𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐥𝐞𝐧 𝐇𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭

𝟎𝟎 | 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐥𝐨𝐠𝐮𝐞

"OUR FAMILY IS IN FINANCIAL DIFFICULTY and you must make sure it doesn't stay that way, mia bellisima figlia."

Those were the words my father had said to me when he declared that I must marry into wealth. That a life of fortune awaits me.

In every conversation, and in every argument, his words always dawn back to how it is my responsibility to rescue our family out of the dark. To restore ourselves from this hidden cave and submerge ourselves with the rest of the world.

I however, don't plan on marrying for money or status. I want, in fact, I aspire to be able to have the choice to control my own freedom and make my own choices with how I can create a better future for myself and my family.

Although my wants and desires don't matter to these people, as I have already said, I was raised to become a heroine in this life of poverty. I was made to raise my family out of the ashes.

My father planted this burden on me from the moment I was born. Whislt I have two older brothers who could easily lift this weight of liability off my shoulders.

But no. It has to be me. It has to be the only girl of the family. How utterly sexist. It's the twenty-first century yet my life is like one that was lived two hundred years ago.

I despise him. I despise my father with every fibre of my being, with every breath of my body and nothing, absolutely nothing will persuade me to think otherwise.

He's the reason my family is suffering. He's the reason my family has wounds that cut deeper than my own scars.

Our destitute life started with him when he lost his job years ago. Since then, he's blamed us for his downfall and has spent his days drowning away his sorrows in alcohol, leaving the rest of us to pick up the pieces.

My mother fails endlessly to keep us afloat, working an additional two jobs just to provide for us. Yet it isn't enough, so me and my brothers have had to step in.

Whenever we go into the big city, we pickpocket our way through the crowd, stealing food, clothes, anything that can help us. We either keep the items or swap them for money at any local pawn shop.

Papá caught on to what we were doing so Rian, my eldest brother, took the blame. But he sees right through Rian.

To him, Rian is a good older brother, taking responsibility for his mischievous, little sister. So to him, to my father, I'm the naughty child, and I have to pay for that.

My father views me as the weakest because I'm the only girl out of my four brothers. But I'm not weak, neither am I strong. I'm just surviving.

I am a survivor, and I have the scars and bruises to prove it. My father isn't just cruel, he's inhumane. I don't know why I continue to call him my father, when he doesn't even own up to that title.

But I suppose the innocent, little girl inside me still hopes that her dad will one day learn to love her.

Love. The power of love. Love can be powerful. But it can also be a weakness.

The love I have for my father makes me weak. I hate him, truly and deeply to my core, but something inside me still believes that he will change. Even after everything he's done to me and my siblings.

I hate to think of it like that. That people change when they simply just reveal their true colours. And my father had shown his time and time again. So does that make me a bad person to think that he still possibly loves me, even after everything he's put me through?

Does it make me a bad person to want to forgive him? And to want his love?

Anyways, Rian's the eldest as I have already mentioned. He's twenty-four and has a sort of 'bad boy personality'. He views himself as a rebel and can be a right dick so it's hard to tell when he does something for us or whether it's just to get into Papa's good books.

Then there's Sebastian who's twenty-one, but we call him Seb for short. He's the golden boy. Heart of an angel and all.

I'm nineteen, and well, you'll figure out who I am soon enough.

Then my younger brother, Aziel who's twelve. Az is like me in a way. He's a survivor too and with a fighting spirit. I'm older but he always wants to protect me from the bad.

And lastly Luca who is only five. The baby of the family. I look after him as though he's my own child what with mamá always working. He was a premature baby actually, and from the moment he was born, I swore to always protect him. Same goes for Aziel.

I love each of my siblings dearly, I mean, how could I not. Yeah they get on my nerves from time to time. The different ways I've planned out Seb's murder is unthinkable to say the least. But they're the reason I'm holding onto the rest of my humanity. The reason I'm not tearing myself apart from the inside out. It's simply really. If I didn't have my brothers, then I wouldn't be me.

I wouldn't be Adora Viviana Lombardi.