Part 2
### Chapter 1: Chapter 1
From a Romanian estate to the firelit nights of Paris, Luludi becomes a woman no man can possess—except the one who refuses to let her go.
Some loves don’t set you free. They hunt you.
Romania, 1855.
In a world where people can still be owned, traded, and given away as property, Luludi is born without the right to choose her own life. A gypsy girl bound to the land, she belongs to a boyar’s estate—her fate already decided: at fifteen, she will be given as dowry and married to a man she has never seen.
But Luludi refuses to belong to anyone.
On the night her life is sealed, she runs.
Cutting her hair and hiding her body beneath a boy’s clothes, she disappears into the unknown. Alone and starving, she finds refuge in a traveling theater, where hard labor breaks her and remakes her.
Two years later, under a sky burning with fire and music, she dances for the first time as a woman.
And that’s when he sees her.
Mazur—dark, powerful, and raised to be obeyed—looks at her like she was meant to be his. What begins as desire turns into obsession. What feels like freedom begins to resemble another cage.
So she runs again.
From him. From her past. From everything that could claim her.
Years later, in the decadent glow of Paris, Luludi is no longer the girl who fled—she is a woman no one can truly possess. Desired. Feared. Untouchable.
Until Mazur finds her.
No longer a reckless young man, but a powerful one—with patience, influence, and the same dangerous hunger for her.
And this time, nothing is innocent.
Complete Chapters 35
Rating 5.0 ( 9 reviews ) Age Rating mature
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Chapter 1
I had never once wondered whether I was different from the other children. I was a child like any other. That’s what I believed. That’s what I felt. I had no way of knowing otherwise.
It took a small wooden stool, Michette, and a late spring day for me to understand.
I couldn’t have been more than five years old.
It’s strange how I don’t clearly remember faces, or exact words, but I remember the taste of cherries. So vividly that sometimes it feels as though I can still sense it now, somewhere on the roof of my mouth—sweet and slightly rough, with the hard pit pressing between my teeth. After that, I never liked cherries again. Or perhaps it wasn’t the cherries themselves that changed.
It was May. The cherry tree in the yard was full, dense, as if it could no longer contain itself. We sat beneath it, perched on a small three-legged stool made by old man Ispas, pecking at the fruit like two insatiable sparrows.
The dress I was wearing had belonged to Michette. It was old for her, but for me it was the most beautiful dress I had ever owned. I loved it so much that it never crossed my mind it could mean anything other than beauty. I didn’t yet know the difference between “mine” and “left behind by someone else.”
Michette laughed. She always laughed, her head thrown back, speaking quickly, as if afraid she wouldn’t have time to say everything. She told me about Paris, about lace dresses and chocolate.
“I’m going to run away there, you’ll see,” she had told me the night before. “I’ll marry a prince and eat nothing but chocolate.”
I believed her. I believed everything she said.
I don’t know how the game began. I only remember the moment she placed the small white kitchen stool on my head—round, with a smooth rim.
“Wait till you see how it looks on you!” she said, laughing.
At first, it was just a game. Then she tried to take it off.
She pulled again. I felt it tighten, pressing into my temples, as if the skin of my scalp were being lifted along with the wood.
That’s when she stopped. She looked at me.
Her eyes widened, suddenly emptied of laughter.
She tried again, harder this time. The pain rose like a flame. I screamed again.
She ran without saying a word, without looking back, as if it wasn’t me left there with the stool wedged onto my head, but something she needed to escape from.
I pulled at it too, with both hands. But it felt as though I would tear my head off along with it. The pain was so great that I could no longer understand anything. It was as if I wasn’t there anymore—only the pain was.
I don’t know how long I stayed like that. Maybe a few seconds. Maybe longer. Then I ran.
I knew I wasn’t allowed on the terrace when Mrs. Lena had guests. I knew that very well. But in that moment, nothing I knew seemed to matter anymore.
There was shade under the vine. Mrs. Lena sat at the table with two friends, in thin voile dresses, serving jam and coffee. Everything was calm, composed, like a photograph.
Michette was there, beside her mother, perched on the edge of her chair.
