Chapter 4 - What the Wool Hid
Massimo went utterly motionless.
The warmth in his posture froze into iron. He had spent fifty years in worlds where pain was currency; he knew the difference between a child's startle and a body screaming from internal trauma.
"Mia?" he murmured, keeping his voice impossibly gentle while his heart hammered against his ribs. "Where does it hurt, sweetheart?"
Mia clutched her lower right side, tears spilling freely over her cheeks. "My... my side, Grandpa..."
Massimo placed his fingers on the hem of the thick, stifling cable-knit sweater.
"Don't touch her clothes in public, Massimo!" Grant snapped from the banquette, his voice sharp with sudden panic. "She’s just being dramatic!"
Massimo ignored him entirely. He gently gathered the thick wool and pulled the fabric up past Mia’s ribs.
The breath left the throat of every bystander close enough to see.
Across the four-year-old child’s delicate ribcage stretched a horrifying constellation of abuse. Deep, mottled contusions—some pitch-black, some sickly yellow-green, and a massive, fresh purple hematoma spanning three ribs—marred her porcelain skin. There were finger-shaped grip marks pressed so hard into the soft flesh that the capillary blood had permanently darkened beneath the surface.
Massimo’s vision tunneled. The air in his lungs turned to boiling glass.
"Mia..." Massimo choked out, his hand hovering over the brutal marks, shaking with a rage so violent it took everything in his soul not to tear the room apart with his bare hands. "Who did this to you?"
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Mia buried her face into the crook of Massimo’s neck, her tiny body trembling with dry, exhausted sobs.
"Daddy told me... I have to wear the thick sweater," she wept into his collar, her voice echoing in the dead silence of the lounge. "He said if I wear the heavy wool... nobody will see that Mommy and I are hurting..."
