They said she died peacefully.
That's what they always say, don't they? When someone slips away in a hospital bed — when the machines stop beeping, and the room goes quiet except for the sigh of grief no one dares to release. Peaceful. Like death is ever kind.
I was five.
Too young to understand why my mother wasn't waking up. Too small to make sense of the nurses whispering in the hallway or the way they looked at me, like I was already a problem they didn't know how to solve.
Her man was Rebecca.
She was twenty-five.
And her blood betrayed her.
They said it was cancer. Aggressive. Silent. A thief in the bloodstream. By the time they caught it, it had already taken everything. I was all she had. And when she left, I had no one.
No father.
No family.
Just a name I couldn't pronounce, and a world I didn't belong to.
The system chewed me up und spat me out. Foster homes. Group homes. Back and forth like a package no one ordered. Smiles that didn't last. Promises that broke before they were even spoken. Every time someone tried to "fix" me, I'd break first, make sure they knew I was no one's charity case. No one's second chance.
Eventually they stopped trying.
I got older. Quieter. I stopped waiting to be rescued and started fighting instead. Literally. Underground rings don't ask for backstories. Just fists. Blood.
And that, at least, I could give them.
Then one night, seventeen years into this messy life, someone knocked on my door. A stranger. Two of them, actually.
His name was Mariano Marcello, a man I'd only ever heard of in headlines. CEO. Businessman. Untouchable. I knew his face from magazines. I knew his name from rumors.
But I didn't know why he'd come for me.
Or what kind of danger was following him.
All I knew was that everything I thought I knew about my life...
Was a lie.
And now the last i never asked for is trying to pull me under.
But I won't drown.
Not again.