Page 147 of The Cost of Silence

My stomach flips, but I keep my face still. “You enjoy this,” I say. “Hurting people. Tearing open wounds you made.”

“Enjoy?” He considers. “I enjoy balance. You and your mother lived because Enzo agreed to keep my secret. Now his sons have chosen to go against me. The scales have tipped too far. They’ll be righted tonight.”

“And me?” I ask again. “Because Orlov thinks you’re going to kill me and pin my soul to your trophy wall.”

Domenico smiles faintly. “Killing you outright would be wasteful. And messy. No. You’re more valuable as a story.” He steps closer, reaching up to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear with obscene intimacy. I fight not to flinch. “Imagine it, Isabella: the great Nico Mancini, would-be king of the clean empire, brought to his knees not by a bullet meant for him, but by smoke. By fire. By the grief of losing the woman he’s foolish enough to love.”

The room seems to tilt. “You’re going to set a fire.”

“Not me,” he says. “Orlov enjoys that sort of thing. I’m more of a… conceptual man these days.”

“I won’t burn quietly,” I say, because my voice is the only weapon I have left. “I won’t just lie here and cry while your men stack kindling.”

He laughs softly. “I don’t expect you to. That’s the beauty of it. You’ll fight, you’ll scream, you’ll claw at the door, and when Nico hears about it, he’ll see your charred ghost every time he closes his eyes. He’ll wonder if you blamed him. He’ll assume you did.”

The worst part is that once, a few years ago, that might even have been true. There was a long stretch of my life where grief curdled into blame with very little encouragement.

But now?

Now I think about the way Nico looked at me under the Christmas tree, how he sat outside my door the night of theattack, the way he held me on the couch and talked about new beginnings while ghosts pressed at his shoulders.

I think about how he told me he loved me like it was both a confession and a promise, even though he thought I slept.

I know what he is. I know what he’s done. I know what he’s trying to be.

You don’t get to rewrite that, I think, staring at Domenico.You don’t get to control this narrative.Out loud, I say, “You’re wrong.”

He tilts his head. “About what?”

“About him. About me. About what he’ll carry,” I say. “You can try to make us into props in your tragic little opera, but we’re not your chorus. We’re not your audience. We’re the people who’ll be standing over your grave when this is done.”

His eyes flash, just for a moment, with something that looks like respect and irritation spliced together.

“It’s a shame,” he says. “You’d have done well in our world. Not like my sister. She didn’t have the stomach for it. She turned my best friend into a weak man, and in so doing, took everything from me.”

“I think I’m doing just fine in mine, and she’d be ashamed of you,” I reply.

I see his eye tic at my words. He shakes his head, almost fondly. “We’ll see how much you’re still saying that when the smoke starts.” He turns to Orlov. “You know what to do.”

Orlov nods. “I’ll be right behind you.”

They leave together, the men at the door falling in behind them like shadows. A new man steps in their place, stockier, with a face like a mangled fist and eyes that slide away from mine.

He shuts the door. I hear the lock turn.

Silence drops, heavy and sudden.

It lasts exactly forty seconds.

Then there’s a faint scratching sound. A chemical tang hits my nose, sharp and wrong. I move to the door, press my ear against it, then jerk back, coughing, as smoke threads in around the edges.

Panic claws at my throat.

They’re really doing it.

They’re going to burn the building and me with it.

For a heartbeat, every atom in me is twelve years old again, standing in the rain staring at the spot where my father fell, deaf to everything but my mother’s sobs.