The rooftop was very quiet. Below them the guards moved and positioned themselves and the world prepared for war. Up here there was only the wind and the weight of what she was about to say.
"On my wedding day, Ozanne broke in with his men. He killed everyone present. Not the guests, not the priest, not a single person in that room was spared. Kylain, the man who was about to become my husband, was shot where he stood." Her voice remained steady, the steadiness of someone who has rehearsed this grief so many times it has worn itself smooth. "With my entire family gone, I was abducted. Brutally. And forced to become Ozanne's wife."
Jokull had not moved. Had not spoken. His eyes were fixed on her face with an expression that had not yet decided what it was.
"A few months after, I conceived Ravi. And I accepted my fate. I told myself I had no other choice, no other option, nothing left to reach for. So I accepted everything." She paused. "Until I met Kylain again."
The wind moved between them.
"It was at a hospital. I had taken Ravi for a checkup. I had believed Kylain was dead, that the bullet had finished what Ozanne started that day. But he had survived. He was there, alive, standing in front of me as though the years between us had been nothing at all." Something shifted in her face, something old and luminous surfacing through the grief. "I promised him we would find our way back to each other. Even then I had to be careful. Ozanne had eyes everywhere, men in every shadow. I was never truly alone."
She stopped again. The next part cost her something visible.
"And then I fell pregnant. With Kylain's child." She looked at Jokull directly, without apology, without evasion. "I had to go to Ozanne and tell him the child was his."
The silence that followed was enormous.
"He told me he only needed one heir," Osmina continued. "Just one boy to love. As for the other, he said i could get rid of it whenever i pleased. And if i chose to let the child live, it would be used as nothing more than a tool for Ravi's success. A means to an end. Nothing more."
She let that settle for a moment before she went on.
"So I made a decision. I could not allow the child of the man I loved to come into this world only to be treated as something disposable. Something to be picked up and put down at another man's convenience." Her voice dropped slightly, not in weakness but in the weight of what she was recounting. "When I gave birth to Ravi, I kept it from everyone. No announcement, no ceremony, nothing. The only person who knew was the maid. That was all."
She folded her hands in front of her, composed and still.
"Ozanne was away at the time. A serious mission in the States. He was gone long enough that by the time he returned and laid eyes on Ravi for the first time, Ravi was already two years old. Two years of a life Ozanne had no part in and no knowledge of."
"Even though he was a mafia man through and through, he showed Ravi a love I had not anticipated. A warmth I had not expected from a man like that." Her eyes grew distant for a moment, moving through the memory of it. "And I could not bear the thought of you growing up without that same love. Without any of it."
She steadied herself.
"So I told him a big lie. I told Ozanne that Ravi was not his actual son. That I had already been carrying a child before he abducted me."
She paused and let that land.
"The look on his face was terrifying. There are no other words for it. In that moment I genuinely believed he would beat me. Kill me even. His hands, his eyes, everything in him wanted to." Her voice did not waver. "But I was carrying what he believed to be his actual child. His blood. His heir. And that single fact was the only thing that saved me. He spared my life and transferred every ounce of that pain and that rage somewhere else entirely."
She did not need to say where. They both knew where.
"He transferred it all to Ravi."
The wind moved across the rooftop. Jokull had not spoken. Had not moved. He stood with the entire coast spread out behind him and his mother's words settling into him one by one like stones dropped into still water, each one finding the bottom before the next arrived.
Osmina pressed on.
"But through all of this, you believed I was faking my love for you. That I had chosen Ravi and discarded you entirely." She shook her head slowly, and the grief in it was not performed. "I personally arranged for Ravi to be pushed into the mafia life, together with your father. The plan was precise and it was deliberate. When Ravi climbed high enough, when he reached the highest position available to him, he would be eliminated. And you would step forward and take everything he had spent his life building. He was your success tool, Jokull. That is what he was always meant to be. Nothing more. To do the dirty work and be discarded. "
Something moved through Jokull's face but she continued without stopping.
"But the time you spent with your father created something none of us had accounted for. You began to believe that we loved Ravi and had forgotten you existed. That every resource, every attention, every act of care directed toward him meant there was nothing remaining for you. And that belief poisoned everything it touched." She exhaled, long and slow. "It did not unfold the way we intended. None of it did. Not until Ravi became something neither of us could predict or control. Not until he turned against you, Jokull."
She stopped.
The story was finished. Every last piece of it now lay between them in the cold open air of the rooftop, and there was nothing left to soften, nothing left to rearrange or withhold.
She looked at her son and waited.