Page 14 of With a Vengeance

Just like with the others, seeing Dante again unlocks a thousand memories, none of which Anna longs to dwell upon. To keep from being overwhelmed by them, she forces herself into action, flinging open the door to the lounge and stepping inside.

Dante is the first to notice her, his piano playing ceasing in a crash of discordant notes. Silence falls over the car as the others turn her way, either surprised or confused or both. Anna peers at them through narrowed eyes, her gaze cool, calm, and piercing. Inside, however, is a vastly different reaction. Her heart thunders and her stomach clenches and her brain roars with violent thoughts.

God, she hates these people.

Hates them with the fiery heat of a thousand suns.

Facing them again, she’s overcome by the urge to kill each one in a hundred vicious ways. Shooting them in the head. Stabbing them in their cold hearts. Ripping them from limb to limb. The thoughts are so bad—so ferociously violent—that she almost flees the car out of fear she might attempt some of them.

And that would be the worst thing to do.

So Anna forces the violent thoughts from her mind, stiffens her body, hardens her heart. She opens her mouth to speak, but nowords come out. Something she hadn’t planned for. And she thought she had prepared for everything. Yet there she stands, speechless, astonished she ever thought she’d be able to talk.

What can she say to the people who took everything from her? What words will even come close to conveying the depths of her pain, her grief, her primal rage? Certainly not this speech, rehearsed so much she can now recite it in her sleep. What had once seemed so forceful now feels puny and weak when facing her enemies.

Anna forces out the words anyway. She has to saysomething.

“You know who I am. Just as you know why I’ve gathered you here. If you haven’t figured it out yet, you will very soon.”

She takes the practiced pause, measuring its length in her head. As she does, something else nudges into her thoughts. Something unrehearsed, unexpected, and unwelcome.

Aunt Retta on the evening Anna came to live with her at her mansion in upstate New York. She didn’t know her only living relative well. When Anna was a girl, her father’s older sister visited so infrequently that she seemed more myth than person. Every few years she blew through the house like a frigid wind, staying only an hour or so before gusting back out again.

All Anna knew about her aunt Henrietta—Retta for short—was that she had married a much-older iron magnate at eighteen, been widowed at nineteen, and inherited her husband’s millions at twenty. Never having children herself, she was utterly incurious about her niece and nephew. What little love Aunt Retta had in her heart was reserved for Anna’s father. There was no room for anyone else. And when he died, that heart became so prickly it might as well have been surrounded by barbed wire.

Anna was sixteen when she went to live with Aunt Retta, too old to be coddled in her sadness yet still too young to handle it all with the stoicism and grace expected of adults. Alone and walloped with grief, she stood in front of the aunt she barely knew,hoping in vain that the gray-haired woman with the pinched face and red-rimmed eyes would say something—anything—to make her feel better.

“I wish there was someone else to take you,” Aunt Retta said instead, a statement that would have been breathtaking in its cruelty if Anna hadn’t felt the same way. She wanted to be with anyone other than her widowed aunt. But her brother was dead. As was her father and, as of the day before, her mother.

“But seeing how there isn’t,” her aunt continued, “you are now my burden to bear.”

“I’m sorry,” Anna said.

That was when Aunt Retta slapped her. A stinging backhand as sharp and sudden as a snakebite.

Anna stood there, aghast, taken aback not just by the pain of the slap but its surrealness.Did that really happen?she thought.Is this just a nightmare?

And for a second, she wished it were. Because that meant when it was over she’d wake up in her old bed, in her old room, in her old house, and that her mother and father would be waiting at the breakfast table with Tommy, who’d tease her about being a sleepyhead while eating French toast. But as her cheek throbbed and her aunt—who’d literally just slapped her—continued to stare, Anna realized that it was indeed a nightmare, but one from which she would never, ever wake.

Not knowing how to react, she began to cry, although it ended up being more of a wail than anything else. High-pitched. Tear-filled. Earsplitting. Full of rage and despair and utter hopelessness. Instead of comforting her, Aunt Retta simply watched Anna until her emotional tempest calmed to regular-grade grief.

“Finished?” she eventually said.

Rather than wipe the tears away, Anna left them on her face, wet, salty, and hot. “Why did you hit me?”

“To see what kind of girl I’m dealing with,” Aunt Retta said. “The answer, it seems, is a weak one.”

Her aunt moved across the parlor to a massive wingback armchair, which she settled into like royalty on a throne.

“You should know by now that we live in a brutal, cruel world populated by brutal, cruel people,” she said. “Those who react the way you just did—all that crying, all that begging for pity—are doomed. The only way to survive is to accept life’s blows and not even flinch. If you can do that, the world will know you’re a woman to be reckoned with.”

In the weeks that followed, Aunt Retta would test her mettle several times, slapping Anna at random moments. First thing in the morning. Right after dinner. While the two engaged in tensely silent strolls over the estate grounds.

Very quickly, Anna learned not to flinch.

And when that happened, the slapping stopped. Anna never asked why, because deep down she already knew. She had won Aunt Retta’s respect, if not her affection.

Anna also eventually realized that those intermittent slaps, so hard they left welts for days, weren’t born of cruelty. They were Aunt Retta’s way of teaching her a valuable lesson.

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