Revenge and Roses

The Only Vote That Matters

Conti Estate, Palermo — Later That Night

Elara's POV

"Say that again. Slower this time, because I don't think my brain processed it correctly the first time.", Mia said.

Elara sat on the edge of her bed with her phone pressed to her ear and her shoes still on. She hadn't taken them off. She hadn't done anything since walking in except sit down exactly where she'd landed, as though moving any further into the room might make the last hour more real than it already was.

"My uncle wants me to marry Silas Vane," Elara repeated.

"The Silas Vane?" Mia's voice dropped, even though she was alone in her own apartment across the city and had no one to hide from. "The one who burned down half a harbor because someone shorted him on a shipping fee?"

"Yep, that's the one,” Elara affirms.

Neither of them said anything for a moment. Elara could hear Mia breathing on the other end, could picture her exactly — sitting up straighter, the way she always did when something mattered enough to stop moving for. It should have made her feel less alone. It made her feel, instead, the full weight of how far away Rome suddenly was.

"I don't know what to say to you right now," Mia said finally, quieter than before. "I want to say something useful, and I don't have anything useful. I just have — Elara. Elara, that's insane. That is actually insane."

"I know.", Elara says.

"No, I don't think you do, because you sound like you're reading me the weather." Mia pauses, then asks, "Are you okay? Actually. Not the answer you give everyone else."

And that was the question that undid her, more than the whiskey, more than her uncle's voice breaking on the word “parents”. She opened her mouth to give the practiced answer — “I'm fine, I'm managing it, I'll figure it out” — and instead something in her chest simply gave way, and she found she couldn't speak at all for a moment, could only sit there with the phone pressed hard against her ear and her free hand pressed flat against her sternum like she could hold herself together from the outside if the inside wasn't cooperating.

"No," she said finally, and her voice came out small in a way she hated. "I am not okay."

"Okay." Mia's voice gentled instantly. She dropped every trace of shock to make room for whatever Elara needed instead. "Okay. I'm here. Take your time."

She didn't take her time gracefully. She cried — not the composed, contained kind of crying she allowed herself in mirrors, but the ugly kind, shoulders shaking, breath catching wrong in her throat, one hand pressed over her mouth like she could muffle it back into her body if she just pushed hard enough. She was furious at herself for it even as it happened. She had promised herself a long time ago that she would not be a woman who cried over men who hadn't even earned the tears yet, and here she was, undone by a man she'd never met, because of what he'd made her uncle become in order to hand her over to him.

Mia didn't try to fix it. She just stayed on the line, saying small things every so often — “I'm here, I'm not going anywhere, take whatever time you need” — until the worst of it passed and Elara was left hollowed out and breathing unevenly, staring at the c***k in her ceiling that ran from the window to the light fitting, a flaw in the plaster she'd never once thought to mention to anyone because it had never mattered before tonight.

"He had two glasses of whiskey poured before I even walked into the room," she said eventually, once she trusted her voice again. "He knew exactly how it was going to go. He'd already decided, and he let me stand there thinking I had a choice."

"That's not sweet, that's strategy, Elara. He wasn't pouring you a drink, he was setting a table," Mia says.

"It wasn't meant to be sweet. It was meant to be effective." She pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes, hard, until she saw color behind the lids. "And it was. I know exactly what he did. I watched him do it in real time, piece by piece, and I still ended up drinking the whiskey at the end of it.” “What does that make me?" Elara asked, trying to force a laugh.

"It makes you a person who loves someone who's using that against you. That's not the same as weak, Elara. Don't do that to yourself tonight on top of everything else," Mia replies.

"He raised me." Her voice cracked again, differently this time — not grief now, something closer to disbelief at her own loyalty. "He sat by my bed every night for a month after my parents died, because I was too scared to sleep with the light off. I don't know how to hold both of those things in my hands at once. The uncle who did that, and the man who poured a second glass of whiskey tonight because he already knew I'd cave."

"Maybe you're not supposed to be able to hold both of them yet. Maybe tonight you just get to be angry, and sad, and terrified, and none of it has to make sense or resolve into a decision before you go to sleep," Mia says, trying to comfort her.

Elara let that sit. It was, she realized, the first permission anyone had given her all night to simply not be all right yet — not her uncle, who needed an answer, and not the version of herself that had been narrating the evening in flat, manageable sentences since the moment she'd walked out of that study.

"I'm scared," she admitted, and the word felt foreign in her mouth, unfamiliar from disuse. "Not of the wedding. Not really even of him, at least not yet, because I don't know him enough to be scared of him specifically. I'm scared that I already know how this ends. I'm scared I'm going to spend the rest of my life the way I spent tonight — grieving something I haven't lost yet, because grieving it in advance is the only way I know how to survive losing it later."

"That's the smartest, saddest thing you've ever said to me," Mia says.

"Thanks," she replied.

"I mean it as a compliment and a tragedy simultaneously." Mia's voice had gone soft, unguarded. "I wish I could be there right now. I hate that I'm not there right now."

"I know." Elara pulled her knees up to her chest, the phone still pressed to her ear, and let herself, finally, just exist in it — the fear, the grief, the strange tangled loyalty to a man who had just spent her whole life against her in a single conversation. She didn't reach for a plan. She didn't reach for the version of herself that would, eventually, need to decide something. Tonight she only let herself sit in the wreckage of it, unhurried, with her best friend's breathing on the other end of the line as the only proof she wasn't doing it entirely alone.

They stayed like that for a long time — not talking, not needing to, the silence doing more for her than words could have. Somewhere past the window the city went on without her, indifferent, the way it always did, and slowly, without her deciding to let it happen, the panic loosened its grip enough for something else to surface underneath it. Not resolve, not yet. Just a single, quiet thought, arriving the way true things sometimes did — uninvited, and impossible to argue with once it was there.

"Mia." Her voice had changed. Steadier, though it cost her something to make it so. "I can't keep doing this — sitting here, letting other people decide what my life is going to be while I only find out about it after the fact."

"What are you saying?" Mia asks.

Elara looked toward the window, toward the dark shape of the garden and the gate beyond it where something had been watching an hour ago and chosen not to be seen.

"I want to meet him," she said. "Before

any of this is decided. Not my uncle's version of him. Him."