Chapter 6

Gianna POV

Pain has a taste.

It tastes like copper and bile.

I woke because the burning across my back was louder than the oblivion I craved. It felt as though every inch of skin from my shoulders to my waist had been flayed open, leaving raw nerve endings exposed to the air.

I was lying on my stomach in my bed. Someone had moved me from the dungeon.

I tried to push myself up, but my arms trembled and gave way. I collapsed back into the silk sheets, gasping as the movement stretched the raw wounds on my back like tearing fabric.

"You're awake."

The voice was light. Airy. Like a child who had just found a new toy.

I turned my head.

Sofia was sitting at the vanity. My vanity. She was applying my lipstick, smacking her lips together to test the shade in the mirror.

"Get out," I croaked. My throat felt lined with glass shards.

"Dante said you needed rest," she said, spinning around on the stool. "But I told him I wanted to check on my sister."

"We are not sisters."

"We are now," she smiled. It was a cold, empty smile that didn't reach her eyes. "We share everything. His house. His name. His attention."

She stood up and walked toward the bed. She was holding something in her hand.

A bundle of wire.

No. Not wire.

Strings.

My steel cello strings.

My stomach lurched.

"You know," she said, twirling the metal coils around her fingers. "I always hated the sound of that thing. It was so... mournful. Like a dying cat."

She sat on the edge of the mattress. Her weight pulled the sheets tight against my flayed skin, sending a fresh wave of agony down my spine. I flinched.

"Dante is gone," she whispered. "He went to the Commission meeting. He won't be back for hours."

"What do you want?"

"I want to make sure you understand the hierarchy here."

She reached out and grabbed my left hand. The hand that pressed the strings. The hand that created the music.

"Dante broke your spirit downstairs," she said. "But you still have this arrogance about you. You still think you are better than me because you are a Vitiello."

"I am better than you," I spat. "Because I don't need to steal someone else's life to have one."

Sofia's face twisted.

She coiled the steel A-string around my index finger.

"You saved him in the cave," she said softly.

My heart stopped.

"You know?"

"Of course I know," she laughed, a hollow, tinkling sound. "I found his journal years ago. He wrote about the girl's voice. About the song. I just... adapted the story. I made it mine."

"He will find out."

"He won't. Because he believes what he wants to believe. And he wants to believe I am his destiny."

She pulled the string tight.

The steel bit into my flesh.

"Stop," I gasped.

"You use these fingers to play, don't you?" she asked.

She yanked.

I screamed.

The string sliced through the skin, grinding down to the bone. Blood sprayed onto the white duvet.

"Stop it!" I tried to pull my hand back, but she was strong. Fueled by a manic, jealous strength.

She wrapped the string around my middle finger.

"This is for slapping me," she hissed.

The wire sang.

Slice.

"And this is for trying to take him from me."

Slice.

I was sobbing now, the pain in my hand rivaling the fire on my back. My fingers were mangled, bleeding freely. The nerves were severed. I could feel the loss of sensation, the death of my music.

"Why?" I wept. "You have him. You have everything. Why take this?"

"Because you love it," she said simply. "And you aren't allowed to love anything but pain."

She dropped my bloody hand. She stood up and wiped her palms on her dress as if dusting off crumbs.

"Where is Mia?" I asked. I needed to know. "Is she alive?"

Sofia paused at the door. She looked back over her shoulder.

"Oh, the maid?" she giggled. "She was so noisy in the dungeon. Screaming your name. Begging for mercy."

Ice filled my veins.

"What did you do?"

"I didn't do anything," Sofia said innocently. "But Dante's men... they have rules about rats. Rats shouldn't talk."

She tapped her lips.

"So they took her tongue."

The world tilted on its axis.

"And then they realized she was useless without it," she continued. "So they put a bullet in her head and dumped her in the landfill south of the city."

A sound tore out of me. It wasn't human. It was the sound of a wounded animal realizing it was cornered and dying.

Mia. My Mia.

She was dead. Mutilated and discarded like trash because of me.

"Sleep tight, Principessa," Sofia said.

She closed the door.

I lay in the pool of my own blood.

The tears stopped. The sobbing stopped.

Something inside my chest, the frantic, beating thing that had hoped for salvation, finally stopped moving.

It died.

And in its place, something cold and sharp began to grow.