I grunt, not trusting myself to speak.
He hesitates. “How’s Sienna? Any update?”
Before I can answer, the double doors at the end of the hall open, and the surgeon steps out. The man’s face says everything before he even opens his fucking mouth.
My throat goes dry.
“Mr. Conti,” he begins carefully, his voice too gentle. “We did everything we could.”
Everything stops. The world, the sound, the goddamn air.
No.
I’ve heard men beg for their lives, heard them cry for mercy with their last breath, but nothing—nothing—prepares me for that sentence.
“What do you mean?” My voice comes out quiet, dangerous. “You’re a surgeon. You fix things. So fix her.”
The doctor swallows hard. “The bullet severed an artery near her heart. There was too much blood loss before she arrived.”
He keeps talking about internal damage and efforts to revive but I don’t hear any of it. My mind goes blank except for one unbearable fact.
My little girl is gone.
Cesaro’s hand lands on my shoulder, grounding me. I shrug it off. My pulse is hammering, fury and grief twisting together until I can’t tell them apart.
The surgeon murmurs something else—an apology, I think—and slips away. The hallway falls silent again, except for the faint hum of fluorescent lights.
I stare at the door she went through, the one she’ll never walk back out of, and I feel the weight of it settle into my bones.
Sienna—my legacy, my blood, my reason for every monstrous thing I’ve ever done—is gone.
Cesaro’s voice breaks the silence. “Lorenzo.”
I turn toward him slowly.
“Do you want to see him now?” he asks.
For a long moment, I don’t answer. Then I nod once. “Yes.”
My voice is calm again. The storm’s gone quiet. But inside, something has shifted. Because now it’s not just about business. It’s personal. And before the night is over, someone will die for what they’ve done.
Cesaro doesn’t speak again. He doesn’t have to. He knows better than anyone that when I go silent like this that something inside me is breaking and once it breaks, it doesn’t heal.
When I finally turn away from the hallway, my body feels heavy, like I’m moving through water instead of air. I don’t even remember walking, don’t remember passing doors or people or the blur of white coats drifting around me.
I just arrive.
The next thing I know, I’m standing in the doorway of another ward, breath catching in my throat.
Elizabeth is sitting upright in a hospital bed, pale and dazed, her curls flattened in places where dried blood once clung. She’s wearing a fresh pair of scrubs because her dress—God, her dress—was destroyed. She looks so small in that bed. So breakable. So impossibly alive.
A nurse steps close, voice low as though afraid of shattering what’s left of me.
“She was shot in the side,” she murmurs. “But she will be fine.”
Two gunshots in less than a week, and she’s still here. Still breathing. Still fighting to sit upright as if she refuses to let the world knock her down.
I drag a hand through my hair, pulse hammering.
