Loving My Enemy's Son

Chapter 2 — The Night Everything Ended

LOVING MY ENEMY'S SON

Chapter 2 — The Night Everything Ended

The doors gave way with a sound like the house itself was screaming.

Tiara pressed herself deeper into the dirt beneath the hedge, both hands clamped over her mouth, and through the narrow gaps in the leaves she watched men in masks pour out onto the lawn — and behind them, dragged between two of them each, two people she would have known anywhere in the world.

*Mom. Dad.*

Every instinct in her small body screamed to run to them. Her legs actually tensed to do it, some deep animal part of her already halfway to standing before her mother's voice stopped her cold in her own head.

*No matter what you hear. No matter what you see. Don't come out.*

She stayed. She hated herself for staying, even as she understood, dimly, that staying was the only thing her mother had asked of her.

Her father was bleeding through his shirt, one eye already swelling shut, and still he stood as tall as the men holding him would allow. Her mother was forced down onto the stone path, and even from here Tiara could see that her mother's spine hadn't bent an inch, not even on her knees.

"Leave her alone!" her father shouted, and a rifle butt drove into his stomach hard enough that Tiara flinched as if she'd taken the blow herself.

He didn't fall.

A man stepped forward from the others — unhurried, in no rush at all, peeling off his gloves finger by finger like he had nowhere else in the world he needed to be. "I expected more from the great Alessandro Romano."

Her father spat blood onto the stones. "If you're here to kill me, stop wasting my time."

This wasn't a robbery. Tiara understood that now, watching the leader circle her parents like he already knew exactly how this would end and was only deciding how long to make them wait for it. Robbers didn't know her father's name. Robbers didn't come with this many men, this much certainty, this much patience.

They had come for her family. Specifically. On purpose.

"Tell me where it is," the leader said, crouching in front of her father, close enough that Tiara could no longer see his face at all, only her father's, set and furious and afraid in a way she had never once seen it before tonight.

Silence.

"I'll ask again."

Nothing.

The leader's voice went flat, all patience gone out of it at once. "So be it." He straightened, turned away, already finished with the matter before he'd even given the order. "Kill them."

"No—" The word tore out of Tiara before she could stop it, though no sound actually escaped past her own hand.

Her father twisted free of the men holding him and lunged toward his wife. "*Run!*" — to no one, to everyone, to a daughter he couldn't see but somehow, impossibly, seemed to be shouting it at anyway.

The shots came in threes.

He staggered. Blood spread fast and dark across his chest, and for one unbearable second his eyes swept toward the hedge — didn't find her, couldn't have found her — and found the place instead, as if some part of him already knew exactly where she was hiding.

His lips moved. No sound behind it at all.

*Live.*

He fell.

The scream building in Tiara's throat never made it past her teeth. She bit down on her own hand instead, harder than she'd ever bitten anything, and tasted copper flood her mouth, and still she made no sound at all.

Her mother's cry cut off before it had even finished forming. She'd barely crawled two feet toward her husband before the second shot came, and then she simply folded down beside him on the stones, and the whole garden went silent except for the fire already climbing the west wing behind them.

---

"Search it," the leader said.

Flashlights swept the lawn — the fountain, the flower beds, the hedges lining the garden's edge. One beam paused, impossibly close, sweeping so near to where Tiara hid that she could see the dust caught in the light.

She stopped breathing entirely.

"Don't see the girl."

"Fire'll take care of her." A shrug, careless, already turning away.

The leader looked back at the burning house a long moment, his face lit orange by it. "No witnesses." He turned toward the men still standing near the doors. "Burn the rest of it."

A match flared. Someone tossed it toward the gasoline-soaked steps, and the flames climbed the mansion like something starving that had waited its whole life to be fed.

From beneath the hedge, eleven-year-old Tiara Romano watched her entire home burn, and her parents lie motionless on the stones twenty feet away, and she did not move, and she did not make a single sound — not when the heat finally reached her hiding place, not when her own teeth found the back of her hand again and again until there was nothing left of the skin to bite.

*Don't come out. No matter what happens.*

So she didn't.

The SUVs pulled away one by one, engines fading into the dark, until the only sound left in the whole ruined garden was the fire, and beneath it, the small, ragged sound of a child trying not to exist.

---

She didn't know how long she stayed there after the engines disappeared. Long enough that the fire had eaten most of the west wing. Long enough that the cold of the ground had worked its way entirely through her pajamas.

She remembered the phone only when the silence became too enormous to hold alone.

Her hands shook so badly it took three tries to find the single saved contact. She pressed it anyway, and lifted the phone to her ear, and listened to it ring.

Once.

Twice.

Then — "Hello?"

She opened her mouth. Nothing came out but a broken, shapeless sob, the first sound she'd let herself make in what felt like hours.

A pause on the other end. Then, carefully, the voice changed — sharpened, sat up straighter, somehow, even through the phone.

"Tiara?"