Morana shook her head immediately, her voice lost within her, tangled in the mass of emotions assaulting her, her jaw hurting from how hard she kept clenching it. She needed to know. She needed to know everything there was to know about him, her soul hungry for the knowledge that it had been denied. She needed to know, to understand him. She’d been locked for years from the truth and he had always been the key.
She needed to know.
Wiping her cheeks with small hands, her nails painted a green that matched her
unusual eyes, Amara continued, her voice trembling like a leaf in the wind.
“I met Tristan when Mr. Maroni brought him to the house that day…” her beautiful, swollen eyes glazed over, lost in the memory she was speaking of, making Morana grit her teeth harder at the image of the aftermath.
“He was wearing this white long-sleeved t-shirt, splattered with drops of blood, one entire hand completely bloodied, his hair a mess. He was just two years older than I was but he seemed so much older. His eyes… god, his eyes, Morana… they were so dead,” Amara shuddered, looking into space, goosebumps erupting over her arms.
She rubbed them slowly. “Mr. Maroni told everyone he would be staying at the compound. He talked about Tristan but Tristan just stood there, not moving, not reacting, his eyes moving over everyone. But he didn’t look at anyone, he looked right through them… as though he was seeing nothing... It was so terrifying coming from such a young boy.”
Morana tried to find the congruence in what Amara was telling her what she’d seen for herself. She’d seen him look that way at other people – at the men in the casino, at the people in the barn, at the crowd in the restaurant. She’d even remembered him looking that way at her that first night in Tenebrae when he hadn’t known who she’d been, and her own knife had been pressed against her neck by his hands.
Now that she knew, she realized he’d evidently never, not since then, looked at her with nothing. There had always, always been something in those blue eyes of his. He’d always looked at her, in that intense way that seared her.
Amara’s voice broke through her thoughts, a gust of cool breeze lifting a strand of her dark hair, chilling Morana.
“I remember asking mama about him that night. Nobody in our world knew why an outsider had been brought into the family, more so to live on the compound. That had never happened before. But a few days later, there were rumors.”
Morana wrapped her arms around herself, a chill settling in her bones as she waited for Amara to continue.
“My mama told me she’d heard whispers among the servants about him. The servants always knew what happened at the compound, but they never spoke of it because of fear – for their families, for themselves, some even from loyalty. But they did talk among themselves, and Tristan had created quite a stir. Mama told me about those whispers, about how he’d murdered his own father in cold blood in a room full of men, about how dangerous he was, about how they said he was going to be the most feared of all men when he grew up. She told me to keep my distance from him. Everyone did. And I’m ashamed to admit, I kept my distance, shunned him like everyone else because of course, I was a little scared.”
“You were just a child,” Morana spoke up before she could help herself, her voice rusty and small.
Amara smiled sadly, fidgeting with the hem of her top. “So was he, Morana. We all forgot that so was he.”
Morana swallowed the lump in her throat, gripping her top with her fingers.
“Him being such a terrifyingly silent boy just fed the wariness everyone felt for him even more. People talked about him, and I’m certain he knew, but he never uttered a word. Nothing. The first time I actually heard him speak was years after he’d come to live there.”
Shaking her head, as if to shake off the memory, Amara continued. “Mr. Maroni had sworn his men to silence about Tristan’s truth – not out of the goodness of his heart, if he even has any, and not because he wanted to protect the boy. Oh no, it was so that the man Tristan would become one day would owe him.”
The disgust in Amara’s voice seeped into Morana, her heart shuddering. The depth of cruelty in her world astounded her. Even though she’d known how brutal their world was, this still managed to catch her off guard. There was no place for innocence here. None. What a little boy had done out of instinct had cost him everything. Not because someone wanted to get revenge against him, or because someone wanted to kill him for themselves. No, but because someone wanted to simply exploit him. He should have been loved and protected. More importantly, he should have been forgiven. Instead, his crucible had only begun at the hands of the people who’d taken him under.
“Fuck,” she whispered, not knowing what else to say, the one word encompassing the entire situation perfectly.
“Yeah. As if that wasn’t enough, he was kept away from all the other children in the family, in a separate wing,” Amara reminisced, another tear trailing down her cheek, her raspy voice trembling. “During the day when other kids went to school outside the walls or played until their time came to be trained, he was locked in the compound with private tutors. Maroni’s best men trained him, tortured him, and he never said a word. Mama said she heard his screams sometimes in passing when she went to the wing. All of us did at some point. But never heard his words. And after a point, the screams just stopped.”
Morana closed her eyes, rage infusing her blood, the urge to kill all those people, the need to kill all those people, to destroy them as they destroyed a child, so acute it became an ache in her heart. She remembered the deep, mottled scars she had seen all over on his body, the burn marks on his back. How many of those had been inflicted by these people? How many when he’d been just a boy? How many had taken him to the brink of death? To the brink of insanity?
A tear made its way down her cheek – a tear of pain, of anger, of compassion – before she could stop it. She let it roll down, taking a deep breath to calm her racing heart.
She opened her eyes. “Go on.”
Amara sighed softly, her face etched in remorse. “I’ll never forgive myself for ignoring him back then. I know I was just a child, but even back then, I knew it shouldn’t have been happening like that. I knew it wasn’t right. And yet, I did absolutely nothing to help him, not in any way. And I wonder sometimes if maybe a kind word, a selfless gesture, a hand of friendship would have made things a little better for him…”
Morana didn’t say anything to that. She couldn’t. Not with the rage she was feeling.
Amara swallowed, evidently struggling with something before she sucked in a breath and continued. “I saw him around the compound for years. I’d be wandering around the quarters, playing with the other children not under training, or helping my mama, and I’d catch glimpses of him over the years.”
Rubbing a hand over her drained face, she went on. “He was always bruised. He walked with a limp sometimes. Sometimes, he could barely walk. And even then, nobody dared pity him, or talk to him. It became clear within years that he was lethal. His silence fed that even more. People within the family shunned him for being an outsider and people outside shunned him for being on the inside. He belonged nowhere. And while nobody messed with him, nobody talked to him either.”
“Wh-what happened then?” Morana stuttered, barely able to get the words out, her heart clenching for the boy he’d been, wishing she could’ve known him back then. She’d been so alone growing up too, surrounded by people but nobody to talk to. Maybe, she could’ve extended that hand of companionship, surreal as it would’ve been. Maybe, they could’ve helped each other feel less lonely.
Maybe…