Her face twists, not fully, but just enough.
Lorenzo snaps.
The way dying things always do, when they realize there is no hope left.
His head lifts, and his mouth twists into a snarl.
“You’re both fucking monsters,” he spits. “I burned yourempire down, while you were rotting like the mutt you are.”
He turns on her now.
“And you?” he hisses, voice raw, desperate. “You’re nothing but a glorified whore. A red-haired brat with your father’s bastard’s name. You think standing behind him makes you royalty? You’re still the same little shit I buried away and gave a new name to.”
He breathes hard. Spits blood.
“You think you’re powerful now?” He laughs—a broken, wet sound. “You’re standing beside a corpse with a crown. When he dies, you’ll crawl back to whatever cage I left you in.”
The mask is off. The rot is showing. The cowardice is bloated and gasping.
He screams again, voice cracking:
“Your father would’ve burned you alive for what you let him turn you into. For crossing bloodlines, Bratva blood.” His gaze focused on my woman.
She steps forward, and the air shifts.
But with something heavier—truth.A truth so sharp it peels back the skin of every lie Lorenzo ever tried to wrap her in. She doesn’t scream. She doesn’t shake. She simply speaks, and I watch every syllable land like a blade against his chest.
“You didn’t just erase me,” she says, her voice flat, scalpel-clean. “You gave me away.”
And in that moment, I don’t see the woman I built into fire. I see the girl who was forced to crawl through ash before she ever saw daylight. I see the child he buried. The bloodline he tried to carve out of history. And she’s still here.
He tries to speak. She cuts him down.
“You put me in a house with strangers, monsters. You didn’t save me. You fed me to them.”
I don’t move.
Because this isn’t my execution.
It’shers.
“You knew,” she says, and the room stills like the walls are holding their breath.
“Because I remember. I remember your voice.”
She takes a step forward, and for a second, she isn’t Isabella.
She’s prophecy.
“When I was locked in that basement, without food, without light, I heard you. You came. Not to rescue me. But to measure how well they were breaking me.”
The silence grows teeth.
“You were there,” she says again, lower now. The kind of voice you use to speak to ghosts.
I feel it in my chest.
Not pity.