I stopped for a moment in the doorway, then blurted out:
I don’t know how I looked. I could only feel the tears running, that I couldn’t breathe properly through the mucus, and that wretched little stool pressing on my head like a punishment.
Mrs. Lena stood up slowly, with a movement that held more concern for her dress than for me, and before looking at me, she glanced—almost imperceptibly—toward her friends, as if she needed to take the measure of her reaction from them.
Only then did she turn her eyes toward me, and in that instant I felt, for the first time, a sharp, lucid certainty—that she did not truly see me, that her gaze passed straight through me and settled somewhere else, in a place where I did not exist.
“Luludi,” she said slowly, pressing each syllable. “What are you doing here?”
I took a step forward, driven more by pain than by courage, feeling the stool press harder and harder into my temples.
“I’m… I’m stuck… I can’t get it off…”
“What are you doing here?” she repeated, more firmly this time, turning slightly toward the other women, as if asking for their approval. “Don’t you know that your kind isn’t allowed here?”
Her words didn’t settle into me all at once; they passed by me like a distant noise, layered over the pain in my head. Mrs. Lena had always been, at most, indifferent to me—never had she given me the impression of being cruel.
“Michette put it on me,” I said, feeling my voice begin to break. “Please, I can’t take it off.”
She didn’t turn her gaze toward her as she spoke to me.
“Michette, my dear, isn’t she lying? You don’t play with gypsies.”
I turned my head with difficulty.
Michette was looking at me, motionless, and for a moment—no longer than a heartbeat—I believed she would laugh and tell the truth, that she would jump off her chair and come to me, as she always did when we played.
“That’s right, maman,” she said.
In that moment, the pain receded somewhere far behind, as if making room for something else—colder, deeper—that filled my chest.
“Michette, don’t lie anymore,” I said softly, not recognizing my own voice.
I don’t know where I found the courage to say that.
Mrs. Lena stepped toward me, and as she came closer, it seemed to me that she was growing, rising above me like a heavy shadow under which there was no longer any space left for me.
I didn’t get to say anything else.
I don’t know how she found that narrow space between the wood and my cheek, but her palm came down sure and hot, and the moment it touched me I felt my skin flare up, as if it had left a mark that would never, ever fade.
It was the first time she had hit me.
“You little liar!” she said, her voice sharp. “Dirty gypsy! You dare say my child is lying?”
I could no longer cry—or perhaps I was still crying, but the crying had no sound, no tears, as if it had been trapped somewhere inside me, unable to come out.
He appeared almost at once, from somewhere I hadn’t noticed, as if he had been standing there all along, waiting—old Ispas, his shoulders slightly hunched, his gait calm, like a man used to being summoned for all the small and heavy things in the yard.
“Take this little gypsy brat away! I don’t want to see her again!”
Then, turning to Michette, her voice suddenly soft, altered:
“You see, my dear? That’s why it’s not good to mix with them. Look at them—how they forget the hand that feeds them.”
Then her expression changed again, and frowning at Ispas, she said in a cutting voice:
“If you don’t keep your little gypsies in line, I will. There are too many of them as it is, eating for nothing. Do you understand?”
Ispas muttered a “yes” into his mustache.
And then, for the first time, I understood that Ispas was a gypsy too. That he was like me. Or that I was like him.
Ispas was old, dark-skinned, and he almost always smelled of work.
Old Ispas took hold of me without a word and lifted me up, and for a moment I hung there, my head weighed down by the stool, my cheek burning, feeling the world pull away from me without quite breaking loose.
There was nothing left to struggle for.
Only then did I understand that some people are worth less than others—and that this begins from the very start, without your knowing, without your choosing.
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### Chapter 2: Chapter 2
In the year of grace 1855, in Wallachia, people like me were slaves. That is what I learned.
Until then, I had lived without knowing, as if things had been naturally arranged around me, as if they had nothing to do with me. But after that, the thought would not leave me. It settled inside me like a restlessness that refused to be stilled, like a question that kept demanding an answer and never fully received one.
How can one human being own another for life?
How can someone be born already belonging to someone else?
