Eliana:

I hadn't thought about this in depth for years, I had been shoving it down for far too long. Each of these men had probably seen and dealt with worse, but the story that I was about to my own, and the intensity of their lives and their opinions didn't invalidate my own feeling about my past. The room slowly began to empty out, each of the mob leaders nodding to their second and enforcers, giving them permission to leave their bosses. I adamantly didn't look at them as they filed past me, I just grit my teeth and mentally prepared to recount something I had sworn never to think about, much less divulge to strangers.

Leondardo was about to leave when he gave me a questioning look, silently asking me if I wanted him to stay or not. I gave him the best grin that I could muster, and shook my head at Angelo and Lucia, letting them know that it was alright with me if they stayed. None of them were my best friends, and none of them made me feel quite as safe or comfortable as Alessio or Ezrah might, but they made me feel better than if they weren't there at all.

Once the door was tightly shut behind everyone else, I took in the room. It was slightly less intimidating, but I still didn't like it. I sighed and ran my hand through my hair, wishing that there was another way to protect Alessio from the doubt that would arise because of their scrutiny of me.

Alessio had been kind to me, and never pressed me for more information than I wanted to divulge, but he couldn't look like he was protecting me or prioritizing me above the job. I'm sure that if he had really wanted information about me, he would have found the resources to do it. The fact that he hadn't hinted at anything in my history told me that he didn't pry more than surface level, which I was happy about. Knowing that he respected my boundaries meant a lot, in part because I knew that he wasn't used to showing much restraint in his line of work.

Everyone but Allegra had taken a seat, and I tried my best to look like I wasn't glaring at them, "If you require an explanation, then you'll have it."

"It would be nice," Elias shrugged nonchalantly, as though his previous challenges hadn't been threats in their own ways. "I'm growing more curious by the minute about how someone with such a seemingly nonexistent history has so quickly adapted to living in this type of situation."

None of the other mafia leaders around the tables glared at me with the same cynicism, but they weren't jumping in at my defense either. I knew that I at least still sported a scowl as I adamantly avoided all of their gazes. "I've been in some bad living situations before, I've been faced with some unfortunate circumstances. The one thing that it's all taught me is that if you're lucky enough to be in a place that's safe, where there's no threat of beating or starvation or rape, then you can count your lucky stars and roll with it. I'm not foreign to violence, and I'm not bothered by it. I'm sorry if you think that I should be."

No one said a word, and I knew they were waiting for me to deliver on my promise. They wanted my story. "I should preface this with a disclaimer. Most foster parents are great, and loving, and caring..... But there are a few that aren't. The earliest ones that I remember were great. Well, there was one woman who seemed a little crazy when I look back on it. She had this idea in her head that if she pushed us hard enough, each of us would be a child prodigy. Endless music lessons, brutal ballet training, she'd slam the lid of the piano on me if I didn't-" I wrung my hands together and shook my head, trying to ignore the couple of scars on my fingers from when I refused to practice. "I digress. Anyways, a little bit before my sixteenth birthday, I was sent to a new home."

I tried not to look at Elias. Part of my gut told me that he wasn't doing this to be vindictive, he was genuinely concerned about the safety of his family, and I couldn't be completely mad about it. I still didn't like it, though. "The previous family was about to permanently adopt this set of twins living there, and they didn't want a third anymore clouding up their space, so I got shipped out again. The new home was.... Odd. The mom couldn't be more than 25, he was at least in his 40s, and their communication was off, but he was a politician, an old fashioned conservative man. I chalked it up to cultural differences, I liked it there so I figured it couldn't be that bad.

"They gave me my own room, they were wealthy and well off. Sometimes the way they talked made me think that I was a PR stunt, there was a local election coming up and he was easily the front runner, so I thought they were trying to make him seem more sympathetic because he was a little cold. I didn't really care, though, if it meant that I had a roof over my head and food, and they gave me even more than that. A couple weeks into staying there, he asked if I wanted to have a movie night. She wasn't there of some fundraiser for public libraries or something, which was ironic because she hated reading or anything that required brain power. He asked if I wanted pizza and of course I said yes. But then I went to the pantry to find the popcorn.... And he was there behind me."

