Between Tyrants

She feared the monster she knew…until the devil himself knocked.

——

Rose’s POV

My eyes sprang open when i heard the door trying to leave its hinges.

The bang hit the walls hard enough to rattle the small mirror above my dresser and I was upright before I was fully conscious. My heart was already doing that thing it did in this house, throwing itself at my ribs like it had somewhere better to be and couldn't understand why the rest of me wasn't following.

My eyes went to the clock and it said 12:03AM.

I sat very still and listened, because in this house listening was a survival skill and I had gotten very, very good at it. I heard Staggering footsteps. The skitter of keys hitting the floor. A slurred curse that started as a word and dissolved into something that wasn't quite language anymore, just noise.

Giovanni was home.

Of course he was.

I pressed my eyes shut for exactly one second, not praying, I'd stopped doing that at fifteen when I realized nobody was picking up, I was just bracing. The way you brace before a wave you can already see coming. It doesn't stop the wave. But it's better than being surprised by it.

I slid off the mattress. Thin thing, that mattress. Sleeping on it every night felt less like rest and more like a recurring punishment I hadn't been formally charged for yet.

My bare feet found the cold floor and I moved to the door the way I always moved in this house , very carefully.

I pressed my ear to the wood.

He was down there. Moving wrong. Even by his standards, which were not high, something was off tonight. There was an erratic quality to the sounds he was making, a particular kind of uneven energy that my body recognized before my brain did.

He wasn't just drunk. This meant  that something went badly somewhere tonight and now it's my turn.

I knew the difference. I'd had years of fieldwork.

"Rose!"

My name. In his mouth. At midnight.

Nothing good had ever followed that combination.

"You little brat! Don't you hear me calling you?!"

Glass shattered somewhere below. The floor shook with a thud that traveled up through my feet and settled in my chest next to all the other things I'd learned to store there quietly.

I opened the door. "I'm coming!"

He was standing under the living room's single dim bulb and he looked exactly like what he was — a man being slowly consumed by something he'd invited in and couldn't get rid of anymore. His once-white shirt hung off him, half-untucked and stained in three different colors none of which I wanted to identify. The smell came up the stairs before he did. Alcohol so thick and sour it wasn't really a smell anymore, it was a presence. It had texture.

His eyes found me the moment I hit the bottom step.

Once, those eyes were clear blue. My mother used to say Giovanni had their father's eyes. Kind eyes, she'd said.

My mother was wrong about a lot of things near the end.

"Where's my goddamn food?"

"I'll bring it right—"

The thing about Giovanni when he was like this was that he moved fast. You never expected it. I always should have. He grabbed a fistful of my hair with the efficiency of someone who had done it many times, which he had, and yanked, and the world tilted sideways, and then my face introduced itself to the corner of the coffee table with a crack that I felt in my skull approximately three seconds before I felt it anywhere else.

Warm blood filled my mouth.

Don't react, I told myself. Reacting adds time.

The fists came after. They always did. There was a rhythm to it I knew it the way I knew the layout of this house in the dark. My body had memorized the sequence. So I did what I always did. I went somewhere else in my head and I waited for the part where it stopped.

It wouldn't have mattered if the food was ready. Last week it had been hot, plated, waiting on the counter exactly where he liked it. He'd said it was cold, it wasn't but he poured scalding soup down my arm to illustrate his disappointment. The scar had settled into something pink and permanent just below my elbow. He looked at it sometimes the way people look at things they built with pride.

"Please." I cried out when it became almost unbearable. "Please, stop—"

Begging made it worse. I knew that. I said it anyway because apparently some part of me was still operating on the hope that one day the word please would mean something in this house. That part of me was an idiot. We had a complicated relationship.

Then, suddenly there were three knocks at the front door.

Giovanni stopped.

The sudden absence of his fists was its own kind of shock. I stayed on the floor and watched his head turn toward the front door and saw something move through his expression that I hadn't seen before.

Fear.

"I wonder who that could be," he said, and his voice had gone to that crooning place it went when his brain was running calculations and his mouth was buying time. "Perhaps One of my friends.” His face brightened at the thought, “Dropping in to say goodnight."

Every cell in my body pulled inward.

His friends. Right. His friends.

I pressed my palms flat to the floor and kept my face very still and focused on the middle distance because if I thought about his friends for more than two consecutive seconds something in me was going to come apart and I couldn't afford that. I'd learned to go somewhere inside myself on those nights. Somewhere so deep and so far that what happened to my body happened to somebody else, some other girl, and I was just watching from a very long way away.

It wasn't a good system. It was the only one I had.

Giovanni smoothed his thinning hair back with one hand and straightened his ruined shirt with the dignity of a man who had forgotten he had no dignity left to perform. For just a fraction of a second, just one, barely long enough to register, I could see who he used to be underneath the wreckage. The ghost of a man my mother had loved. Clean shirt. Steady hands. A life that went forward. That man died the night our family burned. This one was what the fire made from the leftovers.

