Survival is not the same thing as living.
I learned that in the five years after the fire, years that stretched endlessly, like smoke that never quite clears from the lungs.
At twenty two, I had mastered the art of pretending. Pretending the world didn't still smell like ash. Pretending loud noises didn't make my hands shake. Pretending I wasn't counting exits in every room I entered.
People called it strength.
I called it practice.
Every morning, I woke before dawn, because sleeping too long meant dreaming too much. I would sit on the edge of my narrow bed and wait for my heartbeat to slow, for my mind to stop replaying that night like a broken film.
Some mornings, I whispered their names out loud Mama, Papa, Myra just to remind myself they had existed. That I hadn't imagined them. That love had once lived in my house before fire stole the walls.
Eli's name was harder.
Because saying it felt like betrayal.
He was the one who pulled me back from the flames. The one who saved me. And then he vanished. No body. No goodbye. No answers.
Just absence.
And absence is the cruelest form of violence.
⸻
The café became my refuge, even though it smelled nothing like safety. Burnt coffee beans. Hot metal. Steam hissing from machines like restrained anger.
Still, it gave me routine.
I worked six days a week, opening shifts when the city was quiet and closing shifts when it pretended not to be dangerous. Customers came and went, spilling their lives onto counters, laughing, flirting, arguing, living.
I served them all with the same practiced smile.
"You're too quiet," my coworker Lina once said, leaning against the counter during a slow afternoon. "You ever think about doing something else? Something bigger?"
I wiped the surface again, though it was already clean.
"No," I said.
Big things burn.
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I didn't talk about my family. Not really.
People knew pieces of tragic fire, lost everyone, so sad but no one knew the way grief had rearranged my insides. No one knew how often I imagined seeing Eli's face in crowds, only to feel foolish when strangers turned around.
Until that night.
The black car.
The scar.
The eyes that looked like my past staring straight through my present.
After that, nothing felt real.
I walked home in a fog, my body moving while my mind lagged behind, stuck in that split second when our eyes met. When the world tilted, and something I'd buried clawed its way back to the surface.
Eli was alive.
But not the Eli I remembered.
The brother who used to sneak me sweets and threaten boys who stared too long at me had been replaced by someone else. Someone carved from shadows and violence. I could see it in the way he sat in that car controlled, unreadable, dangerous.
And he hadn't said my name.
That hurt more than I was ready to admit.
I didn't sleep that night, I sat on the floor with my back against the bed, hugging my knees, staring at the door like it might open on its own and explain everything. My phone lay silent beside me.
He didn't call.
I didn't even know how he could.
Still, some foolish part of me waited.
Morning came anyway.
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Third party for Elijah POV
Across the city, in a world built on blood and loyalty, my brother stood in a room where mercy had never been invited.
Eli no, Elijah now watched as a man begged on his knees.
The floor was marble. Clean. Expensive.
The man bleeding onto it was neither.
"Please," the man cried. "I didn't mean to."
Elijah raised a hand. Silence fell instant That was his power now.
Not the gun resting at his side. Not the knife hidden beneath his jacket. Not even the reputation whispered through the underworld like a warning prayer.
It was the way men stopped breathing when he lifted his hand.
"You stole," Elijah said calmly. "From a man who does not tolerate theft."
The mafia lord sat behind him, relaxed, fingers steepled, watching like this was nothing more than theatre.
"Finish it," the lord said, voice smooth. Interested. Always interested in how Elijah handled things.
Elijah nodded once.
The gunshot echoed.
Clean. Efficient.
He didn't flinch.
But when it was done, when the body was dragged away and the room returned to silence, his mind betrayed him.
Rain.
A scarf.
A girl with fire in her past and his blood in her eyes.
Mira.
He hadn't expected her to look like that stronger, thinner, sharper around the edges. Like someone who had been broken but refused to stay that way.
Seeing her had cracked something open inside him.
Something he'd sealed shut the night he ran.
He hadn't vanished by choice.
After the fire, Elijah had woken in a hospital bed with burns on his hands and a head full of fractured memory. By the time he was strong enough to return, the house was gone. The bodies were buried. And Mira was Gone.
Taken by the system. Moved. Hidden.
He searched And when searching failed, survival took over.
That was when the mafia found him Or rather recognized him. Anger, Strength, Fearlessness.
Fire had made him useful.
Years passed, and usefulness turned into trust. Trust turned into power. Power turned into chains lined with gold.
By the time Elijah became the right hand of a man feared across cities, he no longer believed in innocence.
Until he saw his sister standing in the rain.
⸻
The mafia lord noticed it too.
The pause.
The tension.
The flicker of emotion Elijah usually kept buried.
"Interesting," the lord murmured later, pouring himself a drink. "You don't get distracted."
Elijah said nothing.
"A woman?" the lord continued. "Pretty ones always complicate things."
"She's nothing," Elijah lied.
The lord smiled slowly.
"Nothing," he repeated. "Then why do I feel like the world might burn for her?"
Elijah's jaw tightened, Because it already had And this time, he wasn't going to let her face the fire alone.