Page 119 of Ripped Veil (Ripped Bratva)

“Why were you in a wedding dress?”

Her mouth falls open for a moment, before snapping shut again. She gives a tiny shake of her head. As if to say,No, you can’t ask that.

It makes me want to pin her against the wall by her throat and show her that I can do anything I fucking want.

I raise another wad of dollar bills. “Are you done playing?”

She eyes the money sadly. Like she knows she can’t refuse it no matter how badly she wants to do exactly that. “I can’t fully remember what happened that night.”

I search her face but can’t quite suss out a lie. Maybe there isn’t one to catch. I decide not to interrupt her because she’s still talking.

“… Everything is hazy. All I remember is that I needed to run. If I stayed, I’d be trapped.”

Trapped.The word carries weight. Carries stories. Something tells me they’re not the kind of stories that come with a happy ending.

“Who was the man who you were meant to be marrying?” I ask.

She cringes and her eyes fall into her lap. “His name was Josiah,” she says softly.

“You ran because you didn’t want to marry him?”

She looks down at her chocolate mousse, still untouched except for the tiny divot her fork left when she scratched at the gold leaf. Her eyes are shimmery. But with what—tears? Memories? Both? Neither?

“Maybe once upon a time, I thought I did,” she says.

I let those words hang between us. We’ve gone around and around in circles without progressing much of anywhere.

“Why do you even care?” she snaps suddenly before I can settle on my next move. “Why do you care who my parents are or if I have siblings? Why do you care where I’m from? Who I was or wasn’t supposed to marry? Why do you care about anything?”

“Information is power,” I answer simply.

She nods sadly. “Charity told me that, too. The night we met, actually.”

“She was right. Tell me about your parents.”

She frowns again, confused by the sudden lurch from topic to topic. “What do you want to know?”

“Whatever you decide to tell me,” I say with a shrug. “But I want real information. Not this evasive shit you’ve been doing all night. Give me something I can believe in, Elyssa Jane Redmond.”

She lets that sink in for a moment. Then she starts to speak. Though she still refuses to look at me.

“My father was a quiet man. He never spoke much. He was always in some corner of the house, whittling away at any scrap of wood he could find. Mama was the same. Quiet. Obedient. We went to… to church a lot. And school. And… and…”

I’m surprised to hear her voice catch and notice a single tear splash down to muddle the gold leaf on top of her dessert. She raises her eyes to look at me finally. More tears cling to her eyelashes stubbornly.

“I haven’t thought about them in so long,” she whispers. “I’ve forced myself to forget so much.”

“Forget what?”

She shrugs. “The way they lived their lives. The way they taught me to live mine.”

“They wanted you to get married and be a good, obedient wife?”

Elyssa nods.

“And what did you want?”

She hesitates. “I wanted what they wanted. I couldn’t fathom anything different. It was how life was with them. With everyone there.”

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