By the time he reached me, there was nothing left but the stink of gunpowder, the twitch of dying bodies, and the river singing somewhere in the dark.
He dropped to his knees beside me. His hands, rough, shaking, found my shoulders, my back, my blood-soaked face.
I tried to speak, instinct, but all that came out was a wet, guttural noise. A sound that didn’t belong to anything human.
His face broke when he heard it. I saw it. I felt it.
But he didn’t flinch.
He didn’t recoil.
He pulled me into his arms, blood and brokenness and all. He held me like a brother, like an oath. Like something sacred.
He pressed his forehead to mine and breathed, and for the first time in my life, I understood that survival wasn’t living.
It was carrying the weight of what they’d taken.
It was becoming something they couldn’t break again.
I bled out into the night. I lived.
But the boy I had been, the voice I had been, died under those floodlights.
That was the last day I ever spoke.
The last breath that carried words.
Now when I rage—
I rage in silence.
When I love—
I love in silence.
When I kill—
I kill in silence.
And my silence?
It screams louder than any words ever could.
Chapter 62
In the Arms of Family
Isabella
Who even am I?
The shock still has its claws in me, a persistent ache I can’t shake. It hovers in my chest like a weight, suffocating every thought I try to grasp. My life, everything I thought I knew about who I was, has been shredded. The truth is a bitter pill, and I’m still choking on it. The Gambino blood coursing through my veins... the revelation of it is like a foreign language I don’t speak, and yet it keeps repeating itself over and over inside my head.
Aslanov’s the reason I’m still standing, though. He’s the one who laid it out for me, breaking down the walls I built. I can’t look at him right now, I can’t, not with everything that’s swirling inside me. He’s still resting, though not fully healed, but I can feel his presence even when I try to ignore it.
Ada and Dominik are huddled over a laptop screen, faces illuminated by the cold, sterile glow of the device. They’re too close, like the space between them is shrinking with every passing minute. Ada’s fingers tap on the keyboard with an urgency I recognize, and yet, her eyes often flicker to Dominik. There’s something in the way she looks at him, something soft, almost too tender. I guess love really comes at the weirdest times.
Ada has been trying to comfort me, offering words that don’tquite fill the emptiness inside me. She says she’ll love me no matter the blood in my veins. But that doesn’t change the fact that I don’t feel like I belong here. Not when everything I thought was mine has been taken away. I swallow hard, trying to suppress the raw emotion rising in my throat.
