Chapter 8
Signs
Andrea
Signs, there were none.
People live their lives looking for them- warnings, signs, whatever you want to call them.
I had none or maybe I was too in love with the idea of him, that I missed out on them.
I fell for Alejandro the first day I saw him. He wasn’t my first and it didn’t happen because I had no experience with love.
He was just different from any other man I had ever met. He was a man, not a boy, not a kid. Or at least he was good in playing the part of the perfect gentleman.
I made him coffee in the place I used to work for in Budapest, while I completed my degree in nursing- or should I say the degree my mother pushed me to pick up, to get a better job position than she and dad had. I never finished University.
Alejandro walked into my life, showing me he could give me everything I ever wanted and then took away everything I ever cared about.
He destroyed everything. He destroyed me.
The first day, I made him coffee. He smiled, we spoke for a few minutes and he kissed my hand, leaving only at closing time. Alejandro smiled a lot. When he was happy, when he was angry, when he was thinking of how to punish you. I just didn’t know that back then. I thought he was a positive person. There were no signs.
He was back the next day with a red burgundy rose for me. It was long stem, full of thorns and he told me it reminded him of me- beautifully breath-taking, the most regal of them all but also dangerous, like a thousand thorns.
I remember gawking at him, my hands reaching for the tattoo on my back.
How could it be? How could he know? I had a red rose on my lower back.
And I had thorns, yes, I had. I was looking for something different. I didn’t want a normal life, I didn’t want to end up living like my parents- struggling for money all the time, in a small house in the countryside.
I wanted the city life, I wanted to become someone. I wanted to be wealthy and find someone that wanted the same things as I did.
If I could take it all back, I would.
I was wrong. I did get a sign. I just didn’t interpret it right. I thought it was fate, when it was stalking. Alejandro had done his research properly. Only later I would find out that when Alejandro wanted something, nothing could stand in his way.
He had wanted me and he was going to have me.
“Would you go out to dinner with me tonight? I am only in town for a few days,” another smile, another small footstep into his trap.
I said yes to Alejandro.
We went out two times in three days. He was there for work, in Budapest for his business. A family business in shipping, he told me. I believed every word out of his mouth. He always smiled. He was always dressed like a gentleman, always opened the door for me, never pressured me to kiss him, sleep with him.
His dark looks intrigued me, his accent was catchy.
In two months, he came back to Budapest six times. The last time, I flew back with him to Italy. I was hooked.
I loved his smile then, before I knew what it meant. Before I knew the horrible things he had planned out for me.
“Are you sure you played the sequence right?” I asked my student and saw doubt in his eyes. “Let’s try it again. From here, Antonio,” I told him kindly, pointing to the note on his book. “One more time before you leave,” I encouraged him and Antonio started playing again.
Even if he was standing behind me, I could feel Sebastian’s eyes at the back of my head. It wasn’t the first time I had someone watching during a piano lesson – sometimes parents stayed behind or arrived a little early to pick up their kids- but Sebastian’s presence was hard for me to ignore.
He followed my every move, listened in carefully to everything I had to say and I couldn’t refrain from looking his way from time to time.
As the melody played beautifully in the background, I studied every single trait of his face.
Rough, savage, wild.
He had a few more scars on his cheeks than I remembered. His jaw seemed a little irregular and swollen. His shoulders looked broader.
I willed myself to stop staring at the tattoo on his neck, but I kept having flashes of that night, of how I had circled my tongue on it, watching him groan in pleasure, his grip tightening around my hips as he had pushed harder into me.
My stomach fluttered at the memory, I gasped.
“Yes, I did it,” Antonio looked up at me, smiling wide.
I smiled back a little and nodded.
“Bravo,” I told him, while he closed the piano and listened in to all the exercises I was assigning him for next week’s lesson.
By the time he had taken all his books and had stepped out of the room, I had regained control and pushed the past out of my head.
Until Sebastian spoke to me again.
“Do you have another lesson now?” his voice seemed so close I turned a little, my heart missing a beat.
He had walked to the piano, hands in his pockets, and was now standing only inches away from me.
I shuffled my papers and cleared my throat.
“No. I am done for today. We need to go pick Eddy up in half an hour,” I said and turned my back to him, pushing everything in my brown satchel.
For a while he stood there in silence, until I turned his way again, adjusting my ponytail, not knowing what that look on his face meant.
He was so serious, his eyes digging into my soul, like he was studying me.
Stripping me – I thought.
Layer after layer, Sebastian was looking for me. For Andrea Szerov.
I took in a deep breath and my eyes followed his hand, as he adjusted the bra strap over my shoulder.
It had slipped from under my short sleeve, button up shirt, and halfway down my arm.
I hadn’t even realized, but Sebastian had. He couldn’t stop looking at my shoulder.
My pulse quickened instantly.
“Why don’t you play something?” he said.
His question stunned me a little, I hadn’t been asked in a long time.
“I don’t know…” I hesitated and then shrugged. “It’s been years since I played for someone,” I admitted.
My father had been the last person to listen to me play.
Back home, when it was cold and snowing endlessly, he used to sit in front of the fireplace and ask me to play something for him.
It had been like a ritual. Fireplace, palinka and me playing classical music for him after his shift.
Sometimes, he wouldn’t even shower until I had played a little something for him first, his chubby face still black from mining all day.
“What would you like me to play?”
Sebastian shook his head.
“I want you to play what you like. Whatever makes you happy,” his words tingled my soul, they reached something deep down and forgotten.
Nobody had cared about what I wanted, what I liked, what made me content in such a long time.
Not trusting myself to say anything, I just nodded and took a seat on the stool.
I stared at the keys and then tried to swallow the lump in my throat.
Beethoven Moonlight Sonata – I thought and that was all my fingers needed to hear.
