I just nodded, that’s all.
I nodded once, like he was telling me a shipment was delayed, like he was informing me a man had missed a meeting, like the world hadn’t just put a gun in my mouth and pulled the trigger without the courtesy of letting me die.
I asked for the ring. Now I sit with it in my open palm, staring at the gold line until it blurs.
My throat moves around nothing. I haven’t cried. Panic isn’t grief. Panic is the body refusing information. Panic is motion. Panic is redialing a dead phone, shouting at men to drive faster, running toward smoke because as long as you’re moving, the story isn’t finished.
Grief is what happens when motion ends, and the dead remain dead anyway.
I close my fist around the ring again, and my knuckles go white.
“No,” I say.
The word barely makes a sound.
I stare at the carpet between my feet. I should shower again. I’ve showered twice since returning, and I still smell smoke when I breathe. Maybe it’s in my hair. Maybe it’s in my skin. Maybe it’s in my head now, and I’ll smell it until I die.
No matter what happens, we’ll always have Isle Lucia.
My hand spasms shut around the ring so hard the metal bites into my palm.
“Shut up,” I whisper.
His voice comes anyway.
Not like memory used to. Not those broken, fragmented flashes from before. This is clean and cruel. The phone pressed to my ear, his voice slowed by pain, trying to give me something beautiful while bleeding in a service corridor.
I love your temper. I love the way you say my name when you’re trying not to beg.
I spent eight years surviving. These last few months, I lived.
A sound breaks out of me.
It’s small at first. Ugly. Surprised. Like my body didn’t know it was coming either. I clamp my free hand over my mouth.
No.
No, not yet.
If I start, I won’t stop. If I let it happen, I don’t know what’s left on the other side. I have men waiting. Enemies circling. Byrne and Reyes are bleeding out influence wherever they’ve been cut from the structure.
I have a family name, a throne, a fucking empire. I don’t get to break because the world still needs the monster in one piece.
The sound comes again, and my hand isn’t enough to hold it back.
I bend forward slowly, ring trapped in one fist, the other hand pressed over my mouth, and my whole body starts to shake with the force of keeping silent.
My elbows dig into my knees. My spine locks, my shoulders burn, and I try to breathe, but it doesn’t work.
The first sob tears through my hand.
I hate it. I hate the sound. I hate the weakness of it. I hate that my body has chosen now—alone in this room with drawncurtains and dead air—to finally understand what the reports have been saying for two days.
Vincenzo is dead.
The thought lands whole.
The ring falls from my fist and hits the carpet soundlessly. I go after it immediately, panic punching through the grief, fingers clawing at the floor until I find it. I close both hands around it and bring it to my chest like the act of holding it there can reverse anything.
