August 5th, 2026
Alessandra's domain
11:01 PM
The room was silent except for the faint hum of rain tapping against the tall gothic windows. The chandeliers overhead swayed slightly, making the shadows stretch unnaturally across the velvet carpet.
Her stormy-gray eyes, cold but filled with an unnatural longing, never left her younger brother.
Rio stood there, his wrists bound in steel cuffs, his gaze dark as ever.
For the first time in six years, they were face to face.
Without asking permission, she brushed a lock of Rio's bangs aside, exposing the jagged scar that cut between his left eye.
Her pale fingers lingered against the scar, caressing it tenderly.
"You've changed… but not as much as you think." Her voice was low, melodic, and disturbingly gentle. "Did you earn this mark in battle?"
Rio's lips remained sealed. His silence was sharper than a blade. Then, suddenly, he jerked his head to the side, forcing her hand away.
The movement was harsh, deliberate. His eyes, burning with restrained fury, locked on hers.
Alessandra only smiled. A soft, knowing smile, as if his rejection only fueled her dark desire. She sighed and clasped her hands in front of her.
Her smile faded.
"Ursula, give us privacy." she said calmly.
The towering giantess immediately stepped forward, her crimson hair falling in damp locks around her scarred face. She glared at Rio like a beast staring at prey.
"Mistress, I object," Ursula rumbled. "This man is dangerous. He nearly killed your men. He could kill you."
Alessandra didn't even flinch. Her face went blank, cold and expressionless.
"I can handle myself. Leave us."
"Mistress..."
"I said leave us."
Ursula's jaw tightened. She wasn't reassured in the slightest, but Alessandra's word was law. She hesitated, then growled.
"If he so much as scratches you, Mistress… I'll tear his throat open."
She turned to the goons. "Untie him."
The gothic-suited men bowed deeply. In unison, they stepped forward and unlocked Rio's cuffs, unwinding the rope that bound his wrists. His hands were free again.
Rio immediately flexed his fingers, the faint sting of blood returning to his veins. He glared at Ursula as the goons filed out one by one.
At the door, Ursula paused, her towering frame blocking the dim light. She shot Rio a glare filled with murderous promise.
"If you give her trouble, soldier boy… I'll be right outside."
Then she closed the door.
Silence.
Only Rio and Alessandra remained.
She stood there, watching him as though she were studying a long-lost painting. Her lips curled into a faint smile, not cold this time, but strangely warm. Longing.
Rio's gaze shifted. On the polished obsidian table near Alessandra's couch lay two daggers. Gothic, curved blades etched with symbols, their hilts bound in black leather.
His heart thudded once. His eyes narrowed.
Alessandra followed his gaze. And then, she chuckled. A soft, almost playful laugh.
"You still have that look in your eyes," she whispered. "Like a wolf that can't stop baring its teeth."
Rio didn't wait.
In one swift movement, he lunged forward, grabbed both daggers, and spun toward her. His military instincts surged like lightning. His hands, steady as steel, crossed the blades at her neck.
The sharp edges kissed her pale skin. One move, and her blood would spill.
Alessandra didn't flinch.
Instead, Rio froze. His stomach tensed as something sharp pressed against him. He glanced down.
Her ring. Silver, ornate, gothic. But on its side, a thin needle-like blade had emerged, pressing against the skin of his stomach.
"Still so slow," Alessandra whispered, chuckling softly. "Just as I remember."
Her storm-gray eyes gleamed as their standoff held, a dagger at her throat, a hidden blade at his belly.
Rio's teeth clenched. His hands didn't waver, but his breathing grew heavier.
"Now, now…" Alessandra's voice was teasing, mocking yet affectionate. "Are you truly going to kill your own sister?"
His voice came low, venomous.
"Bullshit. You're not my sister."
The words hit like a blade, but Alessandra only laughed again, softly, hauntingly.
"You wound me, little brother. Truly."
She tilted her head, pressing her needle-ring a little deeper. He felt its sting.
"Put the daggers down. Let's talk."
For a moment, Rio's entire being screamed to end it right there. To slice her throat and leave her bleeding on her velvet couch.