They seemed to move on their own. They seemed to find their way back into the rhythm of things, remembering every single note by heart.
It had been my favourite since I had started playing the piano, when I was four. I remembered my grandmother playing it for me when I was little and I recalled my mother’s concerned face when I had started playing it, too.
“Maybe something happier today, little Andrea?” she had hoped but It was something beyond my control.
I was never the happy child that skipped down the street. I was never the trouble-free type. From an early age, my father picked me out of the bunch and told my mother I was very complex and sensitive. And saw it as a blessing.
But I was never joyful like Eddy.
Looking back, there was never hope for me. I was never satisfied, never content with what I had. I wanted more and the constant search for something different had gotten me to where I was now.
Lost and messed up.
As I played the sonata, Sebastian stood near the piano, staring at me while my body rocked gently, following my hands. I put all the energy I had, my fingers aching I hadn’t played like that in a while. I had banned that song from my repertoire, scared of what it might do to me, to my iron shield.
“It’s called Moonlight Sonata,” I looked up at him, when I was done and he nodded.
“It sounds like you,” Sebastian murmured and he kept his eyes on me, as my chest moved faster. “Heart-breaking, secretive… Beautiful,” he added and I looked up into his dark, brown eyes.
“I thought I had forgotten it,” I admitted, my eyes down to my hands again.
“Why did you stop playing it?” Sebastian asked and I pursed my lips, knowing exactly why.
“It reminds me of the things I never really valued and the things I lost, things I can never take back,” my ice-blue eyes sunk into his and pleaded Sebastian not to ask more.
“Where did you learn to play?” he wondered and I told him about my life in Hungary, how my grandmother taught me everything she learned about music in her early days, back when the Second World War was depraving Europe of all its beauty.
To her, poverty and destruction had been a daily reminder of how cruel mankind could be, but she had held on to the hope of a peaceful future, thanks to that old piano her father had left for her.
Hope – I cringed at the word. It was dangerous to even allude to it.
I had no hopes for my future, all that mattered was Eddy’s. I wasn’t going to screw things up for him.
“Why didn’t you go back?” he asked then and I shook my head immediately.
“I can’t. I can never go back,” I told him.
“Why not?” Sebastian pressed on and I wished he would stop asking me things about my past, about my family. I had never talked about them with anyone, too scared of what it would do to me to think about them.
I knew they were well, all of them. My dad and my mother were fine, still living in our little house in the countryside, where time seemed powerless.
But I knew I couldn’t visit them. Alejandro would never allow that. Alejandro would be ready to punish me- punish all of us- If I left Italy.
“I just can’t” and I stood, trying to flee from the questions and the memories but Sebastian wouldn’t move.
He stood there in front of me, not giving me space to run away.
“You could take Eddy there, for now at least…” he began to say but I didn’t let him finish.
“You have no idea what you are talking about, Killer,” I said and I took in a deep breath.
“Alejandro would kill you,” I heard him murmur.
“No. You don’t understand. There are worse things than death, Sebastian,” I spoke slowly, never losing eye contact with him, because I really wanted him to understand what my life was like, what Alejandro was like. “Physical abuse is dreadful, but Alejandro never touched me like that. He did something just as bad, leaving no signs along the way.”
Not on my body anyway, but my soul…
I closed my eyes for an instant, holding back a tear and looking for the right words to say.
“He destroyed me emotionally. Slowly. Daily, with the same violence and force that a slap or a whip would hurt me. He tortured me mentally. I couldn’t think, do or even speak without his approval. If I ever disobeyed or tried to escape, he would let me watch my family members take the bullet first, one by one, before I’d take mine. He loves to torture people, he’s just like his father. If I knew…” and my voice broke a little, but I didn’t give in to the tears. I let them fall inside, deep down my battered soul. I could take them, I had taken them before.
“But he didn’t do anything when you left his house, when you left him,” Sebastian pressed on and stepped a little closer.
I sucked in a breath under his inquisitive eyes.
“He loves Eddy. He let me leave because he wants to protect him, too. Until he is older anyway. But I could never leave the country,” I shook my head. “He sends money to my parents, he knows where they live. He would go there personally and kill them, one by one. I am prisoner, Killer. There’s no way out of my prison.”
I felt his hand brush against my shoulder then and I prayed my knees would stop shaking. He didn’t say anything, there was nothing he could say, nothing he could promise me that could be worth a thing and I admired him for that.
Sebastian wasn’t the sort of man to misuse words. I didn’t need to hear more lies, more false promises.
I didn’t need hope, because hope was just something that wasn’t in my cards.
To be fair, I didn’t know what I needed, but I knew what I wanted.
Touch me.
I wanted to feel him, his warmth. I hadn’t been touched by anyone in years. I hadn’t been touched the way Sebastian had touched me in years.
His hand slid down my arm, as if he had just read my mind, his dark, serious eyes impossible to look away from.
Gently, he pulled me towards him and I felt heat spread across my body.
I gasped, my mouth shaking, our lips nearly brushing.
Our hearts were beating wild. They were screaming, calling out for each other after being apart for so long.
I closed my eyes, just as his mouth pressed on mine. A soft moan escaped my lips.
“Sebastian” I began to say but a sound made us both jump.
He took a step back quickly, his eyes wide, and it took us both a few instants to realize what it was.
His phone was ringing.
He brushed his hair back and reached for his back trouser pocket. His face was unreadable again.
“Hello?” he said and I knew exactly who it was, the moment he turned to look at me again.
“Yes, everything is ok”
Alejandro- the thought paralysed me.
He always found his way to me, a way to remind me I was his.
No matter where I was going to go, no matter who I was going to be with, I could never hide. Never escape from him.
You will forever be mine, understood Andrea?