My nails were already short from a life of biting them, but I couldn't help it now. I was too nervous, I didn't want to talk about this, I didn't like talking about it. I glanced at Alessio, sitting in his with his jaw clenched, then threw a quick glance around the room at everyone else. A part of me wished that one of them would interrupt me, or someone would run into the room and stop my attempt at recounting trauma.

"That's when it started. A quick brush against my hips, or a grasp on my shoulders when he would stand behind me, every time I went into a pantry or a closet. I swear, I thought...... I thought that was just what happened in that house, and I was the only kid there so there wasn't anyone else to ask what was normal. But then it started to get worse and I had been through so many different houses-"

It felt so wrong to tell this story, especially to people that I didn't know or trust. To calm myself down, I concentrated on shoelaces as I paced, following their lines through the loops. "So I, uhm, on my sixteenth birthday, I came down the stairs and I knew there was something different. The way he looked at me... The mom was upstairs, he pushed me into the pantry because it would be quieter. I tried to shove him back out but he came at me again, so I slammed the door with his hand in it. Somehow I managed to break every one of his fingers, bones through the skin and everything. He started yelling at his wife to take him to the hospital, barricaded me into the pantry and put a chair under the door knob. While they were gone, I managed to break my way out, grabbed a backpack filled with what I could find, and took off. I never reported him or tried to call social services about him- I was one foster kid, a difficult one at that, and he was a church-going political figure. No one would have believed me, and if they did, nothing would ever have been done about it."

"Is that how you found your way here?" Leonardo asked.

"Not quite," I sighed, hating the rest of this story even more than the first part. "I made it through a couple of major cities before I came across a girl in a more metropolitan area. She was nice, a girl named Lily who came from a surprisingly similar background as I did. I didn't know a lick of sign language at first and she was deaf, paper and pencil were how we communicated, but she told me that she knew a group of people around our age, runaways and homeless alike. It made sense to me that we should join a pack of them, it seemed safer. I bounced around with them for a long time, well over a year. Lily was like a sister to me, we were almost immediately best friends. She taught me sign language over that time, sometimes it was the only language I used."

With a sigh, I dropped into a chair, ignoring the eyes on me and instead staring at the floor as I leaned my elbows forward onto my knees. "There was a really brutal winter that year. It hadn't been so bad before, but the homeless population in the area had skyrocketed and there were only two spaces left in the last shelter for miles. Lily and I were older, we told the two younger girls that we camped with to take them. The two of us found an abandoned house to stay in for the night, but holy hell, it was cold. I had never felt cold like that before. I remember falling asleep that night and thinking that I wouldn't wake up, wondering if it was possible to skip hypothermia altogether and have your blood freeze solid while you were still alive.

"Halfway through the night, someone showed up," My fingers had pulled the pencil out of my hair long ago and I was now rubbing the paint off of it. I sat back in the chair, crossing my arms, uncrossing them, then crossing them again. "There was a guy who sometimes ran in our circle, showed up telling us that a bunch of them were motel crashing about a mile away. It's not uncommon- you pool your money with a group and get a small motel room- you check in alone and sneak the others in above capacity. It's cramped but it's a warm room and a shower. We didn't know him very well, but we were desperate."

I gripped the pencil tightly in my hand and stood up, starting my pacing again. It probably annoyed the others, but if they were going to demand the truth, they would have to accept it however I was comfortable delivering it. "He led us back to an area near skid row. We knew that he was dealing on the side, crack was in highest demand. At that moment, we were malnourished and had no blankets, we didn't care what anyone was slinging, we just wanted out of the cold. Once Lily and I got there, he told us that the other three that would crash there for the night had gone out to get food, and he was going to meet up with them and bring them back. Until then, we could use the bathroom.

