The villa, for Ante, had always been a place of paradoxical echoes. As a boy, its vast, minimalist spaces had amplified the silence between his parents, turning quiet resentment into a deafening roar. Now, as a man, the echoes were different, more sinister. They were the echoes of a terror so profound it seemed to vibrate in the very marble and glass, a frequency only he and its source could perceive.
He had retired to his old bedroom, a spacious room in the north wing with its own, less dramatic view of the pine-covered slopes behind the villa. It was a room frozen in time, filled with the artifacts of a youth he'd long since outgrown: sailing trophies, faded posters of marine life, a bookshelf still holding his well-thumbed copies of Cousteau and Carson. Usually, this room offered a strange comfort, a connection to a simpler self. Tonight, it felt like a cell. The four walls did not keep the world out; they trapped him inside with the gnawing, sickening certainty of what was happening elsewhere in the house.
He had tried to read, but the words of a research paper on cephalopod cognition swam meaninglessly before his eyes. He had tried to sleep, but every time he closed his lids, he saw her face—not as it had been by the pool, alight with dawning understanding, but as it was at dinner: a mask of pure, petrified fear under the weight of his father's hand.
The image of Jure was a stain on his mind. The possessive grip, the way he had spoken about her as a "blank slate," the cold fury in his eyes when Ante had challenged him. He knew his father was a hard man, a man who took what he wanted with the unshakeable conviction that it was his by right. He had built an empire on that principle. But this… this was different. This wasn't a hostile takeover of a company. This was the slow, deliberate consumption of a human being. It was a perversion of the very concept of rescue. His father hadn't saved Mirna; he had salvaged her, like a beautiful piece of wreckage, and was now holding her captive in a private museum of his own obsession.
Ante lay in the dark, his body thrumming with a helpless, directionless energy. The memory of her hand in his, so small and trusting, was a searing brand on his conscience. He had felt the delicate bones, the cool, smooth skin. He had looked into her violet eyes and seen, for a fleeting moment, a person, not a prisoner. And now, somewhere in this silent, oppressive fortress, she was alone with the man who saw her only as a possession.
It was then that he heard it.
A sound so faint it was barely a disturbance in the air, more felt than heard. A choked, guttural sob, muffled by distance and walls, but unmistakable in its agony.
He was out of his bed in an instant, his heart hammering against his ribs like a frantic fist on a door. He stood frozen in the center of his room, every nerve ending screaming. It came from down the hall. From the south wing. From her room.
The sound was not one of simple sadness. It was the sound of a soul being shredded. It was a gasp for air in a room filling with water, a silent scream given a sliver of voice. It was the most desolate, hopeless sound he had ever heard.
His feet carried him out of his room and into the dark, wide hallway before his mind had fully processed the decision. The polished concrete was cold beneath his bare feet. The villa was a landscape of shadows, the moon through the skylights casting long, distorted shapes that seemed to reach for him. He moved silently, a ghost in his own father's house, drawn by the siren song of her despair.
He stopped outside her door. It was a solid, heavy slab of oak, a barrier between the horror inside and the paralyzed world outside. He pressed his ear against the cool, smooth wood.
He didn't hear the sobs anymore. The silence from within was somehow worse. It was the silence of aftermath, of a storm that had passed, leaving only devastation in its wake. He could picture her in there, curled into a ball on the floor or huddled in a corner of that vast bed, her face buried in a pillow to stifle the sounds of her own breaking. He could feel her terror, her shame, her utter aloneness, as if it were a cold mist seeping under the door and coiling around his ankles.
His fist clenched at his side, the knuckles cracking in the silence. A white-hot, primitive fury surged through him, so potent it made him lightheaded. He wanted to smash the door down. He wanted to grab his father by the throat and drag him out of this house, out of her life. He wanted to gather her up in his arms and carry her far away from this cliff-edge prison, to a place where the only thing reflected in her violet eyes was the sun on open water.
The urge to intervene was a physical force, a current pulling him toward the door handle. His fingers twitched, reaching for it.
