Perched on vicious stilettos, she crosses her arms and looks at me. “You took your precious time waking up. Always such a lazy girl.”
It’s an old line. No matter how active I was or how many soccer games I won, my mother always called me lazy because I wasn’t spending my time the way she wanted. In a way she understood or could benefit from.
If she’s trying to insult me, she’s going to have to work harder than that. “I need water.”
“Is that how you ask your mother for something?”
“Please,” I force myself to say, lips stinging. “May I have some water, please?”
Martina’s smile is deceptively delighted. “No, Serafina. You may not.”
Rage, fear, despair. They roll over me in waves. To be tormented by one parent is bad enough; two in the same day is the kind of thing even the best therapist is going to have a hard time helping me rally from.
That’s when another voice sneaks into my head. Whispers,moya voitelnitsa.
Alik has seen me at my weakest and still calls me a warrior. I need to be one now. For me, for him. I force myself to replaythe sound of his voice, let it settle over me like armor. I’ve gotten this far. I’m not going to let my bitch of a mother break me now.
“What do you want, Mom?” I tug at my ropes, making the anchor above jangle. Feel a spark of hope when the hardware connecting the ropes to the ceiling starts to wiggle. “Why am I here?”
Martina gives me a once-over, head to toe. “You’ve gotten fat,” she says, ignoring my questions. “But still no hips or tits to speak off. Where did the genetics go wrong, I’ll never understand…”
“And I’ll always be a disappointment. I get it. It’s been the same old story for as long as I can remember.” I brace myself on my toes, keeping my body as still as possible. The less I move, the less everything hurts. “Did you string me up to bore me to death with your disappointment? Is that why you dragged me from the car?”
“Oh, Serafina.” My mother shakes her head at my obvious stupidity. “How little you understand.”
“Then tell me, Mom.” I choke on the word, but it seems to trigger something in the woman opposite me. “Tell me what it is you want with me. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to pay.”
If I was standing, her answer would’ve knocked my legs out from under me. “Pay? For what?”
Her expression turns cruel, no amount of beauty able to hide all the evil underneath. “For taking him from me.”
Him? “Who?”
My cluelessness makes her furious. Martina clenches her fists at her sides, rage radiating off her thousand-dollar outfit. “Renzo, you stupid bitch. You took him away from me and now it’s time you accept your punishment.”
“What the hell are you talking—oomph…” She cuts off the rest of my question with a baseball bat to my side. I lose my voice and my breath and, for a second, my ability to see. When I’m able to blink away the stars, I find the woman who gave birth to me winding up for a second swing. “Stop,” I pant. “Stop. Wait a second.”
“So you can beg for your life?” she says a little too gleefully.
“S-so-so you can tell me what I did that was so wrong.” My mother and I have never been close, but if there’s one thing I know she loves almost as much as inflicting pain, it’s telling people how much they’ve fucked up.
“Oh, sweetheart.” Two words that hold more hatred than I ever thought possible. “Where do I even begin?”
Martina leans in so close my next inhale is more expensive perfume than air. “You’re the reason he left,” she hisses. “You were supposed to be beautiful, dutiful. An asset to the family. A prize desired by so many men they’d be fighting for you, promising a fortune if they could get their hands on you.”
“You wanted to sell me in exchange for money and power, you mean.”
She presses the end of the baseball bat against my jaw. “It’s the way our world works. You’re not an idiot, Serafina. You know this.”
“I know you shouldn’t treat people like possessions. Like things to be bartered and sold.”
“Then you’re more of a failure than I realized.” She grinds the hard wood into my chin. “It’s no surprise you ended up here, like this.”
For a woman in five-inch heels and a tightly tailored dress, she moves fast. She swings and I barely have a chance to brace for impact before the bat connects with the upper part of my side, just below one of my upstretched arms. Fire explodes across my ribs and down my back and I bite my tongue to hold in the scream.
“Renzo was so disappointed in who you were, nothing like the daughter we imagined having. He couldn’t look at you.Then, he couldn’t bear to be around you, so he left. He left me,” she hisses, “because he hated you.”