All Chapters of THE SONGBIRDS CAGE: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

ElenaHe summoned me like I was a staff.Not Kiryan, not Dario Emilio Moretti himself, sending word through a maid that I was to come to his study, alone, at once. I went because refusing felt like a worse idea than obeying, and because some small, foolish part of me still hoped this could be handled like a conversation between two reasonable adults.It was not that kind of conversation.I walked the length of that hallway toward his study with my pulse hammering in places I didn't know a pulse could reach, rehearsing every version of calm I could manage. I told myself he was a man like any other man, that whatever he wanted to say to me, I could survive it the way I'd survived every other room in my life that had wanted to swallow me whole. By the time I reached his door, I almost believed it.He didn't offer me a chair. He stood behind his desk with his hands folded in front of him, studying me the way you'd study something you'd found in your house that you hadn't invited in a stra

KiryanThe Don's decision to keep her in the house changed everything, and it changed it fast.I stood in his study while he laid out the new terms in that flat, calm voice of his, like he was discussing shipping routes instead of a woman's life. "She stays. Which means the threat level around her just tripled. I want eyes on her at all times, Kiryan. Not shifts. Not rotations. You, specifically, around the clock, starting today.""Understood," I said, and if he noticed how quickly I agreed, how little argument he got out of a man who usually argued every assignment on principle, he didn't say so.He studied me a moment longer than the assignment strictly required, and something in his expression made me wonder exactly how much he already suspected about what had happened between Elena and me in that safehouse. "Do not let this become complicated, Kiryan," he said finally. "I need her alive and I need her controllable. Feelings make people careless, and careless men get the people the

KiryanI nearly told her everything on the seventh night, and the fact that I didn't still sits in my chest as something swallowed wrong.We were lying in the dark, her head on my chest, and she'd asked casually, sleepily, no idea what she was walking into how long I'd worked for the Morettis.I'd answered a hundred versions of that question over the years, always with some clean, rehearsed number that skated past the truth without technically lying. Lying there with her weight warm and trusting against my side, I found I didn't have the will left to reach for the rehearsed version."Since I was nineteen," I said."That's young.""I was recruited younger than that," I said, before I could stop myself. "Trained younger still. By the time I was nineteen, I'd already done things that should have ended me in prison or in the ground. The Morettis just gave the things I already knew how to do a paycheck and a purpose."She went quiet, absorbing that. "What kind of things?"I should have def

Elena"Then say it," I told him. "All of it. Right now. I don't want fragments anymore, Kiryan. I've had fragments for a week and they've been eating me alive from the inside out. I want the whole truth or I want nothing at all."He set the coffee mug down with a hand that wasn't quite steady, and for the first time since I'd known him, I watched the calm that had defined every single thing about him crumble in real time, right in front of me, with nowhere left to hide it."If I tell you," he said, "there's no taking it back. You'll know exactly what I did and exactly what I am, and I don't know how you look at me after that. I've spent nineteen years not knowing how to live with it myself.""I already know enough to be terrified," I said. "The not-knowing is worse than whatever you're about to tell me. It has to be. Nothing could be worse than the version I've been building in my head all night.""You don't know that.""Then let me find out," I said, and my voice cracked on the last

ElenaI have replayed that moment a thousand times since, trying to understand exactly what shifted in me while he knelt there in front of my chair with his whole terrible history laid bare between us.I could have hated him. Some small, wounded part of me wanted to wanted the clean, simple fury of blaming the man in front of me for everything I'd lost before I could even walk, wanted an easy villain instead of the messy, complicated truth actually sitting in that kitchen with us.But hatred needs simple answers that truth rarely gives.I thought about every version of my life I'd been handed a birth certificate that lied, a scar with a false story attached, a whole childhood built on the careful, well-meant silence of people who thought protecting me meant keeping me ignorant. And I thought about the one person in this house who had finally chosen honesty over protection, even knowing exactly what it might cost him, even knowing I might never look at him the same way again. There was