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“What the fuck is that?” someone demanded from somewhere behind me. A couple of the old ladies gave horrified gasps, and Crash muttered expletives under his breath.

They’d all seen before me. And it clearly wasn’t fucking good.

My gaze dropped down, and I knew.

The bag was clear, filled with thick, goopy blood—fresh blood, clots of it.

She wouldn’t…. not this.

My stomach turned sharply, something dark and sick rising up the back of my throat as the implication hit harder than anything she’d said so far.

“Consider it closure,” her father said lightly, as though he were handing over something insignificant rather than what it actually was. “Figured you’d want what was left of your little mistake.”

The word mistake echoed in my head, the air becoming difficult to breathe in. I didn’t bend down. I couldn’t pick it up. I couldn’t even look at it.

Because if I acknowledged it, if I let myself really process what I was looking at, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to hold onto whatever control I had left.

I looked at her, knowing the betrayal was written clearly on my face but unable to do anything about it. Some wounds cut too deep to mask.

“Anything else?” her father asked her, his tone almost conversational.

She held my gaze for a long moment, longer than necessary, and for the briefest second—so brief I might have imagined it—I thought I saw something shift behind her eyes.

But it was gone before I could even be sure it was there.

“Good morrow and sorrows, Vienna,” she said, her voice gentle in a way that made it so much worse.

My chest caved in.

“We won’t be doing this again sometime.”

Chapter 41

Gabriella

Now

The second I stepped into the corridor, I knew I couldn’t go back for my mum.

Not yet.

The truth of it hit me so hard and so fast that I almost staggered beneath the weight of it, my hand catching against the wall as I forced myself to keep moving instead of turning around and running straight back down those basement stairs like every instinct in me was screaming to do.

Because every instinct in mewasscreaming to do it.

Go back. Get her. Don’t leave her there.

But instinct and survival were rarely the same thing, and survival was the only thing I could afford to listen to now.

My mum could barely stand. She was weak from months of stress and fear and whatever sickness had been quietly hollowing her out long before Nico ever locked us in that basement. Her body was battered, exhausted, and running on little more than sheer stubbornness. Even if I got her up those stairs, even if I somehow managed to hold her weight and gether through the house without anyone seeing us, we would never make it across the compound. Not with men stationed outside. Not with Nico expecting me to run. Not with my mother barely able to keep her eyes open, never mind her feet beneath her.

Trying to take her now wouldn’t be brave.

It would be stupid.

It would get us both killed before we even made it past the first fucking gate. And if I wanted to save her, really save her, then I had to do the one thing that felt unforgivable.

I had to leave her behind.