The Stomachless Princess

Anya's POV

Fluorescent lights burned through my eyelids before I could open them.

The Family's secure medical wing. I knew the ceiling tiles by heart. I'd memorized every crack, every water stain, during the dozen times I'd woken up in this exact bed.

My mother stood over me.

Arms crossed. Face sculpted into an emotionless mask. Not a hair out of place. The Donna, untouched by the chaos she'd created.

"Nonna Rosa collapsed from a severe cardiac episode," she informed me, her voice as flat as a coroner's report. "The shock of finding you triggered a heart palpitation."

She paused, waiting for my reaction. I gave her nothing.

"Your father has relocated to a safehouse to manage the fallout. The Soldiers are talking. The Capos are asking questions." Her eyes narrowed. "If you weren't so weak, none of this would have happened."

I turned my head on the pillow. My gaze landed on a small metal tray beside her hand.

Clear capsules. Packed tight with golden Aurelia powder. They'd been left there deliberately. A test. An offering. A threat.

The antiseptic smell of the clinic dragged me backward. Seven years old. The first time I'd been poisoned. My mother carrying me barefoot through freezing snow to this exact wing, tears streaming down her face, her voice breaking as she begged the surgeons to save me.

The next day, she'd stirred Aurelia into my milk.

"It's the only way to make you a true heir," she'd said. And she'd said it again at ten. And thirteen. And sixteen. And nineteen. Every hospitalization followed by the same ritual: tears, promises, betrayal.

Twenty years.

Something inside me-something I hadn't known was still alive-finally went cold.

She would never stop.

As long as I had value as her pawn, as long as my body belonged to the Family, she would keep poisoning me until the day it killed me.

The only way out was to annihilate my own value.

I pushed myself up on my elbows. My atrophied muscles shook. The IV tube tugged at the back of my hand.

I reached out, took the capsules from the metal tray, and swallowed them dry.

I looked up at her. Blank. Unreadable.

"Is there more?"

My mother's eyes widened. Shock. Then a twisted, profoundly proud smile spread across her face.

A feverish light entered her eyes. She crossed to a locked medical cabinet and produced a massive industrial plastic bag. Hundreds of golden capsules. Loose raw powder. Our Family's entire clinic stash.

She set it on the bed before me like a trophy.

I ripped the plastic open.

I grabbed a fistful of capsules and shoved them into my mouth. Swallowed. Grabbed more. The dry plastic casings scraped against my ruined throat. I choked and kept going. My body screamed-veins flooding with boiling oil, every nerve ending firing white-hot agony.

My mother pulled out her phone, her back half-turned to me. I heard her dialing. Heard the Capo's voice crackle through.

"It worked, Elena," she said, triumph leaking through her professional calm. "She's finally consuming the product willingly. My daughter is finally becoming a true Rossi-"

While she bragged, I reached deep into the bag. My fingers closed around raw powder.

"More."

My voice was wet. Broken. My mother spun around, still smiling, and I shoved the bitter poison past my lips. Chewed the gritty chemical substance. Swallowed it down in massive, undeniably lethal doses.

My stomach convulsed.

I lurched sideways and vomited.

A horrific mixture of golden narcotic and dark arterial blood splattered across the pristine white floor. It glowed under the fluorescent lights. Beautiful and obscene.

My mother's phone clattered to the floor.

She screamed.

Not the controlled, commanding voice of the Donna. A raw, terrified shriek that tore through the medical wing like tearing silk.

She lunged at me, grabbing my shoulders, trying to claw the half-chewed drugs from my mouth with her bare fingers.

"Stop! Anya, stop!"

Her fingernails scraped against my teeth. I shoved her hands away and grabbed another fistful of powder. Shoved it past my bloody lips. Kept consuming. Felt my organs dissolving. Welcomed the sensation of life draining out of me.

Freedom.

My vision collapsed to a pinprick. I fell backward onto the mattress, my body folding like wet paper, twitching in a spreading sea of my own dark blood and scattered golden powder.

The heavy doors burst open. Underground doctors rushed in, shoving my screaming mother aside.

The lead surgeon pressed his gloved hands against my ruined abdomen. His face went ghostly pale.

"The stomach lining has been burned through completely," he barked. "The tissue is liquefied-blood and fluid-nothing left to suture. We have to remove the stomach entirely, right now, or she dies on this table."