Page 38 of Vows of Blood

I say nothing, just stew quietly, as my father gives me a curt nod.

Pausing in the doorway, he hesitates. “Prove me wrong, Luca. Don’t let history repeat itself.”

My knuckles turn white around the pen in my hand as rage unlike anything I’ve ever felt surges up within me.

"I'll walk you out," Nico offers, ushering him into the hallway, before setting down a folder on the corner of my desk and tapping it with his index finger. “Those real estate options we were discussing.”

They leave together, my father's back rigid with displeasure. As the door shuts, and for the first time in years, I let the memories that used to haunt me come.

The lake house. A place that used to be filled with good memories, the best of my life so far, is now my torture chamber. Wrists bound, one of which is definitely broken, and knees dragging along the flagstone store of the cellar, I hang, face swollen, blinded by a mixture of sweat and blood.

“This is your fault,” he warns. “You had to defy me.”

I hiss as another crack fills the air, and pain lances across my back. As I jerk away from it, my shoulder pops out of its socket, and I bite down hard on my lip to stop the scream that threatens to burst from me.

“If you had just done as you were told…” His ranting continued on and on. “Your loyalty should be to your family. ALWAYS. You think you can just walk away?”

As spots danced before me, and darkness swallowed me whole, I gritted my teeth and forced sound from my bruised throat.

“Don’t hurt her.”

His laughter bounces off the walls as another crack fills the air, and I brace myself, jerking on the ropes as another strike tears the flesh from my back. He leans close, rasping against my ear as he whispers with mocking, fake concern.

“She never showed up, Luca, which is why doing this hurts me all the more. That you were stupid enough to risk it all over a woman who clearly doesn’t care.”

Rolling my shoulders, stretching out the knots there that never quite goes away, I flip the official-looking file open.

Sienna Fox. The name is typed neatly at the top of the first page beside a photo that must have been copied from a driver's license. She's not smiling in it, but her beauty is undeniable, nonetheless.

Her eyes are tired, deep shadows carved beneath, and with her hair pulled back from her face in a messy bun, she looks more serious than the Sienna I remember. The one whose smile and laughter had me determined to leave this life of darkness behind.

I turn the page and start reading.

Her current address is listed as the shithole apartment I visited. Her employment history shows Bellini's most recently, preceded by a string of waitressing jobs, none lasting more than a year, a brief stint as a receptionist at a hotel, and numerous jobs at grocery stores, cafes, and bars. All overlapping. It seems Sienna hasn’t had fewer than two jobs at a time since she moved here from her home town.

Three years ago, when her father died after an extended illness.

I pause briefly and fight back a wave of sympathy. She was close to her parents, a real daddy’s girl. Her father had reservations about me, about my family, but I respected that. He was right to. And I gladly stuck at it until he decided I was okay to have around.

The education section makes me pause. Two years of her undergrad, with stellar grades, and then nothing. I check the dates. She managed only one semester after we split, with poor grades and sporadic attendance, and then nothing. Currently enrolled in a part-time nursing program, she’s trying to get back on track, but looking at the endless jobs she’s working, it’s hard to see how she’ll get through it.

Her financial situation is worse than I’d imagined. Student debt that makes my eyes water, maxed-out credit cards and overdrafts, minimum payments bouncing or overdue, and no savings. Both of her parents passed away, and yet she has no assets except her twelve-year-old Honda.

What happened to their house? And the garage? Surely, she could have sold them to clear her debt and start fresh. Angrily, I read on. Surely there’s more to this.

Something is missing.

The final page covers her family, and it reads like a tragedy in bullet points.

The family business and adjacent home, which were badly damaged in a fire years earlier, were uninsured, and the land was sold by the bank to cover outstanding mortgages and debts.

Mother deceased four years ago from cancer.

That’s why she dropped out. She went home to help, saddling herself with even more debt in the process for a partial degree she never got to finish and put to use.

Once her parents were gone, Sienna moved, daughterly duty done, as far from their home as she could. My own sister Delia did the same thing after our mother died, but for very different reasons.

I close the file and stare at the wall, stunned. All these years, I assumed she was living her best life, had moved on and left me behind, choosing to be a normal college student over eloping with me.