But then, he stopped.
A colder, more rational dread washed over him, dousing the fire of his rage. If he burst in now, what would he find? His father, still in the room, his presence a vile confirmation of Ante's worst fears? Or worse, his father gone, leaving only Mirna, shattered and exposed? And what would his sudden, violent intrusion do to her?
He saw it in his mind's eye: him throwing the door open, his own face a mask of fury and concern. She would look up, those incredible eyes wide with a fresh, panicked terror. She would not see a rescuer. She would see another man, another violation, another unpredictable force in a world that had become a nightmare. After whatever his father had just done to her, the last thing she needed was another man forcing his way into her space, no matter his intentions. His presence, in that raw, violated moment, would not be a comfort. It would be a fresh assault. It would shatter what little composure she had left.
He was trapped in an impossible paradox. To do nothing was to be complicit, to allow the monstrous violation to continue unchallenged. But to act, to charge in as the avenging knight, might destroy her completely. Her trust in him, so tentatively offered by the pool, was a spider-silk thread. His father's brutality was a hammer. His own righteous anger could be the anvil upon which she was crushed between them.
He leaned his forehead against the cool wood of the door, his body trembling with the effort of his inaction. He was a scientist, a man who believed in observation, in understanding, in careful, measured intervention. But this was not a wounded dolphin or an oil-damaged reef. This was a human heart, being systematically dismantled, and there was no textbook for this, no proven methodology for extracting a soul from a gilded cage without breaking it.
He heard a sound from within again. Not a sob this time, but a soft, rhythmic creaking. The sound of the bed, as if someone was rocking back and forth, a slow, hopeless motion of a body trying to comfort a spirit that was beyond reach. The image was so acutely painful it felt like a physical blow.
He stood there for what felt like an eternity, his ear pressed to the door, his fist clenched, his heart a drum of futile rage and aching pity. He was a sentinel at the gates of hell, armed with nothing but a desperate desire to help and the terrible knowledge that his help might be the final, fatal shock.
He wanted to whisper through the door. "Mirna, it's Ante. I'm here. You're not alone." But the words felt hollow, pathetic. They would not stop the hands that had touched her. They would not erase the memory of the violation. They were just more sounds in the night, another voice from the world of men that had brought her nothing but pain.
The rocking inside the room slowed, then stopped. The silence returned, deeper and more absolute than before. It was the silence of exhaustion, of a spirit that had cried itself into a numb, hollowed-out void.
Ante knew, with a sinking certainty, that his vigil was over. There was nothing he could do tonight. No heroic rescue, no words of comfort. The battle for Mirna would not be won with a single, dramatic charge. It would be a war of attrition, fought in the daylight, with patience and subtlety, a campaign to slowly, carefully, build a bridge she could choose to cross herself.
The realization was its own form of agony. It required him to accept her suffering, to turn his back and walk away, leaving her alone in the dark with her trauma. It felt like a betrayal of every decent instinct he possessed.
With a final, agonized look at the unyielding door, he pushed himself away. Each step back down the hallway was a defeat. The shadows seemed to mock him. The distant, rhythmic boom of the sea was no longer a lullaby but a funeral drum.
He slipped back into his bedroom and closed the door, leaning against it as if barricading himself from his own conscience. The room that had once been a sanctuary of his youth now felt like a confession of his cowardice. He had heard the sound of a soul drowning, and he had chosen to stay on the shore.
He did not sleep. He stood at his window, watching the moon's cold path across the sky until it was swallowed by the predawn grey. The knot of rage and helplessness in his chest had not loosened; it had crystallized into a cold, hard resolve. He might not have been able to storm the castle tonight, but he had seen its darkest dungeon. He had heard the cries of its prisoner.
And he knew, with a certainty that would define every moment that followed, that he would not rest until he had found a way to set her free. The monster was his father, and the battlefield was his own home. And as the first sliver of sun painted the horizon, Ante made a silent vow to the sea, to the sky, and to the terrified girl in the south wing: this would not stand. He would find a way. No matter the cost.