Extras Ch 4: Valentina - Better Than the Streets

Extras Ch 4: Valentina - Better Than the Streets

Whatever you want in life, you have to achieve it yourself.

Valentina learned this truth before she learned to read. The streets of Milan taught her in the only language they knew—the language of cold cobblestones and locked doors, of fists and empty pockets and the particular cruelty of people who looked through her as though she were already a ghost.

She was three when her mother fell asleep on a piece of cardboard and never woke up. The woman's body had been thin and light, her skin waxy, her breathing shallow for days before it stopped entirely. Valentina had shaken her shoulder, called her name, and when nothing happened, she had sat beside the body for an entire night because she had nowhere else to go.

In the morning, a shopkeeper kicked the body with his foot. When it didn't move, he called someone. Men came and took her mother away. No one asked Valentina who she belonged to. No one offered her a hand.

That was the day she understood: No one is coming to save you. Whatever you need, you take. Whatever you want, you build. Whatever threatens you, you fight.

She survived. She stole bread and wallets and, once, a pair of shoes from a sleeping drunk. She learned to read faces the way other children learned nursery rhymes. She learned that a smile could mean danger and a frown could mean an opportunity. She learned that tears were useless—no one cared if a street rat cried—but a well-timed kick to the shins could buy her enough time to run.

By the time she was four, Valentina had built herself into someone fierce. She was still hungry, still dirty, still sleeping in doorways—but she was alive. And in Milan, alive was a kind of victory.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

When the man in the nice coat started following her, she noticed immediately.

He was pale, dark-haired, with eyes that missed nothing. He watched her for three days. She watched him back. She cataloged his expensive shoes, his calm demeanor, the way he never seemed to be in a hurry. He did not look like the other men who sometimes followed children—the ones with hungry eyes and grabby hands. He looked like someone who was shopping for something specific.

On the fourth day, he cornered her in an alley behind a bakery. She pressed herself into a doorway, clutching a stolen roll, ready to bite or run or both.

He didn't come closer. He kept his hands visible. He spoke to her like she was a person, not a pest.

And when he offered her a choice—stay here and starve, or come with him to a house by the sea—Valentina listened. She listened to his warm voice, his patient smile, and his promise of food and safety.

She did not trust him. Trust was for fools and dead men.

But she was four, she was tired, and the winter was coming. A house by the sea, even if it was a cage, was better than freezing on the streets.

So she studied him with her sharp, dark eyes—weighing his words, searching for the lie—and gave him her terms:

"You lie, I bite you."

His smile had widened, genuine for the first time. "Fair enough."

She took his hand.

She did not know, then, that she was stepping onto a chessboard. She did not know that Dante Moretti had been looking for a piece exactly like her—young, clever, fierce, and desperate enough to be shaped. She did not know that her survival would become a tool in someone else's game.

But she knew this: whatever Dante wanted from her, she would give it. As long as it kept her alive and fed. As long as the bargain served her, too.

She was fine with being used.

What she would not tolerate—what she had never tolerated, even in the gutters of Milan—was being lied to.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

The Volkov mansion was a fortress of stone and glass perched on a cliff above the churning sea. Valentina had never seen anything so large, so clean. The buildings she knew in Milan were cramped and crumbling. This place looked like it had stood for centuries and would stand for centuries more, long after everyone inside it was dead and forgotten.

She liked it immediately. Not because it was beautiful—though it was, in a cold, forbidding way—but because it was strong. Strength was the only thing she respected.

She met Viktor first. The old man leaned on a cane, his body thinned by illness, but his grey eyes were sharp as broken glass. He studied her like she was a puzzle he intended to solve.

"You brought a child," he said to Dante.

Dante's hand rested on her shoulder. "Her name is Valentina."

She did not cower. She had learned long ago that predators respected defiance more than fear. So she looked Viktor Volkov up and down—his silver hair, his trembling hands, his assessing gaze—and announced: "You old."

