Normal sounds. Safe sounds.
Worth fighting for. Worth killing for.
I climb out, suddenly aware of how the red dress clings, how my feet are killing me, how blood’s dried on my hands in patterns that look like abstract art.
“I need a shower. About eight hours of sleep. And to hug Mila until she complains.”
“Come on.” Sergei takes my hand, leading me inside. “Let’s go see our girl. Then tomorrow, we start rebuilding.”
Tomorrow. A future past survival. Past vengeance.
A future where the Davenport empire rises from ashes, stronger and sharper, with The Wolf’s wife at its head.
I follow him inside, Dad’s lighter heavy in my pocket, and let the door close on everything that came before.
EPILOGUE
Izzy
One Year Later
Here'swhat they don't tell you about revenge:
It tastes like ash. Like copper. Like the inside of your own mouth when you've been grinding your teeth for twelve months straight.
I'm standing in the gallery of Courtroom 4B, wood grain pressing splinters into my palms, watching my mother get sentenced for conspiracy to murder the man she married thirty-one years ago.
Twenty-three years. No parole for fifteen.
The judge's voice drones on about severity and premeditation and lack of remorse, but I stopped listening three minutes ago. I'm watching Mother instead. Cataloguing the damage the way Dad taught me to read a room.
Orange jumpsuit turning her skin the color of old cheese. Ash-blonde hair showing grey at the roots—an inch and a half of it, which means she stopped dyeing it the day they arrested her. Hands cuffed in front, and this is the detail that guts me: the manicure she maintained religiously for forty years is gone. Nails bitten to the quick. Cuticles ragged. Blood crusted in the corners where she's been picking.
Catherine Davenport, who once made a manicurist cry for applying the wrong shade of nude, has been chewing her own fingers raw.
Good.
No. Not good. Just... fact.
She doesn't look at me. Hasn't looked at me once during the entire three-hour hearing. She stared at the defense table through her lawyer's opening statement. Stared at the wall through the victim impact statements. Stared at her ruined hands while I described the last time I saw my father alive, when he pressed his lucky lighter into my palm and told me he thought I needed it more.
When the verdict came down—guilty on all counts—she blinked once.
That's it.
Thirty-one years of marriage. Twenty-nine years of motherhood. A lifetime of society galas and family portraits and the performance of loving us.
One blink.
The officers approach to take her away. Her chains clink as she stands—ankle shackles, the medieval kind, because she's a flightrisk with seven offshore accounts they still haven't frozen. The sound echoes off marble floors that have absorbed a century of verdicts.
At the door, she stops.
Turns.
Our eyes meet across the courtroom, and for one heartbeat I see something flicker behind the mask. Not regret. Not love. Something worse.
Recognition.