But he hesitated.
He needed answers.
His grip tightened, then slowly loosened. The daggers lowered, but never left his hands. Suspicion burned in his eyes as he moved toward the opposite chair and sat down.
Alessandra, with her usual grace, sat down across from him, folding her legs elegantly as if nothing had happened.
For a long moment, they stared at one another. Brother and sister. Blood tied together, yet worlds apart.
Finally, Alessandra broke the silence. Her voice was soft, almost tender.
"I've missed you, Rio."
Rio's storm-gray glare didn't waver. His silence stretched, suffocating.
But then, suddenly, his voice cracked the air.
"…Why?"
Alessandra tilted her head.
"Why what?"
His voice shook with rage as he spat the words.
"Why did you do it? Why did you destroy him? Why did you destroy this family?"
Her smile faded. Her eyes softened, just slightly. But her words… her words were the same mixture of love, poison, and obsession.
"…Because we chose Mama."
The words hung heavy, like a curse.
Rio's grip tightened around the daggers again. His heart pounded like a war drum.
The air between them was thick. Ominous. Suspenseful.
And for the first time since stepping into the mansion, Rio realized that this conversation wasn't about answers.
It was about something else.
Under the chandeliers' cold light the mansion seemed to breathe slow and deep, as if the house itself were a living thing that inhaled grief and exhaled power. Rain tattooed the windows. Shadows pooled in the corners.
Alessandra sat like a queen whose court had decided the world's shape, while Rio sat across, daggers still in hand though now resting uselessly on his knees. The tiny needle of cold metal at his stomach was a reminder that the balance of blood between them could tip in an instant.
"You chose Mama?" he asked again, voice raw from all the questions, from the fight, from the hunger to understand why everything had been broken and rebuilt into this black altar. "You chose her and became...this. Why did you all become like this? Why did you....why did you betray Father?" His words cracked on the last syllable like glass.
Alessandra's fingers toyed with the hem of her book as if she were stifling an old habit turning pages to calm a restless mind. For a heartbeat she let the pretense of civility hold. The smile she offered was liminal: warmth at the edges but with a set jaw beneath.
"You ask the wrong question, little brother," she said, voice soft and measured. "You want reasons as if reasons are a ledger you can balance to make yourself sleep. You think if you know the ledger you'll forgive us."
He felt that like an insult. "I don't want reasons. I want truths. Not..." he spat the word...."not this euphemism."
Alessandra's eyes, ice at the center, glittered with a smile that did not reach them. "Truth requires willingness, Rio. Willingness to see what we see, to accept what we accepted. We will not drag you into that darkness with half measures. If you want to know everything, if you demand the truth, then you must do what the truth requires."
"What does that mean?" He asked slowly, wary. Every syllable pushed threads of anger longer in him. "Speak plainly."
She leaned forward, hands folded like a woman praying. "Join us," she said simply.
He stared as if the words had been a physical blow. Join them. Join his mother. Join the family that had slammed the door on their father, betrayed him mercilessly and let him die. The notion tasted of ash. He felt heat climb his face, not from the fight's burns but from the memory of Janus's pleading, from the court's indifferent gavel.
"No," he said before his brain could filter the barbed truth. "I won't join someone who betrayed their husband, who left their father to rot, you fucking bitch!" The words became a roar.
Alessandra's face did not flush. For a moment it was like looking at polished obsidian, smooth, implacable. Then something like a shadow of pleasure flickered across her lips. "How very violent of you," she murmured. "Still possessive of your morals. Still certain of your righteousness."
"I am not.." he started, then shut his mouth. He had no illusion left to defend. His voice had gone brittle. His throat felt raw. "You fucking abandoned him."
"We chose survival," Alessandra said, and the words were as clinical as a surgeon's scalpel. "Father was weak and fragile. He could not hold us. He could not provide the strength we needed. We had to choose something else if we would not be erased."
"You call betrayal survival," Rio said. "You call murder - of a thousand small things done over years - survival." The daggers in his lap lay heavy, their steel dulling in his shaking hands. "You call this - your empire - salvation. It's not. It's rot."
