Page 128 of Ripped Lace (Ripped Bratva)

It’s getting harder to breathe, harder to think beyond my panic, my sense of shame. It feels like I’m being buried by the weight of my own emotions.

“Elyssa, calm down.”

“Calm down?” I gasp. “Calm down? I’ve participated in the destruction of so many lives. I don’t even know. I can’t even count. It’s—”

I break off, trembling. Phoenix stands suddenly. His chair scrapes backwards and then he strides around the table and plucks me out of my seat.

“Come with me.”

He guides me through the house, up the stairs. We walk into his office and that rich smell of leather and cologne fills my nostrils. It’s soothing in a way I desperately need.

He closes the door behind us and steers me towards the massive wall filled with information and pictures of everyone he knows who’s connected with Astra Tyrannis.

“Look,” he instructs me.

I shake my head.

“Elyssa,” he says firmly. “Look.”

I raise my eyes to the photographs pinned on the wall.

“Thoseare the people responsible,” he tells me. “Thoseare the people we’re going to hold accountable. You? You were just a victim of your environment.”

“It sounds like an excuse.”

“It’s not,” Phoenix says. “I know it feels like we failed today. I know you’re out of your mind with worry for Theo. But I got some files out of there. And that’s more than we had before.”

He sounds so certain. I want to believe him. But my own sins are staring me in the face, refusing to be cowed.

“Maybe… maybe this is divine retribution,” I whisper.

“What do you mean?”

I raise my eyes to his. “God is punishing me for what I’ve done. That’s why he’s taken my son away. That’s why he took my baby.”

31

Phoenix

Her whiskey-colored eyes seem even larger with all those tears glistening in them. I want to wipe them away, but I stay my hand. She doesn’t need my comfort right now.

She needs to be heard.

“I don’t believe in God, Elyssa,” I tell her. “Or ‘the powers that be’ or any of that bullshit. I believe in us. We make choices and we must deal with the consequences of those choices. It’s that simple and that complicated at the same time.”

She shakes her head. “I didn’t even think—”

“Because you weren’t taught to think,” I say. “You weren’t thought to have opinions or to question authority. You were taught to listen. To obey.”

Something about those words triggers a violent reaction. Her eyes bulge. She claps her hands to her stomach and keels over as though she’s trying to keep her organs from spewing out.

She’s mumbling something on the ground. I kneel next to her. “Elyssa?”

“We had this prayer… They taught it to us as children,” she says softly. Her eyes are gazing—not ahead, but into the past. “I used to say it to myself every night before I went to bed. Before every meal. In church every Sunday.”

A tear runs down her cheek as she begins to recite it in a mechanical voice that doesn’t sound like her own.

“To serve is to find peace. To obey is to find happiness. To listen is to find truth.”

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