So here I am with my new story! It's been almost 6 months since I last published anything on this site and I'm incredibly sorry for the long wait. I wanted to write the story in its entirety before publishing it. I did not succeed as this story became more complicated than I intended it to be; let's just say that the amount of effort I'm putting in this new fic surpasses the one I put in Hunters and Prey by a long shot. I have already written a bunch of chapters, though so there's that good news at least.

I need to warn you that updates will be slow as I have a lot of stuff to do both for my Master degree and for my job. I do not have as much time to write as I would like so you'll have to be patient.

Enjoy this new story and let me know what you think!

Prologue

It was a cold winter night in Boston, a thick blanket of snow covered the whole city. If one had looked up at the sky to take in the stars and lift their spirit up, they would have been sorely disappointed. For the past week, the sky had been nothing but a uniform slab of dark greys and pale whites that made the city look particularly dreadful; it was one of the worst Januaries the city had ever seen in recent years.

In a small villa in Naples Road, North Brookline, a seven-year-old boy woke up when one of the branches of the tree outside his window banged loudly against the glass. He sat up in bed – sheets gripped tightly in his hands – and looked toward the source of the sound that woke him up. When he heard the loud banging again, he decided to get out of bed and go look for himself what was happening. He knew that it was probably just the tree that was making that sound, but he also knew he wouldn't be able to go back to sleep if he didn't check; his overactive imagination would conjure up all types of scary monsters to explain the banging sound.

The boy pushed the sheets away from his body and swung his legs to the side to stand up, a shiver running up his back when his bare feet touched the cold floor. He ignored the cold creeping up his legs and tiptoed toward the window. He jumped back when the branch banged once again against the window, only to take a courageous step forward the next moment to finally look outside the window.

As predicted, he saw nothing but the tree swinging this way and that in the night. He heaved a sigh of relief. Now that he knew there was nothing to fear, the boy turned around and ran to his bed, curling under the covers and rubbing his feet against each other to warm them up. He slid his hands under the pillow and closed his eyes, ready to go back to sleep.

Five minutes ticked by and he was still wide-awake.

He reached for the glass of water he always kept on his bedside table – thinking that a sip of water might help him go back to sleep – only to find it empty.

The boy huffed and threw the covers to the side. He once again got out of bed – this time taking the time to reach for his slippers – and grabbed the empty glass of water on his bedside table. He inched his way closer to his bedroom's door and stopped once he reached it. He pressed his ear against it and listened; he heard nothing but silence, signaling that his parents were asleep.

Glad that he wouldn't run into his mother – she didn't like to see him up this late in the night – or even worse into his father, he opened the door and slipped out of his room and into the hallway on the second floor of the villa.

He tiptoed toward the bathroom on his right, his ears ready to catch the smallest sound in the house. Once he got to his destination, he made sure to close the door before turning on the light inside the bathroom. He walked over to the sink and placed the empty glass of water on top of it. Then, he grabbed the chair his mother always left by the sink and dragged it in front of it, always careful not make any sound.

He climbed on top of it and reached out to turn the cold-water faucet. He filled his glass halfway and drank it all in one gulp before filling it again, this time to the brim. He turned the faucet again, stopping the water. He slowly brought the glass to his lips and took a sip to lower the level of the water. When he looked up, he saw his image reflected in the mirror above the sink.

The boy set down his glass of water and leaned forward, his eyes sliding over his reflection in the mirror and stopping right at his lips. He looked at the angry red cut that marked the center of his lower lip and at the gap right behind it where one of his teeth had been. He tried his hardest to block the memory of the hot tears that had rolled down his cheeks that morning – tears caused by a mixture of pain and fear – and of the haunting memory of the blood filling his mouth.

He pulled down his lower lip with gentle fingers to look at his gums. They had long since stopped bleeding but the flesh was still tender so he did his best not to prod it with his tongue. He closed his mouth and poked the cut on his lip, hissing when he felt it sting. He laved at it with his tongue, hoping to ease the pain and then he took another sip of water from his glass. Once he was done, he set the glass down on the sink and climbed down the chair to put it back where it was supposed to be.

He grabbed his glass of water, turned off the light and got out of the bathroom. He walked toward his bedroom but stopped in the middle of the hallway.

The light was on downstairs.

The boy frowned. His dad had drunk a lot of his grown-up juice before going to bed, something that usually put him to sleep pretty quickly and made him wake up late in the morning. That left only his mom, but why would she be awake?

He wasn't sure what to do. Should he go downstairs and see what was happening? What would happen should his father be awake instead of his mother? The boy shuddered thinking of the consequences of his dad being angry with him for not being in bed.

The boy walked inside his bedroom and placed the glass of water on his bedside table. He stopped before climbing into bed, though, when something came to his mind; maybe his little brother woke up and his mother was trying to put him back to sleep. If that was the case, he could help her and spend some time with his baby brother all at once!

