Chapter 212: Do A Crow A Favor

LOUISE’S POV

Even now, with danger closing in around her, Alice expects me to remain where she left me.

She expects me to be available when she needs me again.

In her mind, this is only a pause. The scandal will eventually lose its appeal. Orion’s attention will turn toward other matters. The immediate danger will pass, and Alice will find a way to return to the life she believes belongs to her.

Then she will reach for me again.

Perhaps she will speak gently. Perhaps she will remind me of everything she has done for me, carefully leaving out the things she has taken. She might even pretend that the trouble we are facing has brought us closer, that we are still a mother and daughter standing together against a world that refuses to understand us.

I know her well enough to imagine the expression she will wear.

The soft smile. The patient eyes. The little sigh that makes every demand sound like a reasonable request.

For years, I have answered that expression as though I have no choice.

I have allowed her to make me angry on command, to turn my resentment toward whichever person stood in her way, and to convince me that every ugly thing I did was necessary for our survival.

I have let her decide which battles were worth fighting and which people deserved to be hurt.

Even when I believed I was acting for myself, I often found that I was moving in the direction she had chosen.

It is an unpleasant thing to recognize.

Not because it makes me sorry for what I have done, but because it makes me question how much of my life I have spent following a path I never chose.

Alice’s control has never depended on her being beside me every moment. It has depended on my willingness to keep answering when she calls.

She has relied on my anger, my fear, my need to prove that I am worth keeping, and my habit of returning to her even after she has made it clear that I am nothing more than a convenient tool.

As long as I remain available, she has a use for me. As long as I continue to play my part, she can keep pretending that she is the one directing every move.

I look down at my hands.

They are still. My fingers rest against the fabric of my dress, and for a moment I study them as though they belong to someone else.

These are the hands that have done things I will never be able to take back. They have helped me build the life I wanted, and they have helped me destroy the lives of people who stood in my way.

I do not regret those choices.

I have no desire to dress them up as mistakes made by a frightened girl who never knew better. I knew enough. Perhaps not everything, but enough to understand that my actions would hurt people.

I chose to act anyway.

That is the sort of person I have become, and a few memories of childhood kindness will not change it.

Matteo’s face comes to mind again, and this time I let it stay.

I remember the way he listened when I spoke, even when my stories were nothing more than a child’s complaints about the day. I remember how he made room for me without asking me to earn it. I remember how easily he could make an ordinary afternoon feel like something worth keeping.

He never asked me to become cruel to survive.

He never taught me to measure people by what they could offer or to treat affection as a debt that had to be repaid. If anything, he tried to teach me the opposite.

I did not listen for long.

Or perhaps I listened, but the lessons could not survive the life I was forced to live. It was easier to believe that kindness made a person weak.

Easier to believe that the world belonged to those who took what they wanted and left before anyone could demand payment.

Matteo’s fate gave that belief a shape I could never ignore.

I watched a good man lose everything because he trusted the wrong person. I watched him pay for his faith in someone who never intended to protect him.

Then I watched the woman responsible move on as though nothing had happened.

What was I supposed to learn from that? That kindness would save me? That love would protect me from the people who saw it as a weakness?

I have never found a reason to believe either.

Still, when I think of Matteo, I do not feel the need to defend myself. His memory is the one place where I can admit what I lost without trying to turn it into an argument.

I wanted him to be my father.

I wanted to stay beside him, to hear his voice when I came home, to believe that someone would notice if I was frightened or unhappy.

I wanted an ordinary childhood.

It was not an extravagant wish. I did not need a mansion or a name that opened doors. I wanted someone who would look at me and see a child worth caring for.

For a while, Matteo gave me that. Then Alice took it away.

I cannot change what happened to him, and I cannot return to the girl who believed that wanting something badly enough might make it possible.

I can only remember him.

Perhaps that is why his death has stayed with me more stubbornly than anything else. For all the people I have known, all the promises I have made and broken, all the arrangements I have entered because they offered me something useful, Matteo remains the one person whose affection I never had to question.

I knew he cared for me. I knew it without needing to ask what he expected in return.

And I knew I had lost him long before his body finally gave up.