Chapter 481: DESTINY DEMANDS SACRIFICE
I worked carefully, pressing the ointment into Vito’s wounds one small section at a time. The room was quiet except for the candles and my own unsteady breathing. I didn’t fully understand everything that had happened, but I understood enough. His injuries had something to do with me. He had taken this pain because of me, because he had kept me close and kept me alive when other people in this place wanted neither of those things.
That truth settled into me slowly, the way cold does , not all at once, but until it reached the center of everything.
I had been pretending, without meaning to, that this was temporary. That it was some kind of long camp, an in-between place before home. But kneeling on the stone floor with his blood on my hands, I stopped pretending. The things I had seen were real. The people who had walked through that door with cold eyes and cold voices , they were real. And the possibility I had been keeping very small in the back of my mind grew until I couldn’t keep it small anymore.
I might never go home.
I knew what death meant. It meant no more talking. No more seeing Elena or Ethan or my parents, ever again. I didn’t want that. I didn’t want it more than I had ever not wanted anything. And Vito , complicated, careful, hurting Vito , was the only reason I was still here.
So I changed. Not dramatically, not all at once. I just stopped pushing against things. I stopped asking for what I knew I couldn’t have. I dressed myself in the mornings and stayed close to him in the evenings and tended his wounds every day without being asked. I was quiet when quiet was needed. I was trying, the only way I knew how, to survive.
When Vito told me he would take me outside, I felt something complicated move through me , excitement and something else beneath it, something that felt like the edge of a drop.
"Really?" I said.
"Didn’t you want to see the sun?"
"Yes!" I grabbed his arm with both hands. "Vito, you’re the best."
He took me out in the car. I sat in the back seat with my nose almost touching the window, watching the city move past like something from a dream I’d been trying to remember. He drove until I recognized the building , the school. Elena’s school.
And then I saw her.
She was coming through the front gate with her backpack, her head down. She didn’t look like my Elena , not the Elena who sang while she cooked or pulled me into her lap to read. She looked smaller somehow. Heavier. Her face had the expression of someone carrying something they couldn’t put down.
"Elena!"
Vito’s hand covered my mouth before the sound fully left it. I grabbed at his arm, twisting, trying to pull free. I needed her to hear me. I needed her to look up and see me and know I was here, I was alive, I was right here,
Elena slowed.
She turned her head toward the car.
I went completely still. My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my throat. She was looking right at us , right at the window , and I stared at her face through the tinted glass and she couldn’t see me. She couldn’t see anything. Just her own reflection in a car she didn’t recognize.
I bit down on Vito’s hand. Hard. I felt the give of skin and tasted copper and I didn’t care, I didn’t care about any of it, I just needed him to let go, just for one second,
He didn’t let go.
Elena stood by the car for a long moment. Something moved across her face , confusion, or maybe something softer than confusion, like the feeling of a word on the tip of your tongue that won’t come. She looked at the window one more time. Then she turned and got into the car waiting for her a few spaces away.
I watched it pull out into traffic. I watched until it was gone.
Vito released me.
"Elena!" My voice came out broken, scraped raw. "Don’t go , take me with you,"
I turned and hit him. My palm connected with his face before I had decided to do it. "You’re all bad people! All of you! Why are you doing this to me? I want Elena, I want to go home, I want my parents,"
"Anna." His voice was steady, which made it worse.
"I want to go home!"
"I’m sorry," he said. "I lied to you. You can’t go home."
The words went through me like something cold and final.
"What do you mean I can’t?"
"You’ll understand soon."
I cried until I ran out of the energy to keep crying. At some point the exhaustion took over, and I fell asleep in the back seat without meaning to. When I woke up, we weren’t in the car anymore. Then we were in a helicopter, and then somewhere else entirely, and the light outside told me an entire day had passed while I was somewhere between sleep and grief.
Vito held food out to me. "Anna. Eat something."
I turned away from him. "I’m not hungry."
My stomach immediately betrayed me. The growl was loud enough that there was no pretending.
"Eat," he said, with less patience this time. "You need strength to stay alive. That’s the only thing that matters right now."
"What do you mean, stay alive?"
Something shifted in him. The gentleness he’d been carrying like a second skin pulled back, and what was underneath it was harder and colder. He looked at me the way people look when they’ve decided to tell you something difficult because you need to hear it more than you need to be protected from it.
"If you decide you don’t want to live, I can arrange that very easily. There are people here who would love to get their hands on a girl like you , not to hurt you quickly, but slowly. They collect things. People, sometimes. Display them. Take what they want and leave the rest." He let that land. "You saw those people on the operating table when you first arrived. You remember that?"
I nodded, barely.
"That’s what happens when someone decides you’re more useful in pieces. Your heart. Your kidneys. Your eyes." With each word he named, I pressed my hands over that part of my body, as if I could hold myself together by covering it. My vision blurred. "They remove them and sell them. You would never see your family again , not because you went home late, but because there would be nothing left of you to send back."
I grabbed his sleeve. My hands were shaking. "Vito. I know you’re good. You’ll protect me, you said so,"
His expression didn’t soften. "I never said I was good."
We arrived by boat. The moment I stepped off, my body decided it had reached its limit , the rocking of the water caught up with me all at once and I bent over the dock and lost everything I’d managed to eat. I straightened up slowly, wiping my face, trying to get my bearings.
Then I saw what was in front of me.
The island’s tree line began maybe twenty feet from where I was standing, and it moved. The ground moved. The undergrowth was alive with them , coiling through the roots and branches, dropping from the lower limbs, sliding between the exposed rocks in the dirt. More of them than I had ever seen in my life, more than I had known could exist in one place.
"Ah," The sound that came out of me wasn’t quite a scream, just everything inside me trying to escape through my throat at once.
Vito stepped in front of me. One hand in his pocket, easy and unbothered, the other extended toward me , palm up, waiting. He stood between me and the tree line like it was nothing. Like this place was nothing. Like he had been here before and it had never touched him.
He turned his head and looked at me over his shoulder, and his eyes were calm in a way that made the rest of the world feel even more dangerous by comparison.
"Anna," he said. "Welcome to my world."
