Page 13 of Empire
“Come back to me, cuore mio.”
I feel a tear slip down my cheek, and slide the needle in.
Salvatore
illicit affairs / Death By a Thousand Cuts – Taylor Swift
Itellmyselfit’sonlyphysical, the same way men tell themselves a knife is harmless if they keep holding the handle.
I repeat it often enough that the lie starts to wear grooves into my head. It’s only sex. The only relief that bleeds off the pressure every six months when the Five Families meet.
It doesn’t touch politics outside the bed where he holds me down and takes what he wants. It doesn’t follow me home or change anything essential.
I can still sit at my father’s right hand and be proud of my name. I can still look a man in the eye and discuss shipments, marriages, punishments, or votes without thinking about the taste of a forbidden heir’s taste on my tongue.
It would be easier to keep believing that if it hasn’t already been going on since Vintermoor.
Two years of hotel rooms and safe houses, of summits and half-night disappearances. Of stolen cigarettes on balconies andbruises hidden under expensive shirts. Of pretending in daylight and unraveling by midnight.
Two years of telling myself I’m not in love with a man I should want to kill.
The car to the airstrip is due in twenty minutes, and my father is in his office taking a last call before we leave for the bi-annual summit.
I drift to the only place that feels like home in this cage—wherever my little sister is.
Lucia stands barefoot in the grass near the rose hedge with a book tucked against her chest, and sunlight catches in the dark ribbon tying back her hair.
She’s thirteen now, all long limbs, serious eyes, and the kind of beauty that hasn’t realized what danger it will invite in a family like ours.
She lifts her head the second she hears me, and smiles—and just like that, the whole fucking morning becomes easier.
She is the only light in my life.
Not in the dramatic way poets write in their bad little books because they’ve never seen real darkness and think sadness makes them profound.
I mean something simpler—she is the only person in this house whose presence doesn’t demand performance from me. The only one who doesn’t want my name, my usefulness, my obedience, or my future.
She wants stories, sweets, and for me to stop looking so tired. She is sunlight in a place built of stone and expectancy. She is softness untouched by our father’s hands; my only weakness and my only joy.
“You’re late, Salva,” she says as I cross the garden toward her.
“I’m not.”
“You are by my standards.”
I huff out a laugh despite myself. “Your standards are unrealistic.”
“They’re excellent. I am a Vieri, after all,” she says primly.
I stop in front of her and wipe the red frosting from her chin. “You sound more like me every time I leave.”
Lucia makes a face and wrinkles her nose. “Oh, that sounds awful.”
“It is,” I say. “You should stop while there is still hope.”
She grins, then fixes the lapel of my jacket even though it doesn’t need fixing. It’s an old habit of hers she picked up from our late mother.
“Will Pappa be angry this time?” she asks quietly.
