Page 45 of Savage Claim

“If I find out that you’re fucking with me, there won’t be big enough pieces of you and yours to find.”

“Understood.”

CHAPTER 28

Isabella

Iwas flipping through Instagram when my FaceTime started to jingle. I smiled; it was Gemma. But when I swiped to answer, my mother’s face appeared on the screen. I felt myself go still. My mother and I had spoken a few times because of Gemma’s meddling, but she had never voluntarily called me herself since she left me with Santino.

“Mom, wow, this is a surprise.”That’s an understatement.

Grace smiled, but it was pinched. It didn’t look genuine. “Isabella,” she said, and my stomach flipped. Had she ever said my name so gently before? I couldn’t remember if she had. “How are you, honey?” She looked at the wall behind me and frowned. “Where are you?”

I glanced behind me. There was a liquor license and a few other things that were hung up but nothing damning or specific. “I’m fine, just running an errand with a friend,” I said, trying to keep my voice casual, as if this was something that we did every week. “I’m waiting for him to finish up.” There was an awkward pause where we just stared at one another. My mother looked like she was trying to memorize my face. “Where’s Gemma?”

She ignored me. “I love you,” she said, and it felt like ice water replaced the blood in my veins. Even before she left Santino and me, I couldn’t remember a time when my mother said those words. She wasn’t a demonstrative woman, and from the little that Gemma and I spoke about her, that hadn’t changed much over the years.I know she loves me, Gemma had said once,she just shows it rather than says it.

“Mom, what’s going on?”

Again, she didn’t react as if she heard me. “I know I’ve never said it enough, but I do love you.”

“Is something wrong?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level and calm. If I scared her, she might hang up, and then there really would be nothing that I could do. “You can tell me. I can—” I swallowed through the lump in my throat. “I can help, Mom, okay?”

Tears slipped down her cheeks, slow at first and then faster and faster, and she shook her head. “I’m so sorry,” she cried.

“It's fine,” I said, heart thudding in my ears. Something was seriously wrong. “Mom, I promise, it's okay. Just let me help you. Tell me what's going on.”

Her shoulders heaved with her sobs. “I didn't want to leave you, I promise, but I couldn't stay with your father. He would have?—”

“That's enough of that,” a voice said, and I choked when the phone swung around.

Santino was looking worse for wear. There was a burn, red and angry and probably infected, that stretched across his face. Some of his hair had been singed away. He was smiling, and it was an ugly, disturbing thing; it chilled me down to the bones.

“You’re alive,” I said dumbly.

“No thanks to you,” he retorted. That unhinged smile didn’t fade a bit, which made it all the worse. Something happened that I couldn’t see, but my mother’s sharp scream rang out through my speaker.

My throat felt like it was going to close. “What are you doing?”

Santino clicked his tongue against his teeth. “You’ve been very naughty, Izzie,” he cooed, and a shiver of revulsion rippled down my spine. “If you only did what you were supposed to do.”

“What? Die?” I yelped.

He hummed in agreement. “Well, if you had only held up your end of things, we wouldn’t be in this mess.” He nodded to someone off-screen, and I heard my mother scream again.

“Stop,” I begged. Tears were clogging my throat and nose. “Please just stop.”

“Remember,” Santino said in a giddy, manic kind of voice. “This is entirely your fault.” He turned the camera around, and it was like I forgot that I could move. There were invisible bonds keeping me in place, shutting my mouth so that I couldn’t scream.

My mother was tied to the wall in front of me. Her arms were stretched painfully and secured with chains. Someone had ripped her shirt open so that it hung in tatters. The terror was clear in her face, and the way her body heaved as she struggled to suck in breaths through her panic. “Sannie,” she begged through her tears. “Don’t hurt our girls. You can do whatever you want to me, butplease, you were the first to hold both of them on the days they were born. You taught Gemma to ride a bike andbought Isabella her first box of menstrual pads, for God’s sake. Don’t?—”

A large man reared back and slapped my mother so hard that she spat blood. It mixed with saliva and dripped down her chin. “Bylo by razumno zatknutsya, chert vozmi.” When she continued to cry, he hit her again, and I watched as her nose crushed inward. Her cries didn’t stop, but they were muffled now.

“Mom!”

It wasn’t me who had screamed. It was Gemma. That motherfucker had my sister, and he was forcing her to watch. Whatever mental block that had kept me frozen unlocked, and I practically sprang out of my chair. “What do you want, Santino?” I asked as I went for the door. When I reached for the handle, I realized that it was locked. I banged on it, trying to alert whoever was on the other side that I needed to get out. “What do I need to do?”

I couldn’t see Santino, but I heard him laugh. “You just keep watching, Izzie,” he said. “That’s what I want you to do.” He must have given some kind of signal because the man who hit my mother slipped something over his knuckles. “Then, I want you to keep this lesson in mind the next time I ask something from you, yes?”

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