Her eyes softened for a heartbeat, enough to make him think she'd cracked, to think perhaps the sister he'd loved might still be somewhere beneath the armor. "You make it sound so easy. We needed you and you left us." The softness turned to a blade of cold. "You abandoned us the moment you chose to walk away from your vows to this family. Do you know, Rio, what it is to wait? To starve for a presence you've been denied?"
"I left to give you all a chance..." He began, but she cut him with a laugh that was almost a sob.
"Chance?" She shook her head. "You left the house to be someone else. You left us to rot in a city that devoured the weak. We did not rot, little brother. We learned to rule."
"Ruled by stealing, by sleeping with strangers who hide behind caps and sunglasses, by signing papers with names you didn't earn!" His voice rose until it was a howl. "You destroyed him. You took everything from Janus."
"Janus died because he could not accept the truth," she said quietly, almost pitying. "He wanted to bind us to an idea of dignity that wouldn't feed us. Do not blame the hungry for taking food when the world offers only bone."
For a breath it was only the two of them and the click of the rain on the windows. The house breathed in, and the chandelier's dim light seemed to pulse like a heart. The air tasted metallic, like the back of caravans and the sharp tang of spilled wine.
"You don't get to speak for him," Rio said. "You don't get to speak for his last days. You didn't stand at his bedside. You let him die with his house empty. And now it was gone."
Her lids lowered, and she allowed a sliver of human feeling to pass, an admission, perhaps, of something she would not say aloud. "He died broken. He begged. We could not repair him. There is a cruelty to that, yes. But there is also mercy in the making of new order. We could not survive under him."
"Bullshit! You made your order by breaking family into something else," Rio said.
He rose then, more to match her posture than to move. He felt the room tilt, no longer thinking of Janus as a man who had been failed, but as an old wound that had been pressed into a scar he could touch only with a knife. "I would never..." he continued.
"You would," she said quietly, and there was no room for argument in her tone. "You will join us because you have nowhere else to go. Because you are blood and we will not allow our blood to leave the line."
The heat in his face turned hot and then cold. He could feel the old instincts, the itch to take the fight into his hands and end it. His fingers curled tight. "I will never kneel to you," he said, measured and brittle. "Not for power, not for your madness." He felt close to something fierce, an animal with the last of its strength.
Alessandra tilted her head, like one rating the fit of a new dress: careful, scrutinizing. "You will kneel because Mama will command it." Her voice dropped. "She will see you. She will offer you what you think you wanted all along, family, power, belonging. She will tell you a story only a mother can tell. And you will feel the pull because it is older than your fury."
It was a promise and a threat; a mother's voice was their most potent weapon. The needle at his stomach pressed once, another reminder that she had options he could not readily stop. He swallowed hard, the taste of iron on his tongue.
"That's childish theatrics," Rio said through his teeth and stood to move away. He took one step, then another. "I'm leaving. You can chain me, hang me, tear me down, but I'll leave. Let me mourn Father one last time. And I won't kill you all."
Alessandra's eyes cooled to steel. She rose in one liquid motion, smooth as a predatory cat. "You are not going anywhere." Her voice folded the room up like paper into itself. "You left us six years ago. We will not allow you to abandon us again. Especially Mama."
They stood mere breaths apart, the space between them taut with all the words they could not say. He should have struck then. He should have lunged and killed and ended the cold architecture that made their house into a fortress. Instead he opened his mouth and felt it empty, his energy spent with nowhere to aim it.
The heavy oak door behind him slammed, and a shadow filled the threshold, Ursula, the giantess, her step a small earthquake. Her massive hands already held rope in a routine practiced a thousand times. Her eyes were expressionless but for a wariness that never left her: this man had killed, he had rampaged.
"Mistress, may I kill him now? He insulted you." Ursula's voice rolled like distant thunder. It carried no eagerness; she asked the question with the blunt efficiency of a blade testing a sheath. Her loyalty was iron, but even iron asked permission before it broke bone.
Alessandra's smile did not flicker. For a moment she looked almost bored. "No." The single syllable was the sound of law. The giantess's shoulders slumped imperceptibly.
