The world swims.
Fluorescent lights overhead—buzzing, flickering—cast everything in sickly yellow. I'm on the floor of a bank vault.
My hand lifts slowly—everything moves through molasses—and my fingertips find wetness at my temple. When I pull them away, they're dark with blood.
Fuck.
The room tilts as I try to sit up. Nausea crashes through me in a violent wave and I have to stop, forehead pressed to my knees, breathing through my nose until the urge to vomit passes.
Blood. Head wound. Basement.
The memories slot into place with cruel precision.
Guards. Shotgun. Being dragged from my car by the throat. The hit that came from my left—never saw it, just the sudden explosion of white-hot pain and then nothing.
But underneath those fresh memories, older ones claw their way up.
Ten days.
Ten days tied to a post in a warehouse that smelled almost exactly like this—mildew and blood.
But back then, there was another smell.
Fear.
My fear.
Rico was there. I heard his laugh even through the hood.
My father traded me like collateral, like I was worth less than the debt he owed Luca LaRiccia because my Aunt Arianna couldn't keep her fucking legs closed.
I was a sacrifice.
My hand shakes as I touch my temple again.
The blood is warm. Fresh.
But another memory superimposes itself over the present—another head wound, another place, another time someone decided a skull was worth cracking open.
Except that wasn't my head.
It was Emmaleen's.
Rico's fist wrapped around the steel sculpture. The sickening crack as he brought it down on her skull. The way her eyes went blank before she crumpled.
The shot.
Rico's head exploding.
I smile, pull myself up into a standing position, and spit blood onto the floor.
It was worth it.
And this will be too.
Just as that thought crystalizes in my mind—that grim acceptance of whatever comes next—the vault door swings open on well-oiled hinges that make no sound at all. The silence isworse than a creak would have been. More deliberate. More controlled.
I turn my head toward the movement, slow and careful, bracing myself against the wave of nausea that I know will follow. My vision swims for a moment, black spots dancing at the edges, but I force my eyes to focus.
