For a second—I didn’t breathe.
Didn’t move.
Then the name settled.
Vasquez—his best client?
My chest tightened painfully.
A man who should have been his greatest enemy... considering what he did to me.
Vasquez was one of my father’s core enemies—the one who had kidnapped me at nine, tearing me away from Italy and dragging me across the ocean to California.
He was the one who had forced me into that cellar. The one who broke me—mind and bone with ruthless precision.
And yet...
That same man had been his most loyal client.
Paying the highest price.
Returning again and again to take what he wanted from Loretta.
My anger surged, hot and suffocating.
But what cut deepest wasn’t even the thought of Vasquez himself.
It was the fact that this man—this monster—had already been dead.
Gone long before this moment.
Killed in a plane crash with his family.
And still... his shadow lingered here.
My vision tunneled, narrowing until all I could see was the man in front of me—and everything he had allowed.
Everything he had sold.
Everything he had destroyed.
Rage flooded my veins, thick and suffocating, burning through every inch of me until it felt like my skin couldn’t contain it.
I looked back at Ottavio.
At the man who should have protected us.
Who had instead turned our suffering into profit.
I had thought—somewhere, deep down—that at the end, he might break.
Might beg.
Might show even a flicker of regret.
He didn’t.
Even now, drowning in his own blood, he chose cruelty.
