Lev’s knees buckled as if they had been taken out by a sledgehammer. He stumbled backward, tripped over a broken chair, and crashed heavily to the floor.
He stared down at his own hands—the very hands that had ordered Vincenzo’s beating, severed Rosa’s finger, crippled Dominic, and nearly choked little Mia.
"You're lying," Lev gasped, clutching his chest as if his heart were seizing. "It's a trick. You're just protecting her. She's... she's in Paris. She's in Rome..."
"Why would we lie?!" Dominic roared, pointing at his mangled arm and then gesturing to the trembling child on the floor.
"Look at us! You've destroyed us!"
"She left a letter, you son of a bitch. We hid it under the floorboards in her old bedroom. The house you've been using as your personal torture chamber."
Lev didn't say another word, nor did he issue any orders to his men. He scrambled to his feet like a wounded animal and bolted out of the speakeasy.
He hijacked the nearest car from one of his own men, throwing the driver out onto the street. He tore through the rain-slicked streets of Chicago like a madman, blowing through red lights, his mind completely and utterly fractured.
My ghost, firmly tethered to him, sat in the passenger seat, watching him drive.
He was hyperventilating, muttering my name under his breath in a frantic, feverish prayer.
Clara. Please, no. Clara, no...
He rammed the car straight through the wrought-iron gates of the Moretti estate, smashed open the front door, and charged inside.
Ignoring his own guards, he sprinted up the grand staircase, his boots leaving muddy prints on the marble, and burst into my childhood bedroom.
It was perfectly intact. My parents had preserved it like a museum.
Lev fell to his knees in the center of the room. He clawed at the hardwood planks beneath the bed, tearing at the wood until his fingernails cracked and bled, prying the floorboards up.
Beneath the floor was a small, fireproof lockbox.
He smashed the lock open with the butt of his pistol. Inside lay a single, yellowed envelope. My handwriting on the front bore his name: Leo.
Lev’s hands shook violently as he unfolded the fragile paper.
I knelt beside him, resting my pale chin over his shoulder, reading the words I had written five years ago, the ink smudged by my own dried tears.
'Dom,
If you're reading this, I'm already gone. Leo is safe.
Dom, please, you have to promise me you will never tell him the truth. If he knows I died for him, the guilt will destroy him. He has suffered too much in this life already; he deserves a chance to breathe, to live without always looking over his shoulder.
You must make him hate me. Hate is a shield—it will drive him forward and keep him from ever looking back.
Please tell Mom and Dad that I am so, so sorry. I love you all. But I couldn't let him die in that alley.
If you can, watch out for him from afar. He is a good man. He just needs to know he’s worth saving.
Love, Clara.'
The letter slipped from Lev’s fingers and fell to the floor.
A soul-shattering howl ripped from the deepest pit of his throat.
It wasn't the sound of a man crying; it was the sound of a soul being ripped to shreds. It was the sound of absolute terror.
He collapsed forward, burying his face into the hardwood, sobbing so violently that his entire body convulsed.
"Clara..." he choked, his fingers digging fiercely into the wood. "Oh, God... Clara, what have I done? What have I done?"
He remembered the day I "betrayed" him.
He remembered me standing in the foyer, my face a mask of cold arrogance, telling him he was nothing but a charity case.
He remembered the tears he shed as he walked out into the rain.
And now, he realized that the exact moment he walked out those doors, I was crying too.
He realized that I had worn his jacket, breathing in the scent of his cologne, and driven straight to my death, doing the bravest thing a twenty-year-old girl could possibly do.
And he had taken that sacrifice—that pure, absolute love—and weaponized it against the people I loved most.
He had ruined the father who taught him how to read, mutilated the mother who mended his clothes, and crippled the brother who had watched his back.
He had become the very monster I sacrificed my life to protect him from.
"I'm here, Leo," I whispered, wrapping my ghostly arms around his violently shaking frame.
I pressed my translucent lips to his hair. "Let it go. Let them go."
But my words were swallowed by the silence of the empty room.
Lev was all alone in his hell.