"I should've known something was wrong. Honestly, drugs and that shit never got to me, he could've brought us back to a den but if there was central heating I wouldn't have cared. When I stepped out of that shower, though, I could hear Lily through the door. She never tried to speak, she didn't need to since I could translate, but it was like she was screaming. I ran out there as quickly as I could, this older guy had her pinned down on the bed and then his buddy tried to do the same to me.... Didn't take me more than a few seconds to realize that it was a set up, he was going to sell us for the night, maybe longer. The guy holding me down-"

A shudder ran down my spine that I tried to suppress, but I shook my head in hopes that I could push the feelings away, to talk about them without feeling them. It was like dissociating all over again. "Well, he got further than I would have liked, but I was only in a towel from the shower. I managed to get to the small knife that I carried in my bag, stabbed him three times in the stomach and once in the arm. It was a short blade, I couldn't do that much damage, but it was enough for me to get the other one off of Lily and leave them unconscious. They may have bled out, I don't know. I threw on my clothes, we grabbed our bags, and we ran.

"We kept running until the cold air was shredding our lungs apart. Found another abandoned building for the night, knew we couldn't go back. I stayed up all night, worried that he might track us down. My hair was still wet from the shower, it literally froze into ice. We didn't make it far enough, I suppose, because the next night, while Lily was keeping watch, he found us. I should've stayed up too, she couldn't hear him coming and then it was too late. He was a lousy shot, he missed her chest and got her arm instead, but it woke me up. I managed to wrestle the gun away from him..... Got two in his chest, dead within seconds."

I stopped my pacing long enough to finally make myself look at some of the people in the room. Those that I didn't know as well, I refused to meet their gazes, but Angelo's face was stoic and unchanged from it's normal deadpan, Leonardo seemed somewhat surprised, and Alessio looked furious. However, no one in the room had the moral high ground to judge me, so I plowed on. "Someone heard the gunshots and called the cops, which was good. The only reason that Lily didn't bleed out then and there was because of the ambulance, I refused to leave her side until we were at the hospital. The police called in a case worker to meet us there, since I wasn't as injured, they kept a cop with me but they handcuffed Lily to the hospital bed.

"I wasn't going to leave her, but when she woke up, Lily told me that I had to run. Odds were that we would end up in a juvenile detention center or maybe even tried as adults to make an example of us. I was the one that did the actual killing and maiming, I would be in much more trouble. Neither of us would ever be willing to go back into foster care, after the places that we had lived in.... It's hard to describe, because you know that the odds are good, that the next foster home will be loving and kind. The same thing stops a lot of kids from reporting bad ones- even if the one you're in is terrible, there's always a chance, no matter how small, that the next will be worse. And you can't risk that.

"She convinced me, I shouldn't have listened to her," I shook my head, still angry at myself after so long. "I swore I would come back for her, get us both out and we could go further. Start a new life, you know? I threw some steaming coffee in one of the cop's faces, caused a commotion and ran. I laid low for a couple of days, managed to hide from pretty much everyone. I didn't come out of hiding until I was almost starving."

The shaking in my hands had become so bad that I clenched them behind my back to hide them. I wasn't going to recount the last part of the story unless someone asked, it wasn't relevant and it didn't change anything. "After a while, I crossed state lines again, hoping that it would make it more difficult for them to track me. The paperwork and I.D. that I carry are doctored, but they're good forgeries. I've managed to stay under the radar, and now I'm here."

I frustratedly and quickly swiped my fingers underneath my eyes, hoping that they weren't too red and that the inevitable tears weren't too obvious. They had begun to force their way from my eyes without my permission during my story, but now in the silence I was grateful for Leonardo breaking it with a serious but somewhat lighthearted, "I'm sorry for teasing you about hating hospitals and small enclosed spaces.... I get it now."

