CHAPTER 9
1245 Words
NIGHTS WITHOUT SLEEP
Fear did not arrive suddenly.
It crept in quietly, the way dampness seeps into stone slow, patient, inevitable. It settled into Serafina’s body until she no longer remembered what it felt like not to carry it.
Nights were the worst.
Daylight gave the illusion of order. Sunlight softened the mansion’s edges, turned marble forgiving, made violence seem distant—contained behind doors and decisions. But night stripped those lies away. Darkness returned the house to its true nature: a place built for power, not peace.
Serafina lay awake long after the lights were extinguished.
Sleep no longer came naturally. When it did, it was shallow and treacherous, filled with dreams that blurred into memory. She learned to lie still, eyes open, listening. Footsteps echoed differently at night sharper, heavier. She memorized the rhythm of the guards’ patrols, the way doors sighed when opened, the subtle change in air pressure when someone entered a room.
Her body learned before her mind did.
A creak in the hallway and her pulse spiked. A distant voice and her muscles tensed, ready to brace, to endure. She slept with one ear tuned to the world, her breathing shallow, careful not to betray consciousness.
Fear became routine.
It lived in the pauses between sounds, in the silence after laughter died. It sat beside her in bed, a constant presence she no longer fought. Fighting took energy. Acceptance was quieter.
Alessandro did not notice.
Or perhaps he did and found comfort in it.
He slept easily, sprawled across the bed as though nothing in the world could threaten him. Sometimes his hand rested on her waist, heavy and possessive even in sleep. Other nights, he turned his back to her, dismissing her existence entirely.
Both felt the same.
Serafina learned to time her breathing to his, to recognize the exact moment sleep claimed him fully. Only then did she allow herself to move to inch closer to the edge of the mattress, to reclaim a sliver of space that felt like hers.
Even then, rest did not come.
Her thoughts wandered instead.
She replayed moments from the day fragments of conversations overheard, expressions she’d memorized, silences that felt too deliberate to be empty. She thought about the man executed in the courtyard, about the woman turned away at the gates, about the wives who came pleading with eyes that knew disappointment too well.
She wondered how many nights they spent awake like this.
Survival, she learned, was not heroic. It was repetitive. Unremarkable. It was a series of small, careful decisions made over and over again.
Do not provoke.
Do not ask.
Do not react too quickly or too slowly.
She catalogued Alessandro’s moods the way others tracked weather. She learned the warning signs of his temper: the tightening of his jaw, the precise stillness before he spoke, the way his voice softened just before it cut.
She adjusted herself accordingly.
Fear sharpened her senses.
She noticed things others didn’t how guards shifted their weight when orders displeased them, how certain names caused tension to ripple through a room. She learned which corridors were avoided, which rooms remained locked even when no one was inside.
She learned that power did not need to shout.
It whispered.
Some nights, she rose quietly from bed and padded to the window, careful not to wake Alessandro. From there, she watched the grounds below the sweep of floodlights, the silhouettes of men pacing their routes. The mansion looked impregnable from above, a fortress of stone and silence.
She wondered how many secrets it held.
And then there were the nights when Alessandro came to her.
Not violently. Not loudly.
Those nights were somehow worse.
He would speak to her in a low, measured tone, discussing nothing of importance—his day, a meeting, a minor irritation. He liked her quiet then, liked the way she listened without interrupting, without opinion.
Sometimes he reminded her of her place.
“You live well,” he said once, his fingers tracing her wrist with absent precision. “Better than most. Remember that.”
She nodded, because disagreement served no purpose.
He did not ask if she was happy. Happiness was irrelevant. Utility mattered.
When he slept afterward, Serafina lay awake beside him, staring into the darkness, her skin still humming with awareness. She learned to dissociate to separate sensation from emotion, body from mind. It was another survival skill, honed with repetition.
Fear taught her that endurance was not passive.
It was active, strategic.
She began to prepare without knowing exactly what she was preparing for.
She hid small things information, not objects. Knowledge tucked away in memory, layered carefully so no single piece stood alone. She paid attention to Luca more closely now, to his movements, his absences, his presence.
He remained distant, formal. But she noticed the way his gaze lingered not on her, but on Alessandro when his temper sharpened. She noticed how Luca positioned himself subtly between Alessandro and others when tensions rose, how he redirected conversations before they curdled into something worse.
She noticed that Luca never entered her space uninvited.
In a house where boundaries were routinely violated, that restraint stood out like a quiet rebellion.
One night, she woke from a half-dream convinced someone was in the room.
Her heart raced as she listened, every nerve alight. The shadows remained still. Alessandro slept beside her, undisturbed. She lay there for a long time, waiting for her pulse to slow.
It didn’t.
That was when she understood something fundamental had shifted.
She was no longer afraid of specific things Alessandro’s temper, the sound of gunfire, the consequences of bad decisions.
She was afraid of uncertainty.
Of the knowledge that at any moment, something unseen could change everything. That safety was not a state but a temporary illusion.
Fear stopped being an emotion and became a condition.
Days passed like this, blending together. Serafina moved through them with quiet efficiency, her smiles practiced, her silences precise. Those around her assumed she was fragile.
They were wrong.
Fear had not broken her.
It had honed her.
She began to anticipate needs before they were voiced, to position herself where she could hear without being noticed. She learned how to ask harmless questions that revealed far more than they seemed to.
At night, lying awake, she practiced imagining different futures.
Not escape she had learned better than that.
But survival with variation.
What if Alessandro fell ill?What if alliances shifted?
What if Luca were no longer merely the shadow behind the throne?
These thoughts frightened her and strengthened her in equal measure.
Because imagining alternatives was the first act of defiance.
One evening, as Alessandro slept beside her, Serafina stared at the ceiling and acknowledged a truth she could no longer deny.
Fear had shaped her, but it had also prepared her.
She did not know when change would come, or in what form. She did not know whether she would survive it.
But she knew this:
When the moment arrived when the structure that trapped her finally cracked she would not be caught unaware.
She would be ready.
The mansion remained silent around her, vast and watchful. Outside, guards continued their endless circuits. Somewhere in the city, decisions were being made that would ripple outward, unseen and unstoppable.
Serafina lay awake, breathing carefully, eyes open in the dark.
Fear was routine now.
And survival refined, deliberate, quietly evolving had become instinct
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