She smiled then, small and satisfied.
“Because he knows my value.”
Her gaze slid over me like I was something scraped off a shoe.
“And you?” she finished softly. “You’re just a worthless bitch who got in the way.”
The insult struck—but I didn’t give her the reaction she wanted. I kept my expression blank, my spine straight, my voice controlled.
“Why do I feel like your family orchestrated the entire choose-who-to-save, choose-who-to-condemn spectacle?”
Her brows lifted a fraction.
The memories surged without warning.
Damp stone floors. Iron chains. The smell of blood and fear. Women screaming in the dark until they learned screamingonly made it worse. The things done to us—things I still couldn’t shape into words without bile rising in my throat.
I swallowed hard, forcing the images back down.
Seraphina stepped closer, her perfume thick and cloying now, filling my lungs.
“My family doesn’t stoop to such crude theatrics,” she said coolly. “We don’t need kidnappings to win wars.”
She leaned in slightly.
“But of course,” she added, “we were the ones who arranged Dmitri’s release after he was captured.”
My pulse spiked.
“In exchange,” she continued, “we asked his captors for a very small favor.”
This time, she watched my face closely.
“To wipe his memories,” she said. “Clean. Efficient.”
Then, softly—almost kindly:
“And they wiped Vanya’s too.”
The room tilted.
“They removed the parts that inconvenienced us,” Seraphina went on, almost conversational. “And then we gave Dmitri something to anchor him.”
She reached into the drawer of the desk and withdrew an imaginary object, miming its weight.
“A diary,” she said. “Written in his own handwriting. Every page forged. Every memory we wanted him to have, written by a man who trusted his own hand more than anyone else’s.”
My jaw slackened.
They had rewritten my son’s.
The realization settled into me slowly, like poison seeping through bone.
Everything my son and I had shared—the nights curled together in our tiny apartment in Greece, the way Vanya used toinsist I stay until he fell asleep, his fingers knotted in the hem of my shirt as if I might vanish if he let go—gone. Erased.
Every whispered story about brave princes and clever mothers. Every soft, ‘sacred Mama’ breathed into my skin after nightmares.
All of it stripped away.