Chapter 129

Lowell's POV

When the door swung open, the smell that reached me was faint dust and stale air—the particular stillness of a room that has been closed against deep winter for too long.

The light switch was right there beside me. I didn't touch it. I walked in by the dim light filtering through the windows, and the door drifted shut behind me with a quiet click.

The apartment looked exactly as it had the last time I was here. My things, Alina's things—nothing missing, nothing moved. It still felt like a place where two people had lived.

I walked into the kitchen. Her favorite tea set was on the counter, and beside it the cups I had brought over from the main house—mismatched, but somehow right together, the way things sometimes are when they aren't supposed to work.

The apartment had been empty long enough that a thin layer of dust had settled over everything.

I reached out and ran my fingertips along the pattern on one of the cups. The cold of the ceramic traveled up through my fingers and landed somewhere in the middle of my chest.

I held still for a moment, then withdrew my hand, closed my eyes briefly, and walked into the bedroom.

The bed had been made with care. The corners were tucked precisely, the pillow set straight against the headboard. Not one surface had been left undone.

She had tidied this place before she left. Every detail of it carried her particular habit of order—clean, deliberate, thorough.

I stopped at the edge of the bed, pressed my palm flat against the covers, then gathered a small fold of the fabric and brought it to my face.

Her scent came to me immediately.

I lay down. The emptiness of losing her eased, just a little, in the presence of that smell. The exhaustion I had been carrying found somewhere to put itself down. In the space that still held some trace of her, my body finally let go.

Everyone's suffering is its own kind of silence.

I could not bring myself to tell her what I had found about her parents. Just as I could not bring myself to tell my grandmother that her younger son had killed her elder one.

For a woman nearing seventy, that truth would be a cruelty without mercy. I believe I will never forget the shock of it myself—the moment I learned what had actually happened.

---

The time Marco and Antonio kept me in the basement was the darkest period of my life.

The light down there was always the same—a single bare bulb hanging from the ceiling, its harsh white glare washing over the rough stone walls and leaving everything flat and colorless. Whatever shadows fell on those walls looked thin, like they barely had substance.

They had suspended me from chains. The shackles on my wrists had worn through the skin; dried blood and rust had merged into a dark crust along the surface. My toes could just reach the floor. Every small movement set the chains swinging, and the sound carried through that empty space as though it had nowhere else to go.

Antonio was standing in front of me. The hem of his coat was muddy, his shoes filmed with dust. His face had the look of a man releasing a pressure that had been building for years—lit up with it, unsteady.

I don't know whether he believed all of his people had been killed, or whether killing them had simply given him the illusion of having finally beaten me. Whatever the reason, he had grown reckless. He hadn't even confirmed I was conscious—he had assumed the beatings had knocked me out.

"You held up well," he said. His voice held the particular pleasure of someone who has just gotten what they wanted. He raised the stun baton in his hand and let it hang there; a thin arc of blue electricity jumped at its tip with a faint, persistent buzz. "I kept wondering why you weren't making any noise. Turns out you'd already passed out."

He laughed once, short and cold, and tossed the baton onto the workbench beside him. The metal rang against the surface.

I kept my head down. My hair fell across most of my face. But I could hear.

He thought I was unconscious—my body had gone limp past any point of control, and he'd read that as the fight being over. So when he spoke, he didn't guard himself at all.

"Lowell—I wonder if your father ever imagined you'd end up beaten by me."

"Do you have any idea how long I've waited for this?"

The resentment had been in him for so long it had eaten through his reason. He was already celebrating.

He moved toward me, his back to the light, his face mostly in shadow—only the faint curve of his mouth still visible. "When your father was alive, he had everything over me. Every time. And our father's eyes were always on him—always. I had enough of it."

"What was he, really? He got one sentence from the old man on his deathbed, and that was enough to put the whole family in his hands."

He paused. The grievance against my father and against me had been sitting together in him for a long time, fermenting.

"You're exactly like him." His eyes went wide and red-rimmed. He was almost spitting the words. "You're nothing—both of you were nothing—but you've always acted like you were something above the rest of us. What exactly did you think you had earned your place with? Your father, who died young? Your mother, who couldn't even keep herself alive?"

At the mention of my mother, my fingers curled slightly inside the shackles. It was the only movement I could manage. The rest of me was beyond responding—I could only hear and think.

Antonio didn't notice. He kept moving, kept talking, his voice climbing, as though he were finally confessing something to a witness he had always wanted but never had.

"Your father deserved what he got. He thought he could clean up the family's name. Thought he could work the politicians. And what happened? Someone put a bullet through his head and he didn't even have time to say a last word. Dropped in a field like an animal."

He let out a strange, quieter laugh. "You want to know why that assassination went so smoothly?"

"Because I was the one who gave them his movements that day."

He drew a slow, hissing breath—the sound of someone savoring something long-denied.

He walked to the workbench, picked up an iron rod, weighed it in his hand for a moment, then set it back down.

"As for your mother—that's almost funny." His mouth curved. There was something wrong in his expression. "Do you know why her labor went the way it did? Because I had her maidservant put something in her drink every day. Of course she died."

My heart seized.

Rage and grief hit at the same moment, tangled together.

All those years. Everyone—including me—had believed my mother's death was a tragedy of circumstance. A difficult birth. An unlucky outcome.

But Antonio had just told me what it actually was. My mother had been murdered.

Whether my father had ever known—I couldn't say.

Then Antonio spoke again, his voice carrying the same poisonous ease as everything that had come before: "The dosage must have been too light back then. If it had been stronger, it would have taken both of you. You wouldn't be here at all."

The sound he made after that was somewhere between laughter and weeping—the sound of someone whose hold on themselves had come completely loose.

I had nothing to say. In his eyes, I was already gone.

"Stay here then." His voice leveled out, the mania passing. "When your grandmother dies, someone will step in and take what the family owes me. Everything your father kept from me—I'll take it back myself. And as for you—"

He laughed once more, low and dark.

"Rot here."