I bring the phone to my ear, my hand trembling. "Margaret?"
"Rosalina." Her voice is thick with tears, breaking on my name. "Oh, Rosalina, dear. I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry."
The world tilts sideways.
"Margaret, what—" My voice does not sound like my own. "What happened? Why are you sorry?"
"It is Seamus, dear." She takes a shaking breath on the other end of the line. "He was killed. This morning. It was an ambush. They—" Her voice breaks completely. "He did not suffer, they said. It was quick."
The phone slips from my fingers.
I don’t feel it fall. Don’t hear it clatter against the tile floor. Cannot process anything except the words still echoing in my skull, bouncing around like bullets ricocheting off bone.
Seamus has been killed.
Seamus is dead.
My father—because that is what he became, somewhere between the orphanage and the training and the years of him treating me like I mattered—is dead.
My legs give out.
I am vaguely aware of Gabriel moving, of his arms catching me before I hit the ground, of him lowering us both down until we are on the kitchen floor with me clutched against his chest. Luca is there too, his hand on my back, both of them surrounding me.
"No," I hear myself say, and my voice sounds distant, disconnected. "No, that is not—that cannot be?—"
But I know it is true. I can hear it in Margaret's broken voice, can feel it in the way they are holding me like I might shatter into a thousand pieces.
Seamus is dead.
The man who pulled me out of an orphanage when I was ten years old and gave me a purpose. The man who taught me how to defend myself, how to stand tall, how to be more than what the world expected. The man who looked at me—a nobody, a street kid with sticky fingers and wild hair—and decided I was worth saving.
The man who loved me like a daughter even though I was not his blood.
Gone.
The sob that tears out of my throat does not sound human. It is raw and jagged and comes from somewhere so deep inside me that I didn’t know it existed. My hands fist in Gabriel's shirt, and I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t do anything except feel this enormous, crushing weight settling over my chest and pressing down until I think I might suffocate under it.
"I have got you," Gabriel is murmuring, his hand stroking my hair, his voice steady even though I can hear the strain in it. "I’ve got you, Bella. I am right here."
Luca's arm wraps around both of us, his forehead pressing against my shoulder.
Another sob rips through me, and then another, and then I am crying so hard I cannot catch my breath, gasping and shaking in their arms while they hold me together because I cannot hold myself together.
Seamus is dead.
The words keep repeating in my head like a broken record, each repetition driving the truth deeper until it settles in my bones.
He is dead and I was not there.
I was here, in Manhattan, playing house with three men while my father was being killed.
I was washing dishes and flirting and having sex on the kitchen floor like I didn’t have a care in the world.
I was happy.
And he was dying.
The guilt crashes over me in waves, mixing with the grief until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