For a terrible moment, no one spoke.

Then Viktor laughed—a rough, surprised sound that seemed to crack through the dusty air of the entrance hall. He lowered himself into a chair, bringing his face closer to hers.

She liked the old man immediately. Even if he looked frail now, she could tell he was a fighter in his youth. So when he asked her to take care of his grandson, Valentina scrunched her face and gave it some thought.

She didn't know this Kazimir or if he was worth her time. But Viktor seemed like the owner of this big house. If pleasing him meant she got to stay, then she would please him. She agreed.

Later, Dante took her to the garden. It was walled and filled with roses—red and white and pale pink, climbing the brick walls in wild profusion. In the center, a fountain murmured softly. The air smelled of damp earth and something sweet.

And there, kneeling among the flowers, was the old woman.

She wore a dress the color of emeralds—deep green silk that caught the afternoon light. Her honey-colored hair was streaked with silver, pulled back from a face that was lined and tired but still beautiful. She was pruning roses with careful, methodical movements, her hands steady despite her age.

This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

She looked up when they approached. When she saw Dante, her expression cooled.

Valentina noticed. She noticed everything.

And as Dante had told her in the car, the old woman liked kids. She knelt on her expensive emerald dress and held her hands. The woman laughed—a rusty sound, as if she hadn't used it in a long time.

After a moment, she looked up at Dante and said, "This was kind of you, Dante."

Dante dipped his head, his smile practiced and warm. "I learned from you."

The words should have been touching, but Valentina saw the way the old woman flinched—just for a heartbeat. Pain. Guilt. Or something else entirely.

Interesting, Valentina thought. She filed the moment away like a coin hidden in her palm.

Later, she would learn that the old woman's name was Nadia. She would learn that Nadia loved her garden more than almost anything, that she wore emerald silk even when there was no one to impress, that she moved through the mansion like a woman who had once been its heart and was slowly being pushed to its edges.

She would learn that Nadia and Dante kept their words polite, but their silences were heavy with things unsaid. Dante was always respectful, always courteous—but Nadia watched him with the wariness of a woman who knew exactly what he was capable of.

Valentina thought about this often. Dante had claimed he wanted to give her a better life. He had claimed to be grateful to Nadia for teaching him kindness. If that were true, why did Nadia look at him like he was something dangerous? And why did Dante keep looking at Nadia like she was a lock he hadn't yet learned to pick?

She did not have answers. But she stored the questions, polished them like stones, waiting for the day they would become useful.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Valentina met the Volkov boy on her first evening.

Kazimir was six years old, small for his age, with grey eyes like Viktor's and a serious expression that sat strangely on his soft face. He found her in the garden, where she was practicing with the trowel Nadia had given her. He stood at the edge of the path, watching her with undisguised curiosity.

"You're the new girl," he said.

Valentina didn't look up. "You the boy."

Silence. Then: "What are you doing?"

"Digging."

"Why?"

"For 'rowing stuff."

He crept closer, his shoes scuffing on the stone path. "Can I watch?"

Valentina finally looked at him. He was small and clean and soft, with none of the sharp edges that marked the children of Milan. His clothes were expensive. His hands had never known hunger. He looked at her with an openness that was almost painful—no suspicion, no calculation, just the simple curiosity of a child who had never been hurt.

She thought of Viktor's words: Too soft.

She thought of the streets, where a boy like this would be picked clean in an hour. His lunch stolen, his pockets emptied, his soft heart broken by the first person who smiled at him kindly.

He would not survive a day in Milan. Probably not even an afternoon.

But Viktor and Nadia wanted her to protect him. And Valentina kept her promises.

"Fine," she said. "You watch. But no touch nothing."

He nodded solemnly and sat down cross-legged on the stones. His elbow brushed hers, and she let it.

She showed him how to hold the trowel properly. She showed him how to tell a weed from a flower and how to pat the soil down gently after planting.

