The Daughter They Erased Came Back Untouchable novel · Chapter 12 of 24

Chapter 12: The Clinic Gate

Fiammetta got up from my knees.

She stood between me and the door, in her nightdress, with Nonna's letter in her fist.

"I'm staying here, Papa," she said.

My father looked at her for a long moment.

"As you like," he said, and he closed the door very softly.

We heard his slippers go down the corridor.

"He's angry," Fiammetta whispered.

"He is never angry," I said. "That's what's wrong with him."

She slept on the floor of the piano room with her head on my coat.

I lay awake and listened to the house.

At ten past three, a car engine started in the courtyard.

A moment later the door burst open.

Ugo came in with two men from the villa's security detail behind him.

He did not look at me.

"Fiammetta," he said. "Papa says you need rest. The car is outside."

"No."

"It's a good clinic, in the hills. Quiet."

"Ugo, no."

"You've had a terrible day." His voice was stiff and strange, and he spoke to a spot above her head. "Come with me."

I jumped off the bed and stood in front of her.

One of the guards took my shoulders in his hands, gently and without effort, and moved me out of the way.

"Let go of her!" I shouted.

Hanna's voice came from the doorway.

"I am calling the police!"

"Call them," Ugo said. "Papa has already told them she is unwell."

Fiammetta fought him on the stairs.

She was thin, but she kicked, and she knocked a lamp off its table, and she screamed for Gaetano.

I stood at the top of the marble steps and watched my eldest brother carry my sister down in her nightdress, past the staff in their dressing gowns, past the crack on the fourteenth step.

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