"And if I refuse?"
Magnus shrugs one elegant shoulder. "Then I marry her tonight, consummate the union with or without her consent, and spend the next few years breeding heirs from her broken body while you watch from whatever hole I decide to throw you in. Either way, I get what I want. The only question is how much suffering you are willing to endure before you accept reality."
The newscast catches my attention before I can respond.
One of my father's many televisions is mounted on the far wall, muted but displaying images that make the blood drain from my face. The Redthorne building, my building, engulfed in flames that leap from the penthouse windows like demons escaping hell. Firefighters spray useless arcs of water against the inferno while news helicopters circle like vultures waiting for the carcass to cool.
"Oh, yes." Magnus follows my gaze and his smile widens. "I nearly forgot about that. Consider it a taste of what happens when you take things that belong to me."
The penthouse. Our bedroom. The closet full of clothes I bought for Persia. The kitchen where Marta taught her to make my mother's recipes. Everything we built together in those two weeks of holding each other in the dark, all of it burning while I stand helpless in my father's study with a hole in my shoulder and my wife in the hands of a monster.
"You have until midnight." Magnus checks his watch with theatrical precision. "Bring the signed documents to the old church where you dared steal from me. Come alone. And Rafael?" He pauses at the study door, his silver hair catching the lamplight. "If you try anything clever, I will make sure Persia's suffering is legendary. Do we understand each other?"
I say nothing. There is nothing to say that will not end with more blood on these floors.
Magnus leaves with Fiore trailing behind him like the spineless coward he has always been, and I am left standing in my father's study with Drake at my side and my father slumped in his chair, looking every inch the broken old man he has become.
"Rafael." My father's voice is thin, reedy, nothing like the commanding boom that once made me flinch with fear as a child. "You have to understand. He threatened to expose everything. The deals with the cartels, the judges we own, all of it. I had no choice."
I cross the room slowly, each step sending fresh agony through my shoulder, until I am standing directly in front of the desk where three generations of Milano men have conducted their cruelty. My father looks up at me with eyes that might hold regret or might hold nothing at all, and I realize with sudden clarity that I will never know the difference.
Because I am done trying.
"You shot me." The words come out flat, devoid of the rage or grief or betrayal that should accompany them. "Your own son. To protect yourself."
"I was aiming for your leg. You moved?—"
"Stop." I lean forward, planting my bloodied hands on the desk, and watch my father flinch for the first time in my memory. "I have spent my entire life trying to earn your approval. Trying to be the son you wanted. Trying to prove that I was worthy of this family, this name, this legacy you never wanted to give me."
My father opens his mouth to speak, but I cut him off.
"I rebuilt everything you and Marco nearly destroyed. I turned Redthorne from a failing operation into an empire. I have killed for this family, bled for this family, sacrificed every soft thing inside me for this family. And this is what you give me in return."
The gun in Drake's hand is heavy and familiar when I take it, when I press the barrel against my father's forehead and watch terror bloom in his watery eyes for the first time since I was a child cowering in a corner while he raged.
I could do it. I could pull this trigger and end decades of pain with a single twitch of my finger. The world would be better without Enzo Milano in it. My mother's memory would be honored. The cycle of violence that has defined this family for generations would finally, mercifully, end.
But that is exactly what he would do.
My father would pull this trigger without hesitation. He would eliminate the threat, assert his dominance, prove once and for all that power flows from the barrel of a gun. That is the lesson he spent my childhood beating into me, the legacy he tried to carve into my bones with fists and belts and the casual cruelty of a man who saw his children as extensions of his will rather than people worthy of love.
I understand the pain Persia has suffered because I have suffered the same fate.
If I kill him, I become him.
And I am so fucking tired of being the monster my father made me.
I lower the gun.
"Rafael." Drake's voice carries a warning. "Brother, think about this."
"I have thought about it." I set the weapon on the desk, just out of my father's reach, and straighten to my full height despite the agony screaming through my shoulder. "I have thought about nothing else for nearly forty years. And I am done."
My father stares at me with confusion bleeding into his terror. "What are you?—"
"You are dead to me." The words come out steady, final, carrying a weight that settles into the room like a physical presence. "Dead, and unfortunately a memory I can’t erase. You will forever be a ghost I choose not to acknowledge anymore. Do you understand me?"
I turn my back on the man who gave me life and spent every day since trying to take it away, and I walk toward the door without looking back.
