Chapter 2 - TWO YEARS OF ICE
Evelyn retreated half a pace, holding the heavy silver tray flat against her ribs.
Adrien Belandi slowly reached out his right hand—a heavy, calloused hand bearing a gold signet ring on the pinky—and pushed a small woven silver basket of warm, crusty sourdough rolls two inches closer to his daughter’s plate.
"Eat a little, Maya," Adrien said.
His voice was a deep, gravelly baritone—low, raspy, and stripped of the harsh authority he used with his lieutenants. It was the voice of a father begging his child for a crumb of normal life.
The five-year-old girl in the white dress didn't flinch. She didn't look at the bread. Her long light-brown hair fell over her shoulders as she kept her gaze pinned to the gold rim of her empty plate. Her two brothers beside her remained equally rigid, their small hands folded in identical positions on their laps.
Behind Evelyn, leaning against a marble pillar near the busing station, another waiter named Marcus leaned in slightly and whispered out of the side of his mouth.
"Don't waste your time filling their glasses, Evelyn," Marcus murmured under his breath, his eyes darting nervously toward the two broad-shouldered men in dark suits standing discreetly near the archway behind Adrien's chair. "They won't touch the water. They won't touch the food. They haven't spoken a single word in two years."
Evelyn kept her posture rigid, her dark eyes dropping to the polished floorboards. "Two years?" she whispered back.
"Since the night their mother vanished," Marcus whispered, his voice barely audible over the distant piano music. "Car went off the bridge near Bear Mountain. Body was never recovered. The girl stopped talking that exact night. A week later, the two boys stopped talking, too. Belandi brought in pediatric neurologists from London, trauma specialists from Johns Hopkins... spent millions. Nothing. They're like ghost dolls."
Evelyn felt a sudden, sharp ache behind her ribs. She looked back at the small girl sitting between her brothers.
Evelyn knew what loss felt like. She had lost her own mother when she was twelve, leaving her to navigate the cold foster system alone with nothing but a cardboard box of old clothes. She recognized the specific, impenetrable shell the children had built around themselves—a fortress constructed out of total silence to keep the terrifying outside world from intruding any further.
May you like
Adrien pulled his hand back from the bread basket, leaning his head into his palm, his shoulders dropping two inches as he let out a long, quiet, ragged exhale.
Evelyn lowered her eyes, swallowed her own fatigue, and stepped forward again to clear a small glass dish from the right side of the little girl’s place setting.
