.Elira

Elira Moretti’s day began, as always, in silence.

The manor still wore its dawn shadows when she padded across the marble corridor, sweater sleeves pulled over her cold fingers. She was twenty now—too old to cry for her mother, too young to forget how it felt to be loved—and the house seemed to know it, its echoing halls whispering keep working, little ghost with every footstep.

She reached the laundry room, arms laden with sheets, and the scent of lavender starch drifted up—one of the few gentlenesses she allowed herself. Folding cloth into perfect rectangles required no voice, no argument, and the rhythm helped her pretend each crease was a heartbeat she could control.

But memories are rude things. They barge in uninvited.

A flash of sea-salt wind.

Sunlight dancing on waves.

A child’s laugh—her laugh—carried away by gulls.

Mama… Papa…

She closed her eyes.

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On weekends her parents had become conspirators in joy. Matteo Moretti—her father, all warm hands and booming laughter—would scoop her up and spin until the horizon blurred. Isabella Moretti—her mother, with eyes the same dark emerald as Elira’s—would chase them down the shoreline, pretending outrage while the tide nipped at their ankles. Elira could still feel her mother’s fingers lacing a tiny pink ribbon into her hair and hear her father teasing, “Our little mermaid, ready to charm the whole ocean?”

Later, back home, they would switch from sailors to chefs. The kitchen glowed honey-gold in the evening, pans sizzling like applause. Matteo wore a backwards baseball cap and wielded a wooden spoon as if it were a maestro’s baton. Isabella guided Elira’s small hands over the dough—“Gentle, stellina. Bread rises better when it’s loved.” Somewhere between giggles and flour fights they created dinners that tasted like lullabies.

Those memories were photographs in her mind—soft, frayed at the edges, yet stubbornly vibrant. She would have framed them if she could, hung them on the walls in place of the ornate oil portraits Luciana favored—portraits that smelled of dust and vanity.

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By noon the manor had shed its hush. Staff hurried through service doors, and Luciana’s voice—iced champagne and poison—echoed from the upstairs balcony as she spoke on the phone, likely selling another artifact that used to belong to Elira’s father. Bianca’s laughter floated after, bright and brittle like broken crystal.

Elira kept to the kitchen. She diced vegetables, stirring them into a velvety soup, the color of autumn leaves after rain. A roast simmered in wine and herbs. Fresh rolls cooled on the counter. She seasoned, tasted, adjusted—Serve perfection and you might survive the evening. Today Luciana expected guests; the slightest flaw could become an excuse for cruelty.

Still, the act of cooking soothed her—until the grandfather clock tolled six. Guests were delayed, Luciana announced, so dinner would be a family affair: Luciana, Bianca, and their disposable shadow.

Elira set the dining table: crystal goblets, antique silver, linen napkins folded into swans. Each place setting cloned the next, except for hers—plain china, no stemware. She’d learned to make herself invisible, an art she hadn’t wanted but mastered anyway.

“Food,” Bianca drawled from the doorway, phone in hand. She wore a silk slip dress the color of spilled wine and the smirk of someone who believed the world gift-wrapped itself for her.

“Yes, Bianca.” Elira lifted the tureen, careful—always careful.

But memory had left her eyes blurred. She misjudged the distance when Bianca thrust her hand out for a bread roll, and the ladle tipped. A ribbon of scalding soup splashed across Bianca’s wrist before Elira could gasp.

Time shattered.

“You stupid bitch!” Bianca shrieked, the word cracking like a whip. The tureen crashed onto the table; porcelain broke.

“I—I’m sorry—” Elira’s apology dissolved as Bianca’s palm met her cheek, the slap sharp enough to snap her head sideways.

Pain bloomed, metallic and hot. She didn’t feel the second slap so much as hear it—Luciana’s rings leaving crescents of fire on her other cheek.

“What have you done to my daughter?” Luciana hissed, sweeping into the room like a winter storm in diamonds. “Can’t even carry a bowl without ruining our evening?”

“It was an accident, I—”

Another slap. Elira tasted copper.

Bianca grabbed a fistful of her hair—those soft, long strands her mother used to braid—and yanked. “I should burn your face the way you burned me!”

“Enough, Bianca,” Luciana said, but not in mercy. She reached for the pot of roast—gravy still bubbling—and upended it over Elira’s shoulders. Hot liquid soaked her sweater, clung to her skin. She bit her lip to keep from screaming.

Luciana shoved her. Elira stumbled into the table, then crashed to the floor, knees barking against marble. A salt cellar toppled, grains scattering like white snow around her shaking form.

“Why are you even on this earth?” Luciana spat. She didn’t wait for an answer; neither did Bianca. Mother and daughter swept out, voices receding up the staircase—already planning new dresses, new parties.

Silence returned. But it was not the kind that healed; it was the kind that watched.

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After sometime,

Elira remained on the floor a long time, staring at the chandelier overhead, each crystal drop refracting light into impossible colors. Beautiful things can still cut you, she thought. Tears blurred the rainbow into a useless smear.

When feeling returned to her limbs she crawled to her knees, ignoring the sting of cooling gravy against burned skin, and began to clean. Porcelain shards, glass beads of spilled wine, white salt—tiny graves of what dinner had been. She worked methodically, because method kept her alive. Blood pricked from her palm when a shard nicked her, but she didn’t stop.

Only when the last stain vanished did she push to her feet, palms braced on the table for balance. The ornate clock chimed nine. Somewhere upstairs Luciana’s laughter drifted, mingling with the fizz of expensive champagne. Elira wondered—distantly—what it would be like to smash that clock and freeze time at the last hour she had ever been truly happy.

Instead she climbed the servants’ staircase to the attic bedroom the Moretti women called her room. It smelled of old cedar, the single window smeared with dust. She peeled off the ruined sweater, biting her lip so her sob wouldn’t echo. Welts already reddened across her shoulders; tomorrow they would bruise purple.

She cleaned her hands, wrapped the worst burn in a strip of linen, and sat on the edge of the narrow bed. A cracked mirror leaned against the wall; she avoided looking at it. She didn’t want proof of what she’d become.

Please, she prayed—though to whom, she didn’t know. Let me be free. Let me go where the ocean can’t be taken from me. Where my name is not a curse.

The roof groaned, as if answering with pity. Tears slipped free—hot, uncontrolled. She clutched the pillow to her chest and rocked, the way her mother once did after nightmares. Memory soothed and tortured in equal measure. She whispered the only lullaby she remembered:

“Moon above, waves below,

Keep my heart where love can grow…”

Her voice cracked on the last note. She lay down fully clothed, salt tears soaking the pillow, and let exhaustion pull her under.Elira slept in shivering peace, unaware that an empire of shadows had just altered its orbit to include her beating, battered heart.

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Possession. Obsession. Madness.

That’s all I hope you all like it.