CHAPTER 10
1207 Words
THE GIRL SHE BURIES
There were names Serafina no longer answered to.
Not spoken aloud, not written anywhere names that belonged to a different version of her, a softer one. A girl who once believed life unfolded forward instead of closing in. A girl who thought the future was something you chose, not something decided for you behind locked doors.
That girl still existed, somewhere inside her.
But she was dying.
Serafina felt it most sharply in quiet moments the spaces where memory crept in uninvited. The scent of citrus soap once used in her childhood home. The sound of laughter drifting from the staff quarters, light and careless. The sight of a girl in the city square one afternoon, hair loose, arms swinging freely as she argued animatedly with a friend.
The girl had looked her age.
Serafina had looked through her.
That night, she stood alone in the dressing room long after the servants had gone. The mirrors reflected her endlessly—elegant, composed, untouchable. The woman she had become wore her restraint like armor, her stillness like grace.
She did not recognize herself.
Carefully, she removed her jewelry. Each piece had been chosen by Alessandro, gifted with meaning she had never asked for. Rings slid from her fingers, heavy with ownership. A necklace fell into her palm, cold and sharp-edged.
She placed them on the vanity one by one, arranging them neatly. Control mattered, even here.
Then she sat.
For a long time, she simply breathed.
The girl she used to be had loved small things. Sunlight through leaves. Music played too loudly. Books read past midnight with the reckless certainty that tomorrow would come regardless.
That girl had opinions she voiced without calculating consequence. She laughed without measuring the sound. She believed kindness was a currency that always paid itself back.
Serafina closed her eyes.
She tried to remember the last time she had laughed without restraint.
The memory did not come.
Grief surprised her not sharp, not dramatic, but dense. It pressed against her ribs, made breathing feel like work. There was no single moment she could point to and say, this is when I lost her. It had happened gradually, over years of small erasures.
The first time she swallowed a question instead of asking it.
The first time she learned to smile while afraid.
The first time she realized silence could keep her alive.
The girl had adapted. And adaptation, over time, had become transformation.
She did not hate the woman she was now.
That was the hardest part.
This woman survived. She endured. She knew how to read danger, how to exist within it without being consumed. She was precise, controlled, capable in ways the girl had never needed to be.
But survival demanded payment.
And the currency was innocence.
Some losses did not announce themselves with violence. They slipped away quietly, leaving only absence behind.
Serafina rose and walked to the window. Outside, the grounds lay still beneath the night sky, illuminated in fragments by carefully placed lights. The mansion looked serene from here timeless, unchanging.
A lie she knew intimately.
She pressed her forehead to the cool glass.
When she had first arrived here, barely eighteen, she had told herself she would endure until something changed. That this life was temporary. That she would emerge intact.
She had not understood then that time itself was the enemy.
It did not break her all at once. It reshaped her, slowly, until the edges she loved were worn down into something unrecognizable.
There were moments she mourned openly quietly, internally. Moments when the weight of all she had lost threatened to pull her under. She learned to recognize those moments and retreat inward, to lock grief away where it could not be weaponized against her.
But tonight, alone, she allowed herself something rare.
She allowed herself to grieve.
Not for the life she never had that pain was too vast, too abstract—but for the girl she had been. For the person who would never grow older with her, who would never learn how the world truly worked.
That girl would never see twenty-five.
She had not been killed. She had been buried.
Gently. Gradually. By necessity.
Serafina straightened, wiping her face with careful hands. Tears were a liability. They blurred vision, betrayed weakness. She had learned that early.
Yet even as she composed herself, she understood that mourning was not the same as regret.
She did not wish to return to who she had been.
That girl would not survive here.
The woman she had become might.
The realization settled into her with unexpected calm.
She did not need to save the girl.
She needed to honor her.
And honoring her meant carrying forward what remained curiosity sharpened into awareness, kindness refined into discernment, hope transformed into patience.
It meant letting go of the parts that would only get her hurt.
The next morning, Serafina moved through the house differently.
Not visibly no one else would have noticed. Her posture remained elegant, her expression serene. But inside, something had shifted.
She no longer flinched at the sound of Alessandro’s voice.
She no longer expected rescue.
She did not look at Luca and wonder why he did not intervene.
Instead, she observed.
Alessandro spoke during breakfast about a meeting later that day. His tone was casual, but she noted the tightness around his eyes, the controlled irritation beneath the surface. Something had unsettled him.
She filed it away.
In the corridors, servants avoided her gaze out of habit. She offered small acknowledgments—a nod, a quiet thank you. These gestures cost her nothing and earned her something subtle: attention.
People remembered kindness.
That afternoon, she sat in the garden with a book she did not read, listening to the distant murmur of voices drifting from open windows. Power in motion. Decisions being shaped.
Once, this knowledge would have filled her with helpless anger.
Now, it filled her with resolve.
She understood the structure of her cage better than ever before.
And understanding was power’s shadow.
That evening, she caught her reflection again this time in the darkened glass of a hallway window. For a moment, she saw the girl superimposed over the woman she had become.
The girl looked sad.
The woman looked steady.
Serafina touched the glass lightly, a silent farewell.
She did not promise to remember everything. Memory was a burden she could not afford to carry unchecked. But she promised herself this:
She would not waste what had been taken from her.
The girl she buried had given her something priceless an understanding of what was lost, and therefore, what mattered.
Later that night, as Alessandro slept beside her, Serafina lay awake, her breathing slow and even. Fear was still there, a familiar presence, but it no longer defined her entirely.
Grief had done its work.
It had cleared space.
In that space, something else began to grow—not hope, not yet, but intention.
She no longer dreamed of escape.
She dreamed of endurance with direction.
Of survival that meant more than simply lasting.
The girl was gone.
The woman remained.
And she was learning, quietly and deliberately, how to live with that.
- Writer
