Chapter 7

Seraphina Vitiello POV:

The music died, leaving behind a silence so heavy it felt like it could crush bones.

The guests were whispering, a low murmur of scandalized delight, like an audience watching a tragedy unfold.

Dante stepped over the broken glass. His dress shoes crunched violently on the shards, the only sound in the cavernous room.

He reached down and ripped the bracelet off my wrist.

The string snapped with a pathetic pop. Beads scattered across the floor, rolling through the puddles of spilled champagne like lost marbles.

He picked up the main strand, wiping my blood off it with a handkerchief as if my DNA were a disease he couldn't wait to scrub away.

He handed it to Isabella.

"Here," he said softly. "It's back where it belongs."

Isabella clutched it to her chest, weeping theatrically. "Thank you, my love. I was so scared I'd lost it forever."

Dante turned back to my father, his face a mask of cold indifference.

"What is the punishment for theft in the Vitiello family?" he asked.

My father adjusted his cufflinks, bored. "The whip. Ten lashes for every thousand dollars of value."

"This bracelet is priceless," Dante said, his eyes locking onto mine. "It represents my life."

"Fifty lashes," my father decided.

I went cold.

Fifty.

My back was already a map of scars from childhood beatings. Fifty lashes with the family's leather strap would strip the skin from the bone. It could kill me.

"No," I whispered. I tried to scramble back on the slippery floor, my heels sliding in the mess. "Grandmother gave me the stones. Please."

"Still lying," Dante said. He looked at the guards. "Take her to the basement."

They dragged me out.

I didn't scream then. I saved it for the dungeon.

They chained my wrists to the overhead pipe. My toes barely touched the concrete, leaving me strung up like a side of beef.

My father didn't do it himself. He had a heavy hand, but he didn't like to sweat in his tuxedo.

He nodded to the enforcer.

The first lash hit.

It felt like a molten wire slicing through my dress and into my flesh.

I bit my lip until it bled, tasting copper.

One.

Two.

Three.

The leather curled around my ribs, slicing into my arms as I tried to twist away.

By ten, my dress was in tatters.

By twenty, I was screaming.

Dante stood in the corner. He had his hand over Isabella's eyes, pressing her face into his chest so she wouldn't have to see the brutality she had orchestrated.

"Don't look, Bella," I heard him say, his voice muffled by the ringing in my ears. "It's ugly."

I was the ugly thing. I was the monster being put down.

Thirty.

I started to dissociate. I floated out of my body, hovering near the damp ceiling. I watched the girl hanging from the chains. She looked so small. So broken.

Forty.

I stopped making noise. My throat was raw, my lungs empty.

Fifty.

The enforcer stopped.

They unchained me. I crumpled to the floor, a heap of raw meat and ruined silk.

"Let her rot here tonight," my father said.

They left. The heavy metal door clanged shut, sealing me in the blackness.

I lay in the dark for an hour, waiting for the bleeding to slow, shivering as shock set in.

Then, painfully, inch by inch, I crawled.

I crawled up the stairs. I crawled to the servants' quarters, where I kept a first aid kit hidden under a loose floorboard.

I sat on the edge of a cot, needle and thread in my shaking hands.

I couldn't reach my back. It was a ruin I couldn't fix.

I had to stitch what I could reach-my arms, my shoulders, where the whip had curled around-and bind the rest tight with gauze to stop the blood.

My phone buzzed.

It was on the floor where I had dropped it.

A text from Isabella.

*Photo attachment.*

It was her and Dante. They were in the back of a limo. He was kissing her neck. She was holding the bracelet up to the camera, the diamonds catching the light.

*He says I taste like strawberries,* the caption read. *What do you taste like, sister? Blood and failure?*

I didn't reply.

I didn't feel angry.

I felt nothing.

The pain in my back was a dull roar, a wall of white noise that drowned out the last of my love for them.

I packed a single duffel bag.

The butler found me an hour later.

"Your father says you are to stay in the basement quarters until you leave for London," he said, refusing to meet my eyes. Whether out of pity or disgust, I couldn't tell. "You are not allowed in the main house."

"Fine," I said, my voice a rasp.

"And you leave in two days."

"I know," I said.

I zipped up the bag.

Two days.

I could survive two days in hell if it meant I never had to come back.