Page 3 of Soulless Rivalry

“I’m okay,roohi,” she whispered in Italian but used the Arabic endearment that my father used with her.

I sniffled, silent tears running down my cheeks. I’d been trying real hard to be strong like mamma told me, but I couldn’t hold them back anymore.

And when the man crouched next to us and grabbed a handful of mamma’s hair, making her whimper, fright froze my body in place.

“Se pensi che ti perderò mai di vista, ti sbagli, puttana,”he spat heinously and I gasped at his words.If you believe I’ll let you out of my sight now, you’re wrong, whore.

That brought his attention to me. Cruel and cold eyes narrowed on me. He stared for what felt like hours but were merely seconds before spitting on the ground next to us.

The action wasn’t only disgusting, it was also demeaning, a way for him to tell me and everyone else in the room that he didn’t respect us, neither me nor my mother. That we were beneath him.

It was humiliating.

Mom was staring at the ground as he got back up and left the room, evading his gaze, but I couldn’t look away from his retreating form.

Something was born in me that day, a red ball of fury within my gut that would only grow with time.

Hatred.

It was a foreign emotion; I had never felt it before, not in the first ten years of my life.

All it took was one meeting with my grandfather for me to learn what it was.

One after the other, every single person in the room followed after him, not sparing me or mamma another glance, like we were dirt on the floor and not human beings.

The last person to go was the woman with the red skirt. She crouched in front of us and used a handkerchief to softly dab at my mother’s still bleeding lip, silently.

Mamma didn’t say anything, her eyes vacant still.

Then the woman’s eyes fell upon me and she gave me a small, wobbly smile.

“Hey, honey, what’s your name?” she asked me softly in Italian.

I gulped, unsure about her motives, but ultimately decided to answer her, “Elyssa. Elyssa Ayaari.”

She gave me a sad smile, a delicate hand coming up to cup my cheek. “You’re a Bianchi, now. Welcome to the family.”

ELYSSA

Present day, Longfield Island.

The thick, tall and worn out walls of the castle would seem eerie and intimidating to anyone, but I always got a nostalgic, soft feeling in my stomach whenever I came back here.

After all, the Seamus Longfield Academy was the closest thing to home for me.

These past two years, ever since I first joined the ranks of the most prestigious school in the country, had been a reprieve from the chaotic and disastrous life that awaited me back at the Bianchi estate. I hated it there. Being the daughter of an immigrant taxi driver and a runaway mafia princess made me the perfect target for the bullying of my supposed family.

The fact that we all lived together made matters worse. All of my cousins had unlimited access to me, even though I was banished to the very end of the estate, away from prying eyes.

The ugly fucking duckling of the Bianchi Family. The granddaughter everybody was ashamed of. The cousin they loved to torment and the niece they loved to ignore.

Even my own mother spent her days in the main house, when I didn’t have a right to. She was more of a hostage, though. There to keep up appearances of a unified family, when in reality, her father and brothers treated her like a pariah and a whore.

These days, she was just a shell of what she once had been and the vacant look in her eyes that settled in after baba’s death never left her. She barely spoke and spent all day locked in her room just staring out the window. It broke my heart every time uncle Ignacio, her eldest brother, allowed me to see her, which wasn’t a lot as it was.

That’s why the ancient castle felt like home. Here, I found peace. My professors appreciated and respected me, and I even made a few friends over the years.

Lost in thought, I didn’t realize I had stopped in front of the building until someone violently checked me with their shoulders, sending me flying to the ground.

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