Ursula's face darkened. "He nearly killed half my staff, Mistress. He can kill you, too."
Alessandra's hand lifted with lazy, casual menace. "If you kill him now, Ursula, you know what we'll do to your kin, right?." Her voice was soft, almost conversational. The threat was simple and precise; she named no names and needed not to. Ursula's jaw clenched as if some terrible calculation unrolled behind her eyes. She had a family somewhere, small and fragile, and the specter of their harm held her like a tether.
Ursula's voice, heavy with respect and fear, fell into the grooves of the mansion's law. "Then what would you have me do?"
"Tie him again," Alessandra said calmly. "We will see Mama tonight."
The words landed like a gavel. Ursula nodded, as if that decision were the comet that decided fates. The giantess stepped forward, her hands efficient as hands of war. The goons streamed back, ropes sliding around Rio's forearms, a chain of leather and metal reassuring to the house.
The ropes were not only restraints; they were ritual. Each loop was a symbol of re-ensnaring him into the web: the family would hold him now, not out of gentle pity but because they could not bear to risk losing the thing that had once been theirs. The binds cut into his skin, burning red lines that the rain could not wash away. He met Alessandra's storm-gray eyes through the constriction and saw not triumph so much as hunger, a hunger that would not be sated.
Rio swallowed, tasting blood again. The ropes made his chest ache, a cage fitted to the contours of his body. He had killed tonight. He had gutted men in a bar, driven steel into throats, torn fists into bone. He felt older than he had a month ago, older than his years, like a coin that had been passed through too many hands and lost its shine.
Alessandra stepped close, close enough now that the scent of her, perfume, old paper, a safe personal dominion, encroached. She did not touch him this time. She only looked and looked, and when she spoke it was like a lullaby sung in a foreign tongue, simultaneously sweet and poisonous.
"Bring him into the inner chamber," she murmured to Ursula. "Feed him. Dress him. Give him a bath. Make him as presentable as one who will meet family at last."
Ursula barked an assent, large hands like trapdoors on the ropes as a dozen goons shouldered Rio up. He didn't resist as strongly as he might have; the fight had worn him down; the ropes claimed him in polite, machine-like efficiency.
As they led him from the room, Alessandra's voice drifted back to him in that impossible, honeyed tone. "You will see her soon, little brother. Mama will be glad. She has desperately waited. She stubbornly persisted. She will hold you. You will see how much she loves you. You will see how we..." she paused and the house seemed to inhale..."how we have missed you so much."
Rio wanted to spit. He wanted to launch into the hall and scream for truth and scream for his father. He wanted to die before they forced that embrace on him. But the ropes bit and the goons marched with the certainty of wolves.
The corridor swallowed them. The tall portraits watched like patient gods. Somewhere deeper in the mansion, lights flickered and a heavier presence prepared itself, the arrival across generations that meant the rest of their plans would unfold. Outside, the rain tempo changed, tapping faster in the world's ears. In the wet of his skin he felt his last shred of solitude dissolve.
"No more running. No more secrets. This is where you belong, Rio. In our embrace."
Alessandra's voice repeated at the threshold.
Rio's mind, that careful, trained mind that had survived bombed-out streets and the smell of burnt oil, began to catalogue: exits, guards, possible weapons, the sound of footfalls. It was work against panic. He allowed himself one last private vow before they dragged him into the inner sanctum.
If they thought to force him into a gilded cage, he would not go quietly. He would learn their patterns, exploit their moments. He would find the hidden seams of the castle and rip them open. He would not become a pet, or a prize. He would not be possessed.
The goons pushed him deeper. The door swung shut. The last thing he heard was Alessandra's voice, silky, still warm with the memory of a sister who had once wiped his scraped knees.
"You're home now, little brother," she whispered. "and you will rest in our arms."
They closed the door with a finality like thunder.
Outside, the rain kept on, indifferent. Inside, the house prepared a reception for the prodigal son, a family reunion that would end in one of a thousand possible ways. The cliff in the road loomed ahead: Isabela would be waiting. The questions would be answered. Or not. The ropes dug into Rio's wrists as an iron promise.