He went back to his steps, this time turning to the left to go down the stairs that would lead him to their living room.

He was excited at the prospect of his brother being awake; since they had brought him home from the hospital a month ago, his baby brother had done nothing more than eat, cry and sleep, leaving the seven-year-old boy severely disappointed. He thought having a baby brother would mean having someone to play with; things were not looking up in that department.

He reached the bottom of the stairs and turned right, his feet moving silently over the gleaming marble floors. He went through the archway that led to their enormous living room and saw that the light he had seen from upstairs came from the four lamps next to the sofas, not from the chandelier chained to the ceiling.

Right in the center of the living room – in a shallow pit easily reachable descending five wooden steps – four black leather sofas formed a square with a glass coffee table in the center.

He saw his baby brother strapped into some sort of portable chair. Stefan appeared to be asleep, not that Damon was expecting anything else from the baby. Although, now that he had seen his brother happily sleeping away his life, his theory that his mom woke up to soothe him simply didn't make any sense.

The seven-year-old looked at the other occupant of the room.

His mother was hunched over a bag placed right by Stefan's odd-looking chair, and she was shoving clothes inside of it as fast as she could without making a mess of the carefully folded shirts and pants. Every once in a while, she stopped to look at Stefan and once sure the baby was still sleeping, she went back to what she had been doing before.

The woman zipped up the now full bag and placed it on the floor, reaching underneath the sofa to pull out another bag, this one smaller than the other one. She started putting the remaining clothes in the second bag.

The boy looked at the scene in front of him with a frown marring his brows. Why was his mom packing her bags? Were they going on a trip? It was certainly weird to prepare their bags in the middle of the night. Maybe it was supposed to be a surprise and he had ruined everything coming downstairs! He bit the inside of his cheek, afraid that he might have ruined his mom's surprise. But if it was a surprise, why was Stefan down here? And why wasn't dad helping mom?

He decided to be brave and stepped closer to the pit.

"Why are you packing those bags?" he asked.

His mom jumped at the sound of his voice and turned to look at him with wide fearful eyes. She heaved a sigh of relief – her hand clasped over her chest – when she saw that it was just him. For a moment, her eyes looked behind him as if expecting to see someone else coming downstairs.

"Are we going on a trip?" he insisted.

Lily's heart was still beating rapidly in her chest; even though the voice that had made her turn had been that of a child, she had still felt panic swell up in her chest. For a moment, she had thought Giuseppe had caught her before she'd had the chance to finish what she had started. Even after her eyes had recognized her eldest son looking at her with those big blue eyes, she had glanced at the stairs that led to the second floor, half expecting to see her husband stumbling down in his drunken stupor.

"Sweetie, what are you doing out of bed so late?" She tried to keep her voice light so as not to betray how much he had scared her.

"I couldn't sleep and I saw the light was on here so I thought Stefan woke up and you were trying to put him back to sleep. I wanted to see him."

Lily moved closer to him and took his hand as he descended the five steps that led into the pit. She steered him toward the sofa and made him sit down next to his baby brother. She smiled sadly when he gave Stefan a light caress on his hair.

"So are we going on a trip?" he asked again.

Lily kneeled in front of him and cupped his cheeks with her hands. She brushed her thumbs beneath those eyes that were a mirror of her own and looked at the cut on his lip, avoiding his earnest gaze. She felt a wave of shame hit her when she saw how red and swollen his lip still was.

"How's your lip? Does it still hurt?"

The boy lowered his gaze and looked down at his lips, his eyes crossing in the effort. He jutted out his lower lip as if attempting to see it better and then shrugged his shoulders.

"It hurts if I touch it and my gums feel all weird and squishy so I try my best not to poke them with my tongue," he told her. "It's not that easy, though."

His last words were accompanied by a tight-lipped smile that, somehow, seemed to subtly accuse her of being a horrible mother; not that she could defend herself in any way from that accusation. She had truly been a sorry excuse of a mother to her eldest son, failing him again and again every single day of his life, but maybe she could do a better job with Stefan. Maybe she could give him the life every child was supposed to have.

"Mommy," his quiet voice brought her back to the present. "What is going on?"

She smiled, even though she could already feel her eyes straining with the effort to hold back her tears. She slid her hands from his cheeks to his shoulders, gripping them tightly.

"I'm leaving," she said in a voice as quiet as his had been. "I'm taking Stefan as far away from your father as I can."

The seven-year-old boy looked at his mother with fear-stricken eyes. For a long, awful moment, he did not know what to think. Lily's words had been so unexpected that the poor boy felt like a fish out of water, gasping and writhing pathetically on dry land.

