Her expression remained cold and imperious, but the voice inside her mind was howling:
Beg me!
All you have to do is kneel. Crawl to me and kiss my ring!
Admit in front of every capo, every soldier, every associate in this room that you can't survive without me, and I'll let you walk out!
Do it now! Stop being so stubborn!
If that Ledger is truly gone, you'll be nothing but a cripple. And then the only place you'll have left is by my side!
She had already woven her net, every thread accounted for.
She believed that as long as I drew breath, I would forever be a thing she held in the palm of her hand.
Too bad.
She miscalculated one thing.
I didn't intend to live.
I straightened slowly, shrugging free of the enforcers pinning me down.
I didn't look at the Donna on her throne.
Instead, I let my gaze sweep across the place I had called home for twenty years.
Every corridor, every courtyard. I had bled to protect all of it.
Now, looking again.
Filthy.
"You won't need to do it yourselves."
My voice was quiet, but the silence of the compound carried it to every ear in the hall.
The next second.
I raised my right hand.
Two fingers pressed together like a blade, the last scrap of strength I'd burned my life to gather condensing at their tips.
My hand moved to the back of my neck. Not the unconscious gesture. Not the old reflex. This time I knew exactly what I was reaching for.
Squelch.
The wet sound of a blade entering flesh.
My hand drove backward, plunging into my own spine.
Blood erupted in a torrent.
It soaked through the white undershirt they'd left me, pooled across the marble floor beneath my feet.
"You've lost your mind!"
Seraphina shot to her feet, every shred of composure ripped from her face in an instant.
Under the stupefied, horror-stricken stares of every soul present — capos who had ordered men buried alive, soldiers who had survived federal raids without flinching — not one of them moved.
I clenched my teeth and hooked my fingers around the vertebrae.
And wrenched.
"Ngh!"
The pain tore through me like my soul was being split in two, and a strangled groan escaped my throat.
But I didn't stop.
Inch by inch, I dragged the Ledger out of my own body. Not a physical thing. Something worse. Every name, every debt, every secret, every pressure point I had ever memorized for her — I felt them tearing loose from the place where they lived, the place at the base of my spine where the body holds what the mind refuses to forget.
The wet, grinding sound turned the entire hall deathly silent.
I stood drenched in my own blood, the still-dripping proof of what I'd been clutched in my fist. A dossier. Leather-bound, blood-soaked, containing the entire financial and operational architecture of the Falcone Syndicate. Everything I had ever been forced to carry.
My body swayed, barely upright.
"The Ledger you wanted."
I looked at Seraphina. Looked at her face, white as a corpse.
Her inner voice was nothing but shrieking panic now: No! Stop! Stop it! I won't go through with it! I don't want it anymore!
I smiled.
Smiled until tears ran down my face.
"Donna Falcone. This empire, this blood and bone. Today I return every last bit of it to you."
My fingers closed like a vice.
Crack.
The dossier shattered in my bare hand, reduced to a cloud of ash and torn pages.
Paper and blood drifted down over the entire compound like a rain of crimson snow.
I owe you nothing.
"I wish you both a lifetime of happiness. In life or death... may we never meet again."
The extraction window hit zero.
My body grew weightless.
In the suffocating silence, my flesh began to break apart.
Like the last embers of a dying fire, I dissolved into motes of light.
Seraphina let out a scream so raw it cracked her voice:
"NO!!"
She lunged from the dais like a woman possessed, but her hands closed on nothing but drifting sparks.
I scattered on the wind.
Not a wisp of my soul remained.
