Page 40 of The Seller

My father was a very handsome man, once. He’s not anymore. Evil leaves its marks on a man. It twists his features into a perpetual sneer. It makes his eyes hollow. When I look at him, I don’t see my father, I see a pure market force.

“You’re coming with me,” he says. “You’re going to marry Don Corelli. It was a mistake to let you complete your studies before marriage. The American culture gave you ridiculous ideas. Half of Europe knows what you have been doing with that slave trader.”

“You mean Stavros?”

My father’s upper lip curls at the mere mention of his name. I wonder if he came for Stavros first. I wonder if he is dead. There is no escaping Salvatore Medici.

“Did you kill him?”

He doesn’t answer me. He stands there full of paternal disappointment and rage, and I know that if I refuse him to his face, he will snap. My father is a terrifying man. My mother died when I was just four years old. Some people say that he killed her. Even though I cannot know for sure, I believe them.

What I do know for certain is that I have never been brave or stupid enough to defy him to his face, because the look he gets in his eye when he is displeased is enough to terrify even the bravest men.

“Get up. Get dressed. You will be married today.”

This is the part where I should argue that he doesn’t have the right to do this to me, that I am not his to give to other men, that what he’s doing is no different to what Stavros would have done, but I can feel the rage seething from every pore, and there is something about being the child of a true monster which makes me immune to everybody - everybody, except him.

I find my body going into auto-pilot. I am obeying him, getting dressed, shutting down. I don’t even ask what is going to happen to my operation. It is beneath my father, but I am sure that he will find some use for it. I only hope that none of the fishermen have been harmed. I don’t think he would have hurt them, as long as they didn’t put up resistance.

The following hours are a blur. I am taken and put on a plane. There are servants to tend to me, do my make up, get me ready for the wedding I don’t want. Nobody seems to notice my state of shock.

I am so disappointed in myself, but I am also utterly done. It took everything I had to come up with the plan to get myself sold. I suffered through Stavros’ attentions. I managed to survive the raid on his compound. I escaped, and made a life for myself.

But it was all for nothing. I cannot resist my father’s will. I am not brave enough. The learned helplessness drummed into me from a lifetime of experience will not allow me to. I do not dare defy him, because I know in my soul that defying him will be the destruction of me.

For all the fighting, for all the pain, for all the loss, I have ended up precisely where I began, and there is nothing left inside me.

Chapter 10

Siri

“Oh my god, Sirios, you look beautiful!”

A woman who calls herself my friend is squealing over me as I stand like stone in front of a mirror, feeling absolutely hollow. I suppose I do look beautiful. Enough white lace could make anything look beautiful. It doesn’t matter. It’s never going to matter ever again.

I can hear strains of organ music coming from the chapel nearby. To me, it sounds like a dirge for my funeral. I died the moment I woke up to find my father in my room. Every hope, every dream, every shred of possibility of living my life was torn from me and now I am here, the pawn I was made to be. I am disgusted with myself, feeling a loathing so deep I cannot put a name to it.

I sent the one man who could have saved me away. I stood on my own two feet, but in the end, it was my own sick allegiance to my father which made me unable to resist the plan which was set in motion all those years ago.

My feet are heavy. My mouth is dry. I feel as though I have been crying for days, though I haven’t shed a single tear. Marriage is the last thing I want, to anybody.

I yearn for the solitude of the fjords, the depths of Stavros’ basement, everywhere and anywhere besides here.

My extended family has been brought to celebrate of course, people I never knew clustering about me telling me stories of things that may as well never have happened. Their joy seems to increase in direct proportion to my misery.

“You look so much like your mother.”

“Before my father murdered her?”

My aunt crosses herself and shakes her head. We don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about anything except what is superficial and easy. They all know I am being sold off, but unlike Stavros who is honest about what he does and why, these people want to dress it up and pretend that there is some romance to the occasion.

They are ignoring my distress with a deliberate aggression which makes me feel as though I am insane. If I cried, they would say they were tears of joy. If I begged to be let go, and told them I didn’t want to be married, they would laugh and call it cold feet. I am surrounded by those who should love me most, and they can’t see me at all.

“You stay there,” my aunt says. “I’m going to gather the bridesmaids and we’ll all take a nice group picture before you walk down the aisle.”

She bustles away, happy in spite of the fact there’s nothing to be happy about. This is an absolute travesty. Once I am married, that will be the end of things. I will be more tightly monitored than ever before. I will be forced to lie with a man I do not love, an old beast of a man who was already in his forties when I was born. Don Corelli is sixty-seven years old. My father says that’s not too old. He said it will be good for me, now that I have proven myself to be wild. He said I need a mature, firm hand to tame me.

I said I’d rather die.

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