Grace POV
The cold wasn't just temperature; it was a physical entity.
It wrapped itself around my bones, seeking to shatter them with a lover's embrace.
I didn't move.
I lay pressed into the ravine’s freezing mud, buried under a shroud of dead leaves and forest debris.
I held my breath as heavy treads thudded past my hiding spot.
The assassins were looking for bodies.
They were looking for the Vitiello heir.
They didn't find me, because I had already decided to become a ghost.
I waited until the forest went pitch black.
Then, I crawled.
My left leg dragged behind me, dead weight trailing a wake of fire.
I didn't go back to the lodge.
I went to the creek bed.
I followed the water.
Water flows away from the source. Water escapes.
I crawled for three miles.
Adrenaline is a liar; it told me I could move when I shouldn't have been able to breathe.
By the time I reached the old service road, the sun was hemorrhaging red light into the horizon.
A trucker found me.
He saw the blood and the mud, and he didn't ask a single question.
He just took me to the city limits, eyes fixed on the road, knowing that ignorance was his best defense.
I didn't go to the hospital. The Family owned the hospitals.
I went to the basement clinic of Dr. Evans.
He was a mob doctor, on the payroll, but he still had a soft spot for the mute girl he had once coaxed into speaking.
I banged on the heavy metal door.
When he opened it, he dropped his coffee mug. Ceramic shattered against concrete.
"Grace? My God. They said... the radio chatter said you were MIA. Presumed dead."
I pushed past him, limping into the sterile, fluorescent room.
"Phone," I rasped.
My voice scraped against my throat like broken glass.
He didn't argue. He handed me his burner.
I logged into my secret account.
The one Josiah