What did it mean that she was leaving? She couldn't leave, not without him! He couldn't even begin to imagine what life would be like without his mom in it; who would help him with his homework? Who would give him his goodnight kiss while tucking him into bed at night? She was essential to him; she couldn't just take his brother and go away.

He felt a knot forming in his stomach when he realized that she had said she would take Stefan away but did not say anything about him.

Was she leaving him?

"Mom?" his voice shook as panic started to spread inside him. He clenched her shirt in his hands, holding onto her for dear life. "What does it mean that you're leaving with Stefan? What about me? Are you leaving me here with dad?"

Lily couldn't hold her tears back at the sight of her eldest son's terrified eyes. She covered his little hands with hers and tried to calm him down but nothing seemed to work. Without letting go of her shirt, he scrambled down the sofa and into her lap.

"Is it because I got dad angry this morning and he started screaming?" If he knew what he had done to make her go away without him, maybe he could fix it and make her change her mind. "I'm sorry he got angry, I didn't mean to ruin his papers with coffee. It just happened, I swear!"

The woman held her now sobbing son close to her chest, each word like a dagger piercing her heart, each tear he shed like a drop of fire that seared her skin leaving behind a mark she knew she would bear for the rest of her life. He was trembling like a leaf in her arms, bawling his eyes out against her chest as she rocked him gently to ease his tears as much as possible.

For a moment, she considered taking him with her and leaving that villa that had never been a home, with her two boys. She would have to work hard and things wouldn't be easy for the three of them, but maybe she could make them work, and they would all be happy. Her eyes slid to Stefan, still asleep in his car-seat, unaware of the tragedy happening not a foot from him. Just one look at his unblemished little face gave her hope for the future.

She looked down at the child in her arms and immediately realized the impossibility of her dream. She had known it when she had first started thinking about leaving and she knew it in that moment; she could not bring the seven-year-old with them.

She leaned back to look at her son and brushed her thumbs beneath his eyes to dry his tears.

"Look at your brother," she told him in a gentle voice. "Look at how small and defenseless he is."

He looked at his baby brother – his tears still running down his cheeks – and knew exactly what she wanted him to see; Stefan was so little and fragile that he was scared to touch him in fear of hurting him with the slightest caress.

What would happen to him if dad got angry and decided to hurt him too? He was too little to get away with it like Damon could. He didn't want his little brother to get hurt.

Lily cupped his cheek and made him look back into her eyes. He had always thought her eyes were the prettiest he had ever seen, but now they looked scary to him. They were cold and sent shivers down his back; he knew then that there would be no convincing her and he sniffed loudly when he felt his heart clench in his chest.

"I need to protect him, do you understand me?" he tried to listen to what his mother was saying over the blood pumping in his ears. "I need to find a safe place for him where your father won't find him."

He shook his head and spoke through the knot he felt in his throat, "Mom, don't go, please," he begged her. "I don't want to stay here."

Her fingers pressed on his cheeks almost painfully when she made him raise his head to look at her.

"I will come back for you, okay?" she spoke with an edge of desperation. "I will find a safe place for your brother and then I'll come back for you and you won't have to live here anymore."

He felt hope making way in his heart. She was coming back? He would live with her and his brother? It seemed too beautiful to be true.

"Do you promise?"

Lily reached beneath her hair and unclasped the necklace she always wore. She took it and wound it tightly around her son's wrist, the pendant in the shape of a musical note pressed against his palm. He loved that necklace; the chipped pendant that looked more like a half-moon with a flag stuck in it than a musical note, but that he loved anyway.

"Look at me," she told him. "I swear I will come back for you. I'll be back so quickly that you won't even notice I was missing."

Despite everything, he believed her and made no move to stop her when she rose to her feet and zipped up her bags. She slung the smaller one over her shoulder and grabbed the other one in her left hand before kneeling in front of him again.

She hugged him tightly, kissing every inch of his face. He could still feel the wetness of his tears on his cheeks and the remnant of the pain he had felt when his mom had said she was leaving without him, but now it was dulled. Her promise that she would come back had sent away all his fears.

She once again cupped his cheeks and look at him intently, as if committing his face to her memory.

"I love you, Damon," she said. "I love you so much, my sweet little boy."

"I love you too, Mommy."

He rose on his knees and bent over Stefan. He pressed his lips against his cheek, holding back a grimace when the cut on his lip stung because of the pressure he had applied on it. Damon leaned back and looked at his brother.

"Bye, Steffie," he whispered as his mother grabbed the handle of the car-seat. "I'll see you soon."

Lily leaned down and pressed a lingering kiss to his forehead before standing up. He watched as she picked up the car-seat in which Stefan was still sleeping quietly. With each step she took toward the door, he felt a weight settle over his shoulders.

His eyes remained glued to her retreating back until she disappeared through the front door.

Not once did she look back at him.

Many, many thanks to delena21051 for betaing this chapter!