Chapter 3 - The Dark Legacy of the Voss Family
The journal entry was dated fifteen years ago, back when Luca was just twenty-one and taking his first brutal steps into the criminal underworld.
“If anyone is reading this,” Luca’s handwriting read, “it means the cancer got to me, or a bullet finally found its mark. But more importantly, it means Clara is alone. And the world needs to know why I tied my life to hers so fiercely that men called me a madman for marrying a blind girl.”
Emma wiped a stray tear from her cheek and turned the page, her eyes scanning lines of agonizing confession.
“Everyone thinks I protected Clara because she was helpless. They thought my childhood crush turned into a chivalrous obsession. They whispered in the back rooms of our clubs that Luca Voss had a soft spot, a weakness that could be exploited. None of them knew the truth. None of them could possibly understand.”
Emma turned to the next page, where the ink grew darker and more frantic.
“Clara is not just blind. For as long as I have known her, she has possessed a terrifying, anomalous gift—one she hid from everyone, even the adoptive family that discarded her. When Clara touches someone’s skin, or when she concentrates deeply in a room where someone has died or suffered immense trauma, she doesn't just feel physical presence. She absorbs fragments of their memories. She sees their final moments. She carries their sins.”
Emma froze, her hand hovering over the paper. Memories? Sins? What kind of madness was Luca writing about? Was her brilliant, feared brother losing his mind?
She kept reading, desperate for an explanation.
“When we were twelve, a rival crew sent a message to our father by executing one of our couriers in the alley behind our school. The police ruled it a random mugging. But Clara walked past that alley the next morning, before the cleanup crew arrived. She touched the brick wall where the man died. She came to school shaking, vomiting, weeping uncontrollably. She whispered names to me in the dark—names of men who pulled the trigger, names of men in our own father’s inner circle who had betrayed us. That was the day I realized my best friend, the sweet blind girl who loved the smell of rain, was carrying the weight of Chicago’s darkest secrets in her mind.”
Emma’s breath hitched in her throat. The room felt suddenly suffocating. She remembered that year—the sudden paranoia that had gripped her father, the bloody purges within the Voss organization where several high-ranking captains were executed overnight for treason.
Her father had always claimed he received an anonymous tip. But it wasn't a tip. It was Clara.
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“From that day on,” Luca’s journal continued, “I vowed to be her shield. Because the moment the syndicate—or any rival family—discovered what Clara could do, they wouldn't see a human being. They would see a living, breathing oracle. They would lock her in a basement, torture her mind, and force her to read the thoughts and deaths of every enemy they wanted to eliminate.”
Emma covered her mouth with her trembling hand, finally understanding the crushing weight Clara had carried in silence.
