“Pope…,” he sighed.
“Don’t you fucking say that name,” I hissed.
He laughed again, though I could see there was no humor left in him.
“Viktor… is…”
I didn’t let him finish.I couldn’t.The thought of him so much as mentioning my father’s name did something cruel to my insides.I reached out until my hand closed around his throat.I applied pressure.His eyes never left mine as I proceeded to squeeze the life out of him.
There was no sound, no sight, nothing in the room except me and my hand around the throat of the man who had ordered my demise.The man who sought to kill Atlas Cavalho, the man who had once saved my life.And probably would again.
Cartilage shifted.Then gave.Vilevski’s body went slack under my grip.
I let him go.
Calm settled into the room, broken only by the slow, steady drip of blood hitting tile.
I straightened.Looked for her.Found her.
Tone stood across the room, chest rising hard, a gun in her hand.
Alive.
For now, that was enough.But the edge between us remained.If anything, it had sharpened.Because now she knew just how far I’d go to protect those close to me.
17
Tone
I’m no stranger to crazy chaos.
I was raised in a house full of men.In a family where I was the only girl.The only daughter.The only niece.The only female cousin.Because the Cavalho genes favored males for some reason.
I grew up surrounded by men who loved hard, fought harder, and carried violence like it was stitched into their bones.It was part of their DNA.
My brothers.My cousins.They were my world.And they still are.
I didn’t grow up sheltered, or protected in the way people imagine when they hear I was an only girl.There were no glass walls around me.No careful hands steering me away from danger.
They threw me into it.Taught me how to survive in it, and how to have the thickest skin.Not thick skin, because there is a difference.Thethickest.
I learned how to read a room before stepping into it and to spot a threat before it fully formed.How to fight and patch a wound.They taught me to stand my ground when someone twice my size thought I’d fold.Because failure wasn’t a possibility.
And I learned quickly—if I wanted to stand beside them, I couldn’t be their weakness.I had to be someone that could standwiththem.
So I became exactly what they needed.Precisely what they wanted me to be.Sharp.Unyielding.Unapologetic.Some would say kick-ass.
I would bleed for them without hesitation.Would kill for them without question and lay my own life down for any one of them—any day of the week.
But ever since Alessio passed, they’d been more careful around me.Treating me like I’m fragile, breakable.I think because we’d grown up thinking we were invincible, and all of a sudden, we learned that we were anything but.
So they wove a cocoon around me, tried to shield me from the forces that conspired around us.Tried to shut me out where they could, letting me be a part of our shared world only when absolutely necessary.
Like now.As a medic called upon to stitch the damage of failing bodies.
It never got easier to inhale the smell of blood and violence and gunpowder.No matter how many bodies I put back together, that smell stuck—thick, sour, impossible to ignore.
Glass crunched under my heels as I moved through the wreckage.Adrenaline still rode high, sharpening everything—too bright, too loud.
