Crave For You

Gabriel

The truth assaults me like shards of glass piercing my skin, tearing it with scorching pricks that erase me from myself, burning away layers until I can't remember who I was, who I am anymore.

My index finger slides over the metallic cool of the trigger as the woman ahead of it stares with her upper lip trembling. I see myself in her eyes—an echo of a phantom with wide eyes who has encountered something destructible.

I gulp down the confusion, trying to disseminate every word of the conversation, twisting and rearranging them as if it would change the truth. My hand with the gun in its grasp feels heavy like a weight is pushing it down.

"Exchanged...for another's?" I repeat, a cold and dry tongue creating every syllable. My voice rings in my ears, along with a raging thump-thump-thump that seems to come from within my chest.

"It's not what you think," Vera says. She looks passive but the turmoil in her grey eyes is clear. I blink, all at once wondering why I never saw myself in her.

How could I? She is no one to me.

"What do I think, mama?" I spit out, my gut hollowing at the pale expression. "Or do I even call you that anymore?"

"Gabriel..." she coos but with another jutting of the barrel towards her, her hand flies up in the air again. "Mi amor, I still love you. You're my son."

"But I'm not," I counter sharply, hearing my voice cracking. "You took me from a life I belonged to. What was that life, Signora Valentino?"

Her lips part slightly before she closes them again, swallowing a gulp. "I–I don't know."

I want to laugh again but it's stuck in my throat. I can only manage a scoff. "You're testing my patience with the trigger, woman."

"No!" she exclaims as she spots my fingers caressing the trigger. Dread dances upon her face, her eyes not leaving the barrel. "Believe me, I don't know. Elio–He–he never told me. He understood that if I knew I'd try to reach my son, I wouldn't be able to give myself completely to you as a mother. He was aware."

Her every word is a stab to my heart—a knife twisting itself into my flesh.

"Don't put the blame on him." I feel cold sweat break on the surface of my skin, and the clamminess that coats my palm. The beats of my heart are frantic, skipping numerous beats with how fast they go. "You manipulated him, you shrewd woman!"

"Gabriel, please..." The woman gives me a mocking look of sympathy as if she can't read the disgust written all over me. "Trust me. Only Elio knew who your real family was. He knew your biological father. All I know is that he was a drunkard who had lost a lot of money gambling. He sold his kid in exchange for money. Money which Elio gave him to raise my child."

My child.

Her child.

A child that's not me.

I fight the sensation that rises in me—an urge to grab her by her throat and watch the light leave her eyes. But as much as I want to, she knows she has power over me. It is a complicated web of emotions that makes me sound desperate.

"Neither of them is to be blamed," I say bluntly. "You did it. You knew whose child you were giving away. You took me from a life that I was meant for and instead put me in this world, with a crown I didn't want."

"That wasn't my fault!" she shouts, the words tearing from her throat with a sob that I know the entire mansion can hear. She nearly collapses at the force of her emotions, taking hold of the bedside table to balance herself. With the crutch under her armpit, her other hand moves to her chest, rubbing the spot just below her throat. "I was wrong to think Juan would come to claim his child. He didn't. Perhaps he thought he'd managed to fool me. He was like that—playing his stupid mind games. He did the same with me."