Isabella hung in the air between us, a poison venom that seeped into the marrow of my bones. That was an erasure. A branding. In two syllables, he had stripped me of my life, my history, me entirely, and draped me in the shroud of a dead woman. A primal scream of denial clawed its way up my throat, and this time it broke free.
"No," I choked out, the word raw and ragged. I took a stumbling step back away from him, away from the portrait that mocked me with my own face. "My name is Alessia. Alessia! I am not her!"
That outburst echoed back through the vast silent room. For a moment wild, I thought him to explode, to punish me for defiance. Instead, Dante merely continued to watch me with his expression unchanged. No anger; no irritation. He looked at me with the detached patience of a doctor observing a hysterical patient, waiting for the fit to pass. That calm dismissal was infinitely more terrifying than any rage could have been. It told me my feelings are nothing to him; my identity is a trivial detail he already discarded.
"That name is of no importance anymore in here," he called out, with a voice low yet steady, cutting through my panic. He turned away from me as a gesture complete and gave a slight nod to the shadow at the far wall. This drew detached from the wall-the other one of his stone-faced guards. "This man-" Angelo- "will show you to your room," Dante said, turning his back once again on me and walking back to the wall of windows, surveying his glittering kingdom below. Conversation closed.
My blood froze. Angelo, the mountain of a man with that scarred neck and those dead eyes, stopped at an appropriately respectful distance and gestured down the long white hallway that I'd never noticed before. "This way," he grunted. His voice was gravel. Every muscle in my body screamed to stay put, to fight, but the look in the guard's eyes told me it was useless. Dante Moretti had given an order. I was to be moved like a piece of furniture, and this man was the mover. Numb with shock and defeat, I let him lead me away from the living room, leaving Dante to commune with his ghost on the canvas.
It was one long sterile tunnel of white marble and recessed lights leading to a single dark wood door at the very end. Angelo opened it and stood aside. My room. My cage. I stepped inside, and he pulled the door shut behind me. I didn't have to hear the click of the lock to know it was there.
The room was beautiful, of course: a prison of impeccable taste. Like the main room, one wall was a sheet of glass, offering a different but equally dizzying view of the city. The space dominated a king-sized bed with a cloud of white pillows and a dark grey duvet. A walk-in closet stood open, revealing rows of new clothes-dresses, cashmere sweaters, silk blouses, all in muted, elegant colours. Nothing I would ever choose. They were a costume. Laid out with unnerving care was, though, a simple nightgown of white silk, resting on a bed-high curiosity of offering me to the ghost he intended me to be.
My gaze was drawn to the opposite wall and a huge ornate silver mirror hanging above a sleek black dresser. I walked toward it as if in a trance, my bare feet cold against the marble floor. I stopped before it and stared. And for the first time, I truly saw what Dante saw.
I saw the shape of my eyes, the curve of my jaw, the way my auburn hair caught the light. I had always seen my mother's daughter in the mirror. Now, I saw Isabella Moretti. I saw a ghost staring back at me, wearing my own terrified expression. I raised a trembling hand to my face and traced my cheekbone with my fingertips. Was this my face? Or could I just borrow it? The thought was nauseatingly spiraled into vertigo. Who was I if not even the figure I saw in the mirror? If the man who owned me saw someone else entirely, who was I?
The rage I felt for my father became a white-hot nova in my chest. This was the generational debt Dante spoke about, buried so deeply that it turned to this monstrous obsession. He hadn't sold me for a loan to a gangster to clear a gambling slate. He sold me, willingly, into a madman's delusion; into pre-existing hell long before I was born. He sacrificed me to a ghost. The betrayal was so complete and so deep that it stole the air from my lungs.
I sank to my knees, with the emerald dress assuming the shape of a pool around me. The dress from the auction; the dress he'd bought me in. It felt like the skin of a snake I desperately needed to shed. With frantic, clumsy fingers, I fumbled with the zipper at the back, tearing at the silk. I wriggled out of it, shoving it away from me like it was contaminated. I was left shivering in the cold air, clad only in my simple underwear. I looked at the pristine silk nightgown on the bed, the costume waiting for me. I looked at the rows of beautiful, soulless clothes in the closet.
No. I would not wear his ghost's clothes. It was a small thing, a pathetic act of defiance in a world where I had no power. But that was mine. I crawled to the bed, pulled the heavy gray duvet off, and wrapped it around my body. Huddled on the floor, swathed in a plain blanket, I stared at my reflection in the brooding glass of the window. A small shadow was defiantly against a city of lights. He could lock me in this tower, call me another's name, but I would not become her; Alessia Romano would not die in this room.