I shrugged, "It's fine. They don't really make sense unless you know the story, so I get it."

Lucia walked up to me and set a mug of tea on the table with a pointed look. In my total obliviousness, she must have left the room to get me some and I hadn't even noticed. Elias seemed to be the only one that could sense I was nearing my breaking point and looked at me with narrowed eyes, "Are you still planning on going back for Lily?"

"I already did," I gripped my tea in cold hands and stared at the colorful water. My desperate and futile hope was that no one would ask about her. The tsunami wave was finally crashing down on me, and I wasn't prepared enough to hold my breath. "She didn't make it past state lines. I found her in a cemetery in the same town I left her in. Did some digging, turns out that the same week I left, she was relocated to another foster home and killed herself. I guess she was desperate and I didn't make it back in time."

The room fell silent as I took my seat again, no one said a word but I could feel the tension rising by the second. I played it off, shrugging and finally taking the first good look at Elias since I had started my story. "I'm not working for the Russians. I had no involvement in this world at all until I came here. If you can't seem to find a track record on Eliana North from more than a few years back, it's because I wasn't her back then."

I waited for someone to say something so that I could hear anything besides my own voice. It was a low growl that finally broke the silence, Alessio's voice ringing, "Everyone out. Right now."

My eyes remained trained on the ground, knowing that he intended for me to stay as everyone filed past me. I finally managed to raise my gaze as Elias left the room, barely in time to see his no longer suspicious, but still not welcoming, stare. Allegra followed closely behind him, finally straightening from her unflinching position against the bookshelf, but instead of giving me that analyzing look like she could see into my soul, she merely gave me a blank stare. It was a step up from what I got from her before, which was skeptical doubt.

The door clicked shut and I stared intently at the tops of my shoes, wiggling my toes inside as if I could see them. "I suppose it's better that they look at me as if I'm a little crazy rather than with suspicion. You're more likely to get their support since they know I'm not a spy."

"Eliana."

"And at least this way they won't keep talking about their suspicions behind my back."

"Eliana."

"But I bet-"

"Eliana," He commanded with his voice, more forcefully this time.

I gulped down a breath of air and finally glanced up at him with a shaky breath. I wondered how many dots he had connected now. What could have been quirks before were much more obvious now, it wasn't hard to read into them- the way I compulsively locked doors three times, how I wasn't fazed by violence, my distaste for the pantry, the scars that had littered random spots on my body long before the Russians had taken me. Allegra's pronouncement that I had killed someone before rang true, and now it was confessed in front of a room full of strangers.

I had never even said it out loud to myself, but now a room full of vicious people that I barely knew, had full access to some of my darkest past.

There was a dull panic in my chest as I stared at him, but he only looked at me with hesitancy, as if for the first time ever, he was unsure of himself.

"Would you like to.... Talk about it?"

I could have laughed at his hesitancy, if my mind hadn't started to feel like a computer trying to update to the latest version of windows after not being used for five years. My mouth was rebelling after voicing the story, it didn't want to form words or cohesive thoughts. Instead I just shook my head, feeling the energy leave my body. I sighed, dropping where I stood so that I could just sit where I was, warm in the little patch of sunlight that still streamed through the window. I didn't have the energy to walk to a chair, much less recount it or relive it again.

My legs were sprawled out in front of me, ears ringing and brain tuned out until I realized that I needed to respond. "No, I don't."

He didn't know what to say or what to do, I could tell from his posture and clenched jaw. There was no good answer, no good response that could fix what happened or even ease the memory. It was just a tightening chain around my neck, weighing me down with no way to escape it.

I hadn't realized that Alessio moved from his spot to sit silently on the ground a few feet in front of me until his ankle was laying across mine. It was barely a noticeable feeling, just a reassurance. I didn't have to say anything, he didn't expect me to acknowledge him. He just wanted me to not feel alone, no explanation needed. My anchor holding me in place as the water receded again