"In a minute." I lean my head back against the concrete. She's sitting on a concrete floor in a ruined gown with zip tie marks on her wrists, and she is the most devastating thing I've ever seen.
"Enzo?" she asks.
"Gone. Too old and too careful to fight this publicly. The council restructures next week. Alessandro takes full control." I pause. "I'm done. With the operations side. With the parts that require me to be what I've been."
I look at my hands. The blood on them — some mine, some not.
"I've done terrible things. Things I can't undo and don't ask forgiveness for. I've been the underboss so my brothers don't have to be. So Alessandro can run the legitimate empire and Matteo can build something real, and someone has to handle the parts they can't touch." I meet her eyes. "That's been me. For years. I've hurt people. A lot of people. The opposite of everything you do every day."
I stop.
My hands are in my lap. I look at them — really look, the way I haven't let myself in years. The blood. The knuckles. The specific weight of everything they've done and can't undo.
"I'm not proud of it. I've seen too much blood. And I'm done."
Serafina is quiet for a long moment. I feel her looking at my hands, too. Feel the moment she decides something.
"Who are you?" she says. Not unkind. Genuinely asking.
"I don't know yet." I look at her. "I'd like to find out."
I stand. Offer her my hand. She takes it — fingers wrapping around mine, warm and certain.
I pull her to her feet.
"You left," I say. "You walked away from all of this at eighteen and built something clean and entirely your own. If you stay with me, you go back to the world you spent your whole life escaping. The names. The weight of it." I pause. "I don't want that for you. I don't want you to sacrifice what you believe in for something I'm not even sure I deserve."
Serafina looks at me.
"You don't get to decide what I want." Flat. Certain. "I know what I want. And no one, not my father, not Enzo, not you, gets to control what I choose to do with that." She holds my gaze. "Are we clear?"
I look at her. At the zip tie marks on her wrists and the absolute, unshakeable certainty in her eyes.
"Clear," I say.
Then my legs go.
Not dramatically — just the sudden withdrawal of everything my body has been running on. The bullet, the blood loss, the adrenaline — all of it deciding simultaneously that we're done here.
The wall is at my back. Then I'm sliding down it. The floor comes up, and I notice, distantly, that my hands aren't working the way I'm telling them to, and that the corridor is tilting, and that the only thing I can fully focus on is Serafina's face.
She's on her knees beside me before I finish falling.
Her hands move fast — face, throat, side — the examination of a woman who has pulled people back from the edge in rooms far worse than this.
She is not afraid.
She is furious.
"Don't you dare," she says. Low. Fierce. Hands pressing hard against the wound. "Don't you dare do this to me right now, Luca Moretti."
"I'm fine?—"
"You are not fine." She looks up. "Caruso!"
He's there in seconds.
"Bellevue." Absolute. No room for argument. "Take us to Bellevue now."
