Sold To The Devil's Son

Chapter 10

She woke before the sun did, the room still gray, and lay there a while not moving before she made herself get up.

The floor was cold under her feet. She crossed to the bathroom and stood in front of the mirror for a long moment before she let herself actually look.

Bruising, faint, along her hip. A mark at her throat she didn't remember him leaving, small and darker than the rest of her skin, already going yellow-green at the edges. She touched it once, light, and felt nothing sharp, just a dull soreness that told her it had been there longer than she'd known.

She made herself keep looking. That felt important, somehow — not turning away from what her own body had recorded overnight, even though every instinct in her wanted to pull a robe on and never look at any of it again.

Her mother's face came up in her mind, unbidden. Francesca in her own mirror, some morning thirty years ago, probably standing in a room not so different from this one. Alessandra didn't know if her mother had ever looked at herself the way she was looking now.

"I am not her," Alessandra said, out loud, to the mirror.

It came out smaller than she wanted it to. Not a declaration. More like a question dressed up as one.

She said it again anyway. "I am not her."

The mirror didn't answer, obviously. But something in her chest tightened around the words like it was testing their weight, and she stood there a moment letting the sentence sit in the room instead of taking it back.

She thought about last night. Not all of it: the fact that some part of her body had responded to him anyway, even while the rest of her had been trying to leave the room entirely. She hadn't wanted that. She hadn't asked for it. But it had happened, and pretending otherwise this morning, felt like its own kind of lie, and she'd promised herself that she wasn't going to lie to herself anymore about anything that happened in this house.

She hated it. That was the plain truth of it, no dressing it up. She hated that her body had a mind of its own last night, separate from everything she'd decided and chosen and fought to hold onto. It felt like another kind of theft, on top of everything else that had already been taken from her in the last two days — her name, her home, her choice about any single part of her own life. Now this too. Some traitor instinct in her own skin that hadn't consulted her before it decided to feel something.

She sat down on the edge of the tub because her legs had started to feel unsteady.

"It doesn't mean anything," she said, quiet this time, mostly to herself. "A body responds to things. That's not the same as wanting them."

She wasn't sure she believed that yet. She said it anyway, because saying it felt like a start, and starts were all she had this morning.

She thought about Nonna Rosa's face last time, warm and lined, hands cupping her own face like she was something worth holding carefully. *I know exactly what you are feeling. I felt it too.* Had Rosa felt this too? The confusing, humiliating awareness of her own body doing something her mind hadn't approved? Alessandra didn't know. She hadn't asked.

She stood back up. Looked at herself again in the mirror.

The bruise at her hip. The mark at her throat. Her own eyes, tired, but clear. She'd expected to find something broken looking back at her. Some version of Francesca's resignation. She didn't find that. She found someone tired and sore and furious, all three at once.

"I am not her," she said a third time, and this time it came out steadier.

She turned from the mirror and went back into the bedroom to dress, and that was when her hand brushed the sleeve of the robe she'd left folded over the chair last night, and she felt something small and hard shift inside the fabric.

The knife. Matteo's knife, still tucked where she'd hidden it, exactly where he'd shown her — sleeve. She'd forgotten it was there through everything that happened after he'd given it to her. It had been there the entire time. Small, folded, useless in the moment she might have needed it most, and entirely present anyway, a fact she hadn't thought to reach for.

She held it in her palm for a moment, feeling the weight of it, turning it over the way she had in the hallway when he'd first pressed it into her hand.

'Learn where the exits are. Not to use them. Just to know them.'

She thought about putting it away somewhere safer — It would have been the reasonable thing to do. There was no reason to carry a knife around a house she was going to spend every day of, no immediate use for it that she could point to this morning, sore and tired and freshly furious as she was.

She didn't put it away.

She tucked it back into her sleeve instead, and felt it settle against her wrist.

She didn't know yet if she'd ever use it. She didn't know if the day would come where carrying it mattered, or if it would just sit there, sleeve after sleeve, a habit that never had to become anything more than a habit. But she understood that carrying it changed something in how she held her own shoulders. Gave her hands somewhere to rest besides folded and helpless in her lap.

It wasn't power. Not really. One small knife against a house full of guards and dogs and a man who'd told her plainly there was no version of anything here that didn't end with her belonging to him.

But it was hers. Nobody had given it to her as part of the transaction — Matteo had handed it over quietly, against his own better judgment, against his brother's wishes, because some old grief of his own had made him decide she was worth arming. It was the first thing in this house that existed for her sake and no one else's.

She would carry it. Every day, in her sleeve, out of sight, exactly the way he'd shown her.

She finished dressing. Fixed her hair as best she could without calling for help.

She opened the door and went down to face whatever the house had waiting for her this morning, the knife a small, steady weight against her wrist the whole way down the stairs.