He listened with the focus of a student who had never been taught anything so important. He asked questions—endless questions—about worms and seeds and why the roses had thorns if they were supposed to be pretty. She answered them all with the authority of someone who had learned gardening exactly two hours earlier.

By the time the sun began to sink, Kazimir was covered in dirt and smiling.

"You're good at this," he said. "Better than grandma."

Valentina snorted. "I no better than old woman. She's doing this forever."

"But you explain it better. She just does it. You tell me why."

She looked at him sharply, searching for mockery. But his grey eyes were earnest, his expression open. He meant it.

"Stupid," she muttered.

But she smiled, just a little.

· · ─ ·✶· ─ · ·

Months passed. Valentina grew.

With regular meals and warm clothes and a bed that belonged to her alone, her body began to catch up with the ferocity that had always lived inside her. Her bony limbs filled out. Her cheeks lost their hollows. Her grammar smoothed and sharpened, the street accent fading under Nadia's patient tutelage.

She learned to read. She learned to write. She learned that there were more ways to fight than with fists, and more ways to win than by running.

She also learned the rhythms of the house. Viktor's illness, which came and went like the tide. Nadia's garden, which was her sanctuary and her armor. The tension between Dante and the rest of the family—a cold undercurrent beneath every dinner, every conversation, every glance.

And she learned that Kazimir was not as soft as he seemed.

Oh, he was gentle, yes. He cried when he found a dead bird in the garden. He gave his desserts to the kitchen maids when he thought no one was looking. He flinched when Viktor's voice grew sharp.

But there was steel beneath the softness. She saw it in the way he argued with his tutor about history, refusing to accept the sanitized version of events. She saw it in the way he watched Dante—not with suspicion, like Nadia, but with a quiet assessment that reminded her of Viktor at his sharpest. She saw it the night he found her crying in the hallway—crying because she had dreamed of her mother—and sat beside her without a word, his small hand finding hers in the dark.

He didn't tell her it would be okay. He didn't promise things would get better. He just sat with her, solid and silent, until the tears stopped.

Maybe he would survive in Milan, she thought. Maybe. If someone taught him how.

Since Viktor and Nadia had asked her to protect him—and since she had given her word—she decided she would be that someone.

She taught him how to spot a lie. How to read the shift of someone's eyes, the too-smooth cadence of a voice, the tiny tells that meant someone was hiding something.

"You watch their hands," she said one afternoon, as they sat in the garden. "Liars always forget about their hands. They control their faces, but their hands give them away."

Kazimir nodded, absorbing this like a lesson in arithmetic. "What else?"

"If someone's too nice, they want something. Nobody's nice for free."

"What about grandma? She's nice to everyone."

Valentina paused. The boy had a point. Nadia was kind without calculation, gentle without ulterior motive. She was the exception to the rule.

"The old woman is different," she admitted. "But she's rare. Most people aren't like her. Most people want something."

Kazimir was quiet for a moment. Then: "What do you want?"

The question startled her. No one had ever asked her that before—not Dante, not Viktor, not Nadia. What did she want? She wanted to survive. She wanted to never be hungry again. She wanted to be strong enough that no one could ever hurt her.

But those were small wants, survival wants. Beneath them, something else stirred—something she didn't have words for yet.

"Power," she said finally. "I want power. So nobody can use me unless I let them."

Kazimir considered this. "That makes sense."

"Does it?"

"Yes." He looked at her with those serious grey eyes. "You were used before in Milan. You don't want to be used again."

Valentina stared at him. He was seven years old, and he had articulated something she hadn't even fully understood about herself. Maybe he wasn't as stupid as she thought.

"Don't tell anyone I said that," she warned.

"I won't." He paused and smiled. "Can we dig for worms now?"

Despite herself, she laughed. "Fine. But you're doing the digging. I'm supervising."

"That's not fair."

"Life's not fair, stupid boy."

But she helped him dig anyway, and when he found a fat, wriggling worm and held it up like a trophy, she didn't roll her eyes.