He pulled the door open.

And then he went completely still.

The man in the doorway was…I don't have a word for it. Tall doesn't cover it. Tall is just a measurement. This was something else. He filled the frame not just with his body but with something that came off him, some quality the air seemed to recognize before I did.

He was broad. Dark hair pulled back. An oxblood shirt, unbuttoned at the chest over a black suit jacket, and the tattoos — they started at his fingers, gold rings over inked letters, and traveled up his hands and arms and disappeared under his collar where an eagle spread its wings across his neck like it owned the territory.

His jaw was the kind that sculptors lose sleep over. His eyes were the color of glaciers. Green ice. Not the pretty kind. The kind that looks like water until you're already in it and then it's too late because it's solid all the way through and it doesn't care about you at all.

He stood there and he didn't say a word and he didn't need to because the room had already understood the assignment. Two men stepped in behind him like shadows that had learned to walk, taking up positions on either side.

Giovanni tried to shut the door.

The man put his boot in the frame without even glancing down. "No, no." His voice was low, "That's not how this works."

He pushed the door wider and stepped inside and my uncle — the man who had just had his fists in my hair, the man who shattered glass for entertainment, the man who had never in six years backed down from anything — my uncle backed up.

Step by step. Like the man's presence was something physical pushing him.

"Giovanni." Something that wasn't quite a smile moved over the man’s face and was somehow worse for it. "It's been too long."

"W-what are you doing here?" Giovanni's voice had shed about four layers of itself. "How did you find me?"

"You really thought you could run from me?"

"I wasn't — I wasn't running—"

"It looked like running."

My uncle swallowed. I heard it.

The man moved further into the room with a predator's ease , and reached up to flick something invisible from his lapel. Like the entire situation was a minor inconvenience he was managing on the way to somewhere more important. "Where's my money."

The temperature in the room dropped by 30%. Uncle Giovanni was shivering. 

"I don't have it." Giovanni's voice was very small now. Barely there. "Not yet. I just need a little more time, I swear I can get—"

The man sighed.

Then he unbuttoned his jacket and reached inside, pulled out a gun and raised it to my Giovanni’s forehead with the same unhurried energy someone else might use to check the weather.

"Giovanni, Giovanni, Giovanni." He shook his head once, slowly, like a teacher who has run out of patience for a student who keeps failing the same test. "I didn't come all this way for excuses."

Giovanni's knees buckled. The drunk bravado, evaporated instantly and completely, and what was underneath it was just a frightened old man in a dirty shirt with his hands shaking.

"Please," he whispered through cracked lips. “Please, I'll get it, I swear, just don't—"

For a moment I felt warmth spread through my chest watching him beg.

I wasn't proud of that thought. I also wasn't going to apologize for it. I had a limited budget for guilt and Giovanni had never made the list.

The man's eyes moved across the room in a slow, methodical sweep. Briefly Taking inventory. And then they found me.

I swear everything  stopped.

I mean that. The room, the sound, the particular quality of the air, it all just stopped and rearranged itself around the fact of his gaze landing on me and staying there.

He looked at the bruise climbing my cheekbone. The torn collar of my shirt. The blood I hadn't managed to wipe from my chin. The way I was still half-crouched on the floor.

He looked at all of it.

And his expression didn't change , that hard, unreadable mask didn't shift but something moved behind his eyes. Something I couldn't name because no one had ever looked at me that way before. Not like I was something to use or something to ignore.

Like I was something that mattered.

Like he was memorizing what had been done to me and filing it somewhere with very specific intent.

I couldn't hold it.

Whatever was in those glacier eyes was too much to look at directly, too heavy, and I dropped my gaze to the floor and felt heat crawl up my neck that I couldn't entirely explain. Shame, maybe. Or something else. Something that didn't have a name yet but sat in my chest like the first note of a song I'd never heard before.

The room was completely silent.

Until his hard voice broke it.

"Who is she?"

Every Debt Has A Price. She Was His.

—-

Rose’s POV

"She's my niece."

Giovanni said it like the word embarrassed him. Like niece was something he'd stepped in and was now trying to scrape off the bottom of his shoe.

The man's eyes didn't move from me.

Not immediately. He took his time, the way people do when they're not afraid of what they'll find, and I stood there with dried blood on my chin and my shirt torn at the collar and I did the thing I'd perfected over six years of living in a house where being looked at was rarely good news. I made myself into furniture.

My Eyes down. Shoulders in. Breathe shallow, becoming something not worth the effort of noticing. 

It had never fully worked on Giovanni.

It was not working now either.

"I see," the man said.

Just two words that are