Chapter 5

The silence in the room didn't last long. It broke apart the moment Liana found her voice again, and when it came, it came shaking.

"No," she said, backing away a step, shaking her head as though the motion alone could rewrite what she'd just heard. "No, they wouldn't do this to me."

"They did." Oliver's voice stayed level, unmoved by the gunshot still ringing faintly in both their ears, unmoved by the body slumped against the restraints a few feet away. "You heard him yourself."

"No." The word cracked as it left her, smaller this time, less certain, as though some part of her already knew arguing wouldn't change what her own ears had heard.

Oliver watched her for a moment before he spoke again, and there was no comfort in his voice, only a kind of hard, practiced honesty that felt almost crueler than sympathy would have.

"Don't trust people," he said. "That's the first thing anyone in my world learns. Usually the hard way."

Liana wrapped her arms around herself, the concrete cold beneath her bare feet, the weight of everything pressing down on her all at once. She looked up at him, taking in the man who had pulled a gun on someone without hesitation only moments ago, the man who had kept her safe inside his home for weeks without asking for anything in return.

"Who are you," she asked quietly.

"Oliver Reed," he said, and something flickered behind his eyes as he said it, some old weight he carried without ever quite setting down. "I run the Reed family. Whatever you've heard people call it, mafia, syndicate, whatever whatever, that's what it is, at the end of the day. That's exactly what I am."

Liana's lips parted, but no sound came out at first. She took a step back without meaning to, her eyes moving over him as though she were seeing him for the very first time, the calm in his voice, the men with guns still standing near the wall, the body slumped lifeless only a few feet away.

"The mafia," she repeated, barely above a whisper, staring at him like the ground had just shifted beneath her feet. "You're, you've been keeping me in a house owned by, you're actually, you're really."

She couldn't finish the sentence. Her mind was already racing backward through the past weeks, every locked door, every silent guard posted outside her room, every question she'd been too afraid to ask because some instinct in her had already sensed the answer long before tonight.

"I thought," she said, shaking her head slowly, "I thought you were just, I don't know but not this."

"Does it change anything," Oliver asked, watching her carefully, no defensiveness in his voice, only a flat kind of certainty, as though he'd had this exact reaction thrown at him more times than he could count.

Liana opened her mouth to answer, then closed it again, because the honest truth was she didn't know.

The man standing in front of her had saved her life, had just put a bullet in the man who tried to take take her life ,had sheltered her for weeks without asking for anything, and somehow all of that sat strangely beside the word he'd just said about himself, mafia, like two truths that shouldn't be able to exist in the same person and yet clearly did.

"I don't know," she admitted finally, quietly, her eyes still fixed on him. "I don't know what to think anymore. About anything."

Something almost like understanding passed over his face, and for a moment the room felt a little less cold.

"My own family betrayed me," she said, the words tumbling out now, faster, rougher, anger finally cutting through the shock. "The people I trusted more than anyone in the world, and they wanted me dead, for money, for a company, and the man who actually saved me turns out to be, whatever this is. What does that even say about the world I come from."

"That's not the end of the story, Liana." Oliver's voice softened, just barely, just enough that she noticed it. "That's not the end."

She lowered her hand and looked at him, searching his face for whatever he meant by that, and found only certainty there, quiet and unshakable.

"They've taken everything," she said,"The company. My mother's legacy. Everything I was supposed to inherit, everything I worked for, it's all in their hands now." Her voice broke properly this time."And my father. He's with them too, isn't he? He let them bury me and just... stayed silent."

"Yes," Oliver said simply, no softening, no apology in it, just the truth laid bare because she deserved that much at least.

Liana's hands curled into fists at her sides, and something shifted behind her eyes, grief hardening slowly into something else entirely.

"I'll make them pay," she said. "Whatever they've done to me. Whatever they think they've won. I'll make them pay for every single bit of it."

For the first time since she'd woken in that dark room weeks ago, something close to approval crossed Oliver's face.

"That's why you have to be strong," he said. "Stronger than you've ever had to be. They tried to kill you because of what you're worth, Liana. Your name. Your blood. Your inheritance. People like that don't stop coming after what they want. Not until someone makes them."

She held his gaze, and for a moment neither of them said anything at all, the room around them heavy with everything that had just been said and everything still left unspoken.

"I don't know how to be that person," she admitted quietly. "I don't know how to fight people who taught me how to love them first."

Oliver studied her for a long moment, something unreadable passing behind his eyes, and when he finally spoke, his voice had dropped into something quieter, something that didn't quite belong to the man who had pulled a trigger only minutes earlier.

"You remind me," he said, and then stopped himself, as though the words had slipped out before he meant to let them. He looked away briefly, jaw tightening, before he made himself finish it. "You remind me of my sister."

Liana blinked, the anger inside her stilling for just a moment, replaced by something gentler, something curious.

"You have a sister?"