“You... you stupid, naive child,” he stammers, his lips stained bright red. He clings to his superiority because it’s the only weapon he has left. “Do you really think an audio file is going to bring me down?”
“It’s absolute proof,” I say, gripping my gun tighter.
“It’s digital noise!” he snaps. “I’m the court, Iris! I have half the appellate circuit on my personal payroll. I have the Police Commissioner in my pocket. You hand that tape over, they’ll claim it’s fabricated audio. It’ll be tied up in litigation for a decade.”
He bares his bloodied teeth and turns his head slightly, trying to look at the man holding the gun to his skull.
“And you, Drazic,” my father sneers at Cassian, spitting blood. “You feral, ungrateful dog. You think you’re getting revenge for the museum? You don’t even know who holds your leash.”
Cassian presses the hot barrel harder into the bone. “Shut your mouth.”
“Why do you think I saved your ass from the needle five years ago?” my father laughs, a manic, breathless sound. “Out of the goodness of my heart? Your father worked for me, Cassian. The great Don. He cleaned up my messes in the shadows. He moved my money. But he got old. He got soft. He refused to put a bullet in a federal witness for me.”
Cassian freezes. The lethal pressure of his body pinning my father down goes rigid. The color drains entirely from his striking face. The dark, calculated control of the Don shatters, instantly replaced by a visceral shock. His chest heaves as if the agonizing betrayal hit him like a physical blow. The man he pledged his life to, the man he believed was a saint, is the exact same monster who ordered his father’s execution.
“Because he refused to obey,” my father gasps, his eyes wild with malice, “I bought his guards. I paid for the hollow-point bullet in his chest. I put the murder weapon in your paralyzed hand, and I let you sit in a freezing cell for eight months to break you. I orchestrated the coup so I could own the new Don. I built you!”
The room falls dead silent.
I stare at my father in complete horror. He isn’t just a corrupt politician trying to save his legacy. He’s a generational monster. He’s a parasite who systematically destroys lives, orchestrates murders, and frames innocent men purely to consolidate his own power. He created Cassian’s nightmare. He created my own nightmare.
“I won’t spend a single night in a cell,” my father promises, desperately throwing his immense political power at the gun against his head. “I’ll be out on bail by morning. And you... You’ll both be dead by noon! I’ll unleash the entire weight of the federal government on you. I’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth!”
I stare at him.
The fragile illusion of the law shatters, scattering across the floor like the glass of the vase I dropped in this exact spot about a week ago.
He’s right. The law is a total fiction. It’s a convenient fairy tale we tell the powerless to keep them perfectly obedient, while men like him use the justice system as a Kevlar shield. The court is a machine he built, and it will never turn its gears against its creator. If we leave him alive, he’ll never stop hunting us. There will be no peace. There will be no freedom.
Whatever he trained into me goes quiet. Something vastly colder takes its place.
I look at Cassian.
The Ghost is watching me. His chest is still.
“He’s right,” I say. My voice is dead. It’s devoid of mercy, devoid of fear, devoid of love.
I hold my father’s gaze as I deliver the verdict he earned.
“Finish it.”
Cassian’s eyes flash with a dark, terrifying pride. He doesn’t pull the trigger of his SIG. Instead, he holsters the weapon smoothly at his hip.
My father exhales a shaky, massive breath of relief, actually thinking he has won. Thinking the overwhelming threat of his political power has forced the hitman to back down.
He’s wrong.
Keeping his knee pinned brutally against my father’s spine to hold him down, Cassian reaches his right hand into theinterior pocket of my father’s overcoat. He pulls out my father’s personal, registered revolver. Cassian checks the cylinder, snaps it shut, and wipes the smooth grip with the hem of his black T-shirt, ensuring it is clean of his own prints.
He drops the revolver directly onto my father’s lap. He draws his own gun again and presses the hot suppressor back to the base of my father’s neck.
“The cops are going to walk into this room. They’re going to find two dead corrupt officers shot with my nine-millimeter hollow points. Ballistics will know exactly who was in this room. They’re going to find a corrupt Judge who realized the Ghost finally came to collect his debt. A Judge who watched his empire crumble, knew there was no way out... and turned his own gun on himself.”
My father’s eyes go wide with dawning horror. He glances down at his own revolver sitting on his thighs, then up at me, pure panic stripping away his arrogance. “Iris! Iris, please! You can’t do this! I’m your father!”
“You wanted a tragic suicide,” I reply, handing his own words back to him with dead-eyed calm. “You get one.”
Cassian digs the barrel of the gun harder into my father’s vertebrae.
