One year later
I smiled as I hurried down the stairs as quickly as I could, my left hand gliding over the bannister. As I rounded the corner toward the entryway, I was shocked to see my father standing in the doorway and looking at me with the cruel smirk he often gave my mother.
I pushed down my fear, knowing that the moment Calix had become my friend was the day my father’s corrections ceased. We’d never spoken of it, but I knew he’d done something.
What a teenage boy could threaten the head of the Karras family with, I didn’t even want to know.
‘Come, Thalia,’ my father said, reaching out a hand to stroke over the top of my hair in a mockery of everything that was gentle about Calix.
‘Where’s Calix?’ I asked, flinching away from his touch. He snatched my wrist in his hand, his fingers bruising as he gripped me tightly. His knuckles were stained dark and wet, the skin torn open. ‘Where is he?!’ I yelled when he didn’t answer, planting my feet as he dragged me out the front door. My heart raced as I looked everywhere for Calix. He’d never once kept me waiting when he promised to visit. My father’s car waited at the top of the driveway, his personal driver holding the backseat door open. My father shoved me in and climbed in beside me, making me turn wide eyes to him.
‘You’ll see him soon enough,’ he said, adjusting the sleeves of his jacket. Dressed from head to toe in black, he looked so different without the shock of a white dress shirt peeking out on his chest.
‘Is he okay?’ I asked, swallowing back the tears I knew would only anger him more. He hated Calix in a way that I wouldn’t put it past my father to get rid of him at the first chance he got.
‘Soon enough, everything will be exactly as it should. You can take comfort in the fact that you will not be punished for the mistakes of others,’ he said, glancing at me briefly before turning his attention back to the window. “But there will be a lesson to learn today. I hope you are smart enough to pay attention, my darling daughter,” he said, staring out the window. He didn’t look at me as he spoke the words, and dread gathered in my belly. His lessons always hurt, even after he’d stopped hitting me.
The streets of Chestnut Hill faded as we left the affluent neighborhood my family called home. We kept going and going until industrial buildings crowded the roads, and we made our way around the back of an old warehouse. Most of the buildings still seemed to be functioning, but despite the heavily armed security men guarding the one in front of us, it didn’t seem to be used by anyone recently.
My father stepped out of the car once it pulled to a stop, nodding to me until I followed him out. He remained silent as he walked through the doors one of his men pulled open for us, letting me trail behind him even though all I wanted to do was run.
To find Calix and get out while I could.
He guided me through the main space of the building, the empty structure feeling cold. Even compared to the coolness of our home, something about it left me with a sense of dread.
Death clung to the walls. Death was on every surface and in the air, as if it were imprinted into the building itself and would never be clean. A graveyard with walls.
The doors at the back of the room opened and my father stepped through them. I hesitated at the sound of cheering voices coming from inside the new room. One of my father’s men prodded me between the shoulders until I kept moving forward.
Men stood in a circle at the center of the enormous room, blocking my view of whatever might be in the middle. As my father reached them, they parted to allow him through. My feet dragged as I forced myself closer, needing to see whatever kind of Hell he’d brought me to see.
It was a punishment undoubtedly, for growing closer with Calix and not keeping him at an appropriate distance. Girls like me weren’t allowed to have friends, especially not boys.
Not when my father said my allegiance would belong to my husband one day without question.
‘Daddy?’ I whispered, stepping up behind him. I hated the name every time I said it, knowing he’d never done anything to deserve it, but his insistence kept me from calling him anything else, even as I shook with fear of what was coming. He moved to the side, allowing me to see into the pit in front of him. Metal plates lined the walls around the hole in the concrete, leaving them with nothing but a hole where the floor must have been at one point in time. It was huge, with a dozen people standing below and plenty of space to move around.
There were bodies littering what looked like sand on the ground, and I swallowed back my rising nausea as I realized the woman kneeling at the center of all of it with her head hanging forward was my mother.
‘Mommy!’ I called, watching as her body twitched but she didn’t raise her head to look at me. My father’s hand grasped my shoulders through my dress, lifting me from the ground as my eyes connected with Calix’s in horrified shock. He knelt on the ground in front of my father’s men, his father and the men I recognized that worked their family’s security watching in the background with their heads hung low.
Dark stains covered their clothes. Their faces. I knew even without the shock of color that it was blood.
The unmoving bodies littering the ground around the pit left no doubt to that.
My father tossed me into the pit, my hands and knees landing awkwardly in the sand as the tiny grains dug into my skin. Calix’s eyes were wide as he shoved to his feet to reach me, grunting as someone wrenched his arms behind his back and secured them with rope while I pushed myself up to stand.
‘She has nothing to do with this,’ Calix growled, struggling against the person holding him. His father knelt next to him, his beaten and bruised face a mirror of my father’s torn up knuckles. Calix’s bare chest was crisscrossed with bleeding wounds, one of his cheeks marked with a gash that would scar.
He’d always been inhumanly beautiful. From the moment I’d first seen him, I’d wondered how it was possible for a boy to be so pretty. The cuts on his chest and his face changed him, as well as the savage snarl on his face that I’d only ever seen when the girls at school had pushed me years before. At his side was a blade, a sword, as if he’d dropped it when he hadn’t had any other choice.
I spun, my eyes sliding over the wall at my back and the weapons lining it. My history lessons flashed in my memory. My father jumped into the pit at my side, chuckling and grabbing a fistful of my hair. He wrenched my head back while Calix yelled his protest. ‘Leave her alone!’
‘Do you like ο λάκκος, my daughter?’ he asked, his voice harsh. ‘This is where we settle our disputes with fire and blood. This is where decisions are made and the future is shaped.’
‘It’s a gladiator ring,’ I wheezed, bringing my hands up to grasp at his hand. The blood coating his skin from whatever fight he’d been a part of made my hands slick, slipping along his and unable to find a grip.
‘Good, Thalia. The Italians may be useless in most ways, but at least in this they offered something of value. An entertaining way to kill your enemies and fight for power.’
‘What did she do?’ I asked, nodding my head, as much as I could, to where my mom still knelt in the sand.
‘She allowed another man to touch her. My wife let Eugene Regas inside her, when her body belongs to me alone.’ I didn’t understand the words, not fully, but I knew enough to know that a woman belonged to her husband.
My mother would never have taken such a risk. Not with the way my father beat her for everything she did wrong. He loosened his grip on my hair, tossing me to the side so I fell to the sand.
‘Let her death be a lesson to you, so that you never forget your place and what happens when a woman disobeys her husband.’