I had been born on the estate of Boyar Vlaho, to a Romani mother who, like the soil itself, was bound to his land, and to a father I had never known—a distant grandson of old Ispas, whom I would later call my grandfather, more for my own sake than for anyone else’s, just so I could feel that I belonged to someone, that I was not merely a stray in a vast courtyard.
About my father, I knew little—only what Ispas had told me on long evenings, as he sat on the threshold, rubbing his cracked palms together.
He had died before I was born. He had not yet turned eighteen, poor soul.
My mother was sixteen and still carried me in her womb when one of the boyar’s horses struck him in the head with its hoof.
Ispas would tell me the same thing every time, with a persistence that unsettled me:
“It made a dull sound when the hoof struck his head, as if it were hollow.”
And he would laugh. He laughed every time, as though he had just told a fine joke.
I could not laugh. It seemed incomprehensible to me—unbearable—that a human head could make such a sound.
The estate of Boyar Vlaho was vast and rich, truly beautiful. It had everything—orchards, stables, fields, and people. Many people. More than twenty Roma bound to the land, working from dawn to dusk, asking no questions, expecting nothing beyond tomorrow, just like today.
After what happened with Michette, I understood that I was one of them too.
I was eight then. Michette, ten.
She was not cruel to me. Not in the way people can be cruel without even realizing it. But we were no longer friends. Whatever had been between us had quietly dissolved, without noise, without explanation.
Now she treated me with a gentle absentmindedness, as though I were something she was fond of, but that did not truly concern her. Like a favored servant.
If I looked at the others, I would tell myself I was lucky. Miss Michette did not have demanding needs. Most of the time, she only wanted to be listened to. She talked without pause, like a mill turning in vain, saying the same things in different ways.
Though she was only two years older than I, she already carried herself like a young lady. She was pale, with thin skin, almost translucent at the temples, and light-colored eyes in which nothing ever seemed to settle, as if her thoughts passed too quickly to leave a trace. Her hair was soft and yellowish, most often worn in braided plaits, and when she laughed—which she did often—she showed small, pearly teeth.
She dreamed of men, of dresses, of the life that would come after.
I dreamed of freedom. But there was no one to ask me about it.
Michette took her lessons at home with Monsieur Dadu, a frail man, almost thin to the point of transparency, with long, restless fingers that were forever adjusting his cuffs and smoothing his sparse mustache, as though each movement had been rehearsed before a mirror.
He spoke slowly and with care, in a sweetness that felt out of place, now and then sprinkling in French words he pronounced with almost tender attention. He spoke of Paris with familiarity, as if it lay just a stone’s throw away from us, even though he may never have set foot there.
It was he who had planted in her mind the idea that elsewhere is always better.
In the end, he had planted it in me as well.
Of course, I was not allowed to attend their lessons. Who had ever heard of such a thing—a little Gypsy girl studying alongside her masters’ daughter?
But on warm days, when the study window was left open toward the rose garden, I would slip close and stand there, motionless, pressed against the wall, holding my breath as though I might be betrayed by the sound of it.
The words entered me without my fully understanding them, but I kept them, turning them over on all sides like stones found along the road.
That is how I learned of Africa. Of the Americas.
I learned a few words in French, which I repeated in my mind until it seemed I heard them spoken by someone else—someone who could say them better than I ever could.
And, without realizing it, I began to learn how a woman ought to be.
Because in the meantime, Michette no longer dreamed of the prince from Paris.
She sat on her chair, upright, with shoulders too narrow for the way she tried to appear grown, her hands folded in her lap, and she watched Monsieur Dadu with a strained attentiveness that, for a moment, made her seem more alive than she usually was. In the afternoon light, her pale skin took on a faint translucence, and those light-colored eyes remained fixed on him, blinking rarely, as if she feared missing something.
She dreamed of Monsieur Dadu. Day and night.
She drank in every word he spoke, imitated—without realizing it—his small gestures, the way he lifted his fingers, the way he shaped his sentences; and when she spoke of him, her voice grew thinner, quicker.
She said she would marry him and give him a cartful of beautiful children, with mustaches like his.
Then her short laugh would brighten her face for a fleeting instant, without truly changing it.
I had remained the only one who still believed that elsewhere is better.
Because, after all, it is always better somewhere else.
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