Her Parents Gave Her Away Like She Was Worthless

By five o'clock that afternoon, the Pacific storm had returned with biblical ferocity, tearing branches from the old-growth firs along the bluff and hurling forty-foot waves against the base of the Point Grey cliffs.

The great room was illuminated only by the roaring fire of seasoned birch and the warm, amber pool of a single brass floor lamp standing beside the Bösendorfer grand piano.

Seraphine sat on the tufted leather bench before the eight-foot instrument.

Her sleeves were rolled to her elbows, her bare feet resting lightly on the brass pedals, her calloused, scarred fingers moving across the eighty-eight ivory keys with a wild, breathtaking, tempestuous brilliance that silenced the howling of the gale outside the glass.

She was playing Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G Minor.

The music did not sound like an academic exercise; it sounded like an ocean tide breaking through an iron sea gate. It carried the roar of the fire in East Vancouver, the dry, mathematical cruelty of her father's kitchen table, the salt spray of the shipping docks, and the unyielding, magnificent resurrection of four souls that had refused to die in the dark.

Sitting on the Persian rug beside the piano legs were the three children.

Leo was lying on his stomach, his chin propped in his hands, his repaired wooden boat sailing across the floral borders of the wool rug. Maya sat with her back pressed against the mahogany curve of the piano case, her eyes closed, her small body absorbing the rich, acoustic vibrations that shuddered through the wood.

Julian sat on the bottom step of the timber staircase, his chin resting on his knees, his gray eyes watching Seraphine’s scarred cheek catch the dancing light of the hearth with an expression of quiet, absolute reverence.

The heavy cedar terrace doors clicked open with a soft, muffled sound.

Christian Duras stepped into the room.

He had stripped off his overcoat, wearing an unbuttoned black dress shirt and dark trousers, holding a heavy crystal tumbler of dark scotch in his left hand. He did not speak. He did not walk toward the bar.

He stopped in the shadows near the northern archway, leaning his broad shoulder against an eight-inch structural beam, watching the woman at the piano.

Seraphine’s fingers struck the final, cataclysmic chords of the coda—an explosive, cascading descent of octaves that seemed to rattle the heavy glass walls of the house before dying away into a single, low, resonant G that hummed through the floorboards for ten long seconds.

The room fell into an immaculate, breathless silence.

Leo let out a long, happy sigh, his head dropping onto his arms on the rug, fast asleep before the string had even stopped vibrating.

"Julian," Seraphine whispered softly from the bench, not turning around. "Take your sister up to the west rooms. The hot water bottles are under the duvets."

Julian stood up immediately. He didn't argue. He gently nudged Maya’s shoulder, helped the sleepy eight-year-old girl to her feet, and scooped his little brother’s limp, flannel-clad frame into his arms with the protective, practiced competence of an older brother who had carried the weight of a broken family for fourteen months.

"Good night, Seraphine," Julian murmured as he mounted the stairs.

"Good night, Julian," she answered softly.

The children disappeared into the shadows of the upper gallery, the bedroom door clicking shut with a muted, domestic thud.

Seraphine did not stand up from the leather bench.

She reached into her pocket, pulled out a small linen handkerchief, and carefully wiped a speck of cedar ash from the black lacquer of the fallboard.

"You play like someone who learned on an upright in an unheated basement, Miss Novak," Christian’s voice rumbled from the shadows of the archway.

Seraphine turned her head slowly.

Christian walked across the white oak floorboards, his steps soundless, stopping three feet from the piano. He set his crystal glass on the edge of the mahogany rim, pulled up an antique walnut chair, and sat down directly across from her bench.

"My grandmother bought a used Heintzman upright from a church basement on Commercial Drive when I was seven," Seraphine said, her fingers resting lightly on the cold ivory keys. "She told me that if you play loud enough, you don't have to listen to the men arguing about money in the front room."

Christian looked at her hands—hands that were slender, strong, with faint white burn scars along the tendons of her left wrist where the heat of the East Vancouver fire had seared through her cotton sleeves.

"Your father called Gregor Lasic forty minutes ago," Christian said quietly.

Seraphine’s hands went still on the keys. "Did he?"

"He told Gregor that he had retained an attorney from the Croatian community legal clinic," Christian continued, his voice dropping into that terrifying, subterranean register that made the hair on her arms rise.

"Bogdan claims that the debt transfer executed in the shipping office was signed under severe duress. He is threatening to file an emergency commercial fraud petition with the Supreme Court in New Westminster on Monday morning."

Seraphine let out a short, dry, humorless sound that was half-laugh, half-scorn.

"He found out about the Sterling petition, didn't he?" she asked, her hazel eyes meeting Christian’s without a flinch. "He realized that the man who bought his debt is currently facing an eighty-million-dollar estate war with the Fraser River developers. He thinks you're distracted. He thinks you'll pay him two hundred thousand dollars to keep his signature off the public dockets."

Christian reached into his pocket, pulled out the original manila envelope Simon had collected from Gregor Lasic’s table, and laid it flat on the piano lid.

"I don't pay blackmailers, Seraphine," Christian said softly.

He picked up the heavy crystal tumbler, took a slow sip of the peaty liquor, and looked into her eyes with an intensity that burned hotter than the birch fire behind her back.

"Simon tracked Bogdan’s financial transactions for the last six years," Christian said, every word landing with the weight of an iron anchor dropped into deep water.

"Your father didn't lose that four hundred thousand dollars on hydroplanes, Seraphine.

Your father lost that money because for five years, he was paying seventy thousand dollars annually to an arson investigator in Burnaby to suppress the forensic report on the fire that burned your brother’s kitchen."

Seraphine stopped breathing.

The room seemed to lose all atmospheric pressure. The sound of the Pacific storm outside the glass vanished beneath a high-frequency ringing that roared through her ears like an industrial saw.

"What did you say?" she whispered.

Christian opened the manila envelope, pulling out an eight-page certified forensic arson report bearing the official gold seal of the British Columbia Office of the Fire Commissioner, dated March 14, 2025.

He laid it open under the amber light of the piano lamp.

"The fire was not an electrical short behind the refrigerator, Seraphine," Christian said, his voice cold as an open grave.

"The accelerant was industrial dry-cleaning naphtha—the exact solvent your father stored in forty-five-gallon drums in his commercial plant on Hastings. Bogdan poured two gallons of solvent beneath the floorboards behind your brother's bed, set an open candle in a saucer of mineral oil, and drove to Richmond to establish an alibi at a poker game."

Christian leaned forward, his large, scarred hand gently closing over hers where they rested frozen on the ivory keys.

"He had a six-hundred-thousand-dollar commercial fire policy with Lloyd’s of London, Seraphine.

He didn't care that his twelve-year-old son was sleeping in the back room.

He wanted the insurance settlement.

And when you ran through that wall of fire, dragged your brother through the window, and took the blast against your face... you didn't just ruin his marriage negotiations with the property developers."

Christian leaned in until his breath warmed the pale scar on her cheek.