My brother's face, beaten beyond recognition. Blood crusted around his swollen eyes. His body twisted at angles that make bile rise in my throat. The prison uniform torn and stained with so much red.
More photos. Different angles. Close-ups of injuries that speak of systematic torture. A final shot of him crumpled on concrete, still and lifeless, other inmates standing around his body like it's nothing.
My knees buckle.
The bathroom tile is cold against my knees. I notice this absently, knowing that someone will have to clean my sweat and tears from this marble. The photographs scatter across the pristine floor, each one a knife to my chest. Tommy's dead face stares up at me from every angle.
Dead.
Tommy at eight, missing his front teeth, promising he'd protect me forever. Tommy teaching me to throw a punch after Mom died. Tommy's letters from prison, each one insisting I not blame myself.
All gone.
The word doesn't make sense. Can't make sense. I saved him. I married Alessandro. I became someone else. I did everything they asked.
My hands shake so violently I can't gather the photos. Can't breathe. Can't think. The room spins, marble and gold blurring into a nightmare I can't wake from. The glossy photographs crumple in my grip, Tommy's destroyed face creasing under my desperate fingers.
He died anyway.
All of it. The wedding, the lies, the transformation, the nights in Alessandro's arms telling myself it was worth it. All for nothing.
I protected no one. Saved no one.
The Emma who learned to shoot, who watched her husband break fingers for her, screams at me to fight. But that woman was built on saving Tommy. Without him, she's just another lie, another performance with no purpose.
The bathroom door opens. Some woman enters, takes one look at me on my knees surrounded by death, and backs out immediately. She probably thinks I'm having a breakdown over a lover or a business deal. She has no idea I'm mourning the only family I had left.
Tommy is dead.
The words echo in my skull, bouncing off bone until they're all I can hear. My baby brother who I taught to read. Who held my hand at Mom's funeral. Who went to prison trying to protect me. Gone.
I try to stand, to be strong, to be the strategist Alessandro praised. But my body betrays me. Legs shaking, hands trembling, voice gone. The new Emma, the dangerous one, dissolves like sugar in rain.
I stumble out of the bathroom, leaving the photographs scattered like accusations across marble. The gallery lights are too bright, the laughter too loud. Everyone's watching me, but Emma's world just ended.
My phone rings. Alessandro. I stare at his name on the screen, unable to answer. What would I say? That everything we built was meaningless? That I failed the one person I was supposed to protect?
It rings again. Then again. His cologne seems to linger on my skin from this morning's goodbye, mixing with the salt of my tears.
I silence it and walk out of the gallery, ignoring my bodyguards' confusion. They follow, of course, but I'm not really there anymore. I'm floating somewhere outside my body, watching this woman in designer clothes stumble through Chicago streets.
The phone keeps lighting up. Alessandro calling repeatedly, probably wondering why I'm not responding. His messages blur together:
"Stellina, where are you?"
"Your guards say you left. What happened?"
"Answer me. Please."
"I'm sending Marco's men to find you."
Finally, I answer just to make it stop.
"Emma?" His voice is tight with worry. "What's wrong? What happened?"
"It's over." The words come out flat, dead as Tommy. "Everything we did was for nothing."
"What do you mean? Where are you?"
