Chapter 11%
Zeus came rushing in like a storm. His face–panic. Real panic. He dropped to his knees beside me !!
I let my eyes roll back, coughed once, then went limp in his arms. Oh, baby. You’re so easy when you’re drowning in guilt
He carried me like I was something holy. Whispered my name. “Zoraya, breathe. Stay with me. I got you I got you.
By the time we got to the hospital, the doctor I paid five grand to lie was already waiting.
She put on her solemn face, stared Zeus in the eyes like she cared. “Mr. Lambert.. she’s under enormous stress. The pregnancy is extremely fragile. Any emotional distress could result in loss of the child. You need to protect her from all negativity.“?
Zeus clenched his jaw. “Is she going to be okay?”
“She will be. But she needs rest. A new environment. No triggers. You want this baby, Mr. Lambert? Then don’t bring her pain.”
She glanced at me like I was the victim of some horror story. And he nodded. He fucking nodded.
You see, Savannah? You left him with guilt and ashes. But me? I’m still here. Breathing. Bleeding. Carrying his future.
Let’s see which of us he remembers five years from now. Let’s see who really wins in the end.”
SAVANNAH’S POVE
My surgery… was hell.
Luca–my half–brother, apparently–performed it himself. Said no one else was touching my brain but him. He was cold, sharp as ice, but his hands were steady. He never called me sister, not even once. But when I woke up, with pain slicing through my skull and the weight of everything I’d lost choking me, he was there. Silent Watching. Guarding.
And then three years passed. Three fucking years.
That’s how long it’d been since I died.}
And my child? My child didn’t make it.
4 didn’t cry.!
I couldn’t.
Maybe it was the stress. The medication. Or maybe it was fate. Maybe the baby just knew this world was too cruel to enter with a mother like me and a father like him. I still woke up sometimes clutching my belly, forgetting it was empty. I still heard the heartbeat that never
got to speak.
But I wasn’t the same woman who kneeled in the rain with blood in her mouth and a man’s boots walking away,!
No.!
She died
And I was born.
My father–Mr. Moretti–stood by the window the whole time. I thought he might cry. I thought he’d say something poetic, like in the movies. But he just looked at me with eyes that had seen too much war, too much betrayal, and nodded.
“You did good, figlia,” he said quietly. “You did what I could not. You survived.”
My father had brought me here after the operation. A quiet estate nestled in the Swiss Alps, hidden beneath layers of stone and silence. Winter there had been a blade–you learned to respect it or it killed you. Luca, my half–brother, hadn’t said much. But his eyes were sharper than scalpels. He had saved my life, but he hadn’t been soft. He had looked at me like I was a war he’d agreed to fight.
“Recovery’s not a destination, he had said once, stitching my arm after a training session. “It’s a damn battlefield.”
I had bled into that snow for weeks. I had learned to shoot with numb fingers. I leamed to breathe through the ache. I earned to forget Zeus’s voice in my eat whispering lies with the same mouth that used to kiss me.
I had cut my hair short. No more long waves for him to wrap around his hand. I had worn black–not for mourning, but for armor. Silk gloves lined with steel, Heels designed to snap ribs if I swung just right.
My father had watched quietly. Guilt clinging to him like old smoke. He hadn’t found me in time. But he had tried to make it right.
One night, while I had been wrapping my fists before a fight, he hit a cigar, eyes low, and said, “They called you dead, figlia. Then rise like death’s daughter.“2
been meant to
I hadn’t answered. I had just nodded. That was what I was now. Death’s daughter. Cold. Calculated. Alive because I hadn’t be
- be.
Three winters later, I no longer shook when someone raised their voice. I no longer apologized for surviving
I no longer cried when I heard his name.
But I did write. Not in a journal, Not in sad little pages of heartbreak. I had written in a ledger. Leather–bound, thick. With a pen made of steel and purpose.
Names
Faces)
Dates.
Offenses
Those who had hurt me. Those who had watched.
Those who had stayed silent when I bled.
Zeus’s name had been carved at the top. Not because I had wanted him back, Not because I had still loved him. That part of me had burned.
But because he’d killed me. And now I knew how to return the favor without lifting a finger!
I didn’t need revenge
I needed justice.
And when I was done, they’d wish I had stayed dead. I glanced down at the last line I had written that night, hand steady, ink charp like a bladed
“They buned me. But I wasn’t the one who died.
THE ROOM smelled like cigar smoke and blood memory. The kind of scent you can’t wash off. Oak panels lined the walls, carved with generations of power It wasn’t a room made for softness, and definitely not for women. But I didn’t flinch when I stepped inside. Twelve chairs. Twelve men. Every one of them handpicked by my father across four decades. Old faces, sharp eyes. They watched me like I was a ghost walking.
“She’s Moretti blood, my father said, voice calm but iron. “Legitimate. Rightful.”
Some of them nodded. Most didn’t. One even scoffed. Bald guy, deep scar across his throat–Marco, I think. “With respect, Don Moretti. she’s a woman. A girl. Not raised in this life. Not forged in it like your son.”
Luca stood behind me, silent, sharp–jawed, ready to draw blood. I could feel it. But I lifted a hand before he could speak!
I didn’t need him to fight my battles. Not anymore
I took a step forward. Let the silence stretch. Then I spoke–fluent Sicilian, every syllable clean and clear.
“Quando un uomo dimentica da dove vene, è già morto.”)
(“When a man forgets where he comes from, he’s already dead“}||
That shut them up.
