The night it happened, the sky was cruel. Thunder rolled low and slow, as if the heavens were warning the earth to stay still but the earth didn't listen. Neither did the men downstairs.
Elara Quinn was eight years old when the world taught her what fear smelled like; gunpowder and roses. The crimson petals her mother kept in a crystal vase lay scattered across the marble floor, some floating in blood that looked too dark to be real.
Her little brother whimpered beside her. He didn't understand. He was too young to know that monsters didn't hide under the bed, they walked in through the front door, wearing suits and expensive shoes.
"Close your eyes, Jamie," she whispered, pressing his head against her chest. "Don't look. Don't listen. Don't move."
But she couldn't close hers.
She watched through the narrow crack of the closet door as her father fell to his knees, as the man in black leveled a gun at his head with the kind of calm that only came from power.
"Should've stayed quiet," the man said, voice smooth and deadly, before pulling the trigger.
The sound shattered something inside her. Her mother screamed his name, a sound so raw it didn't belong to this world and then she fell too. The roses hit the floor a second later.
Elara didn't cry.
Tears would've made noise, and noise meant they'd find her so she bit her lip until she tasted blood, holding Jamie tighter, her small body shaking while her heart learned the first lesson it would never forget, love doesn't save you. It destroys you.
The men left eventually, their laughter fading into the rain. One of them lingered, though: tall, broad, his back to the door. She couldn't see his face, but she saw the ring on his finger. A heavy silver band carved with a serpent swallowing its tail and it glinted under the lightning.
She remembered that detail the most because when she finally grew up and started hunting for answers, that ring became her only lead.
The ring and the vengeance that kept her alive.