The scent of blood always lingered in the hallways of the old Sinclair estate.
Not literally, but Elias swore it clung to the walls — in the rugs, the velvet curtains, the polished wood. A trace of something heavy. Something unsaid.
He was only eight the first time he saw his father slap a man across the face for speaking out of turn.
Not yell. Not threatened. Just a single slap — calm, surgical, brutal.
The man never spoke out of turn again.
That night, Elias had wandered into the garden. Barefoot, breathless, his tiny fists wrapped around the edges of his button-down shirt, trying to hold himself together. The moonlight slid across the marble like liquid glass, and somewhere nearby, his mother hummed a lullaby to no one.
Isabelle Romano-Sinclair was a woman of art, not war. But she loved a man born into shadows. And she raised a boy who couldn't escape them.
She found Elias near the roses, sitting cross-legged in the dirt.
"Why are you out here, tesoro?" she asked gently, kneeling beside him.
He didn't answer.
She reached out, brushing soil from his palms. "Did your father say something?"
Elias shook his head. "He didn't need to."
There was silence for a while. A peaceful kind.
"I don't want to be like him," Elias whispered finally. "He's so… loud, even when he doesn't talk."
Isabelle studied her son with unreadable eyes. "Sometimes men are loud because no one ever taught them how to live in quiet."
"But you're quiet," he said.
"I chose quiet," she said softly. "But your father was born into noise. Just like you."
A pause.
"Will I forget how to be quiet too?"
Isabelle smiled faintly and touched his heart. "Only if you choose to forget what peace feels like."
Back to Present Day
Elias stares out the window of his office, the city burning gold under a dying sun.
"I chose this noise," he thinks. "I wear it like skin now."
But somewhere in the corners of his memory, there's still the sound of his mother's humming.
The feel of dirt under his tiny palms.
The breath of a world not yet heavy with blood.
And then there's Leila.
Soft-spoken. Unbending. Peaceful, not passive.
She doesn't fight the world. She simply refuses to let it change her shape.
He closes his eyes.
"Maybe I didn't forget what peace feels like."
"Maybe I buried it alive."