Page 4 of Luca
I find Sofia in her bedroom, still in her nightgown. Her wedding dress hangs on the closet door like a ghost, all ivory silk and hand-sewn pearls.
When I see her sitting on the floor, it's like being transported back to when we were both eight years old. The day we both knew we were being separated forever.
She has that same lost, hollow look in her eyes.
"Sof?" I drop my backpack and cross the room, my heart hammering with a familiar terror.
She looks up, and her eyes are swollen from crying, but it's more than that. There's something broken in her expression that I recognize from the worst period of her depression in university. When she started harming herself because the pain inside was too much to bear any other way.
"You came," she whispers, and her voice has that thin, fragile quality that means she's balanced on a knife's edge.
"Of course I came." I sit beside her on the Persian rug that's been in this room since we were children. "Talk to me. What's really going on?"
She takes a shuddering breath, and I realize she’s trying to organize thoughts that have clearly been spiraling for weeks.
"I've been researching him for months.”
“Who?”
“Luca. The man I’m marrying today. I’ve read every article I could find online about his family, about what they really do." Her voice cracks. "I kept hoping I was wrong. That it was just rumors. That they really don’t do the things the newspapers say they do."
"And?"
"Seven men have disappeared in the past two years. Just gone. Dropped off the face of the earth. And everyone knows it was his family, but no one talks about it because they're too scared." She wraps her arms around herself. It’s her way of trying to hold herself together when the world feels too big and dangerous.
"There was this one article about a man found in river with his hands cut off. Another about a business owner who refused to pay protection money. They found pieces of him scattered across three neighborhoods."
I force myself to stay calm. Sofia needs me to be the strong one, the way I always have been. While I haven’t always been able to help her, now I’m here and I will.
"Jesus, Sofia."
"I know what you're thinking, that I'm being overly dramatic, that I'm letting my anxiety spiral like always." She lets out another sob. "But I'm not. I'm not imagining this. Ihave newspaper clippings, police reports, everything I could find. Papa would kill me if he knew I'd been researching the Romano family, but I had to know what I was walking into. Now I’m terrified."
I study my sister's face, identical to mine but worn thin by months of terror and sleepless nights. She's lost weight, I realize. Her collarbones are too prominent, her cheeks hollow. When did she get this fragile?
"Why didn't you tell Papa you couldn't go through with it? He loves you. Surely he could’ve figured something out."
"Because you know what happens when I can't handle what's expected of me." Her words drop off to barely a whisper. "You remember university. The... incident and the clinic."
The incident.
That's what we call the three months when Sofia disappeared from her life because the pressure of maintaining perfect grades and perfect everything finally broke her completely. I didn’t know about it until she was out and able to secretly contact me.
I’ve never forgiven myself for letting her down when she needed me the most.
"That was different. You were nineteen and overwhelmed. This is about your entire life, your safety-"
"No, it's not different." She meets my eyes, and I see the depth of despair there. "It's exactly the same. I can't handle this, but I can't escape it either. Every option leads to disappointing someone or destroying something. I’ve tried so hard to make this work. But I can’t. So now, I’m falling apart. The same way I always do."
My heart clenches because she's right. Sofia has always been the sensitive twin, the one who absorbed everyone else's emotions like a sponge until she drowned in them. When we were kids, before everything changed, I was Sofia's buffer against Papa's rages and the violent world he moved in.
Then Mama took me away and left Sofia alone with Papa's impossible expectations and the lie that her mother didn’t love her enough to take her too. It wasn’t until years later when Sofia and I were able to secretly reconnect that I was able to tell her the truth. That our mother didn’t have a choice. Papa only allowed her to take one twin because he didn’t want me, not the other way around.
"I can't marry him," she continues. “I can't spend my life wondering if I'm going to say or do the wrong thing that gets me hurt or killed. I can't live in fear. I won’t make it. You know I won’t. I’m not strong like you."
"So don't."
"Don't what?"
