyes again. “Was that the plan? To have a Malcovich boy named after the man my father killed? To laugh at us every time you called his name?”

He stood up, unable to sit next to her anymore.

“Was I just a sperm donor for your revenge, Aria? Was the wedding just a way to get close enough to slit our throats?”

The accusation was heavy. It was ugly. It stripped away every tender moment they had ever shared and painted it in the colors of deceit.

Aria stood up too. The shock on her face turned into fury.

How dare he? How dare he question her love? She had saved him. She had spared him from the truth for months. She had sacrificed Emily for him. She had almost sacrificed herself.

“Ethan, don't tell me that, I was stripped of everything!” Aria said while her eyes shone in anger.