Make Them Regret It Chapter 01
To make the biological daughter he’d only just found feel at home, my father personally carved my Core from my body. Then my fiancé beat me thirty times with a belt.
They told me if I called off the engagement, it would all be over.
Later, they staged an elaborate charade to make me believe our family was destroyed, all to force me to break.
That night, my grandmother, my mother, my two sisters-in-law, and my five-year-old niece all died.
Before they pushed open the chapel doors, the last thing they said was, “It’s only one night. How bad can it be?”
The doors opened.
My grandmother sat peacefully on the pew, her chest still. My mother and both my sisters-in-law were gone. My niece lay in my arms, her small body already cold.
I was wearing a wedding dress, with blood still crusted at the corner of my mouth.
By the time the sun rose, every woman in the Romano family was dead.
…
When the emergency alarm blared through the Romano estate, I was in my wedding dress, waiting for Colton DeLuca to come and take me to the ceremony.
Red text flashed across the projection screens mounted in every corner of the estate:
“Family Head Antonio Romano has been arrested for collaborating with hostile forces. All adult male family members will be taken into federal custody. All female family members will be confined to the estate’s private chapel. In the morning, they will be transferred to the Blackwood facility for processing.”
Transferred for processing.
The name was a whisper, a ghost story. Blackwood was where they sent people like us—people with abilities—to be studied and broken down. No one ever came back. You were used until there was nothing left to take.
My wedding day had become a funeral.
The chapel was freezing that night.
The chapel walls were lined with a material that suppressed our abilities. The moment we stepped inside, the power that ran in our blood vanished. We were as helpless as anyone else.
By the time dawn approached, I was the only person in the chapel still breathing.
I leaned against the wall and swallowed the last capsule my grandmother had given me.
That was when I heard two guards laughing and talking outside the chapel door.
“Mr. Romano and his sons have spoiled that girl rotten.”
“I know, right? Just to get Blythe to break off her engagement to the DeLuca kid, they staged this whole damn thing. Hired fake feds, locked all the women in here…”
The other man laughed.
“Romano said as long as Blythe signs, everyone’s out at sunrise. They’re still partying up at the main house. The sons are all there, keeping Isabella happy.”
I froze.
There were no federal agents. No arrest.
My father and brothers were perfectly fine.
This was all an act.
A show they had put on for me, just to make me give up my fiancé for the biological daughter they had only recently brought home—Isabella Romano.
The drug began to work, a deep cold spreading from my chest.
I opened my mouth to scream, but only blood surged up my throat.
The men outside heard the noise.
“What was that?”
One of them came over, carrying an emergency lamp. He peered through the crack in the door, and his face went pale.
“Open the door. Something’s wrong.”
The other man grabbed him.
“What’s the rush? Blythe’s a stubborn one. She’s probably faking it, trying to scare Mr. Romano.”
“Besides, Miss Isabella was very clear: no matter what you hear tonight, you don’t open that door. You want to be the one who messes this up for her?”
The man with the lamp hesitated.
In the end, he didn’t move.
I lay on the freezing stone floor and watched a thin strip of daylight seep in from a high window.
I wanted to tell them I wasn’t faking.
I wanted to tell them it was too late.
Everyone in the chapel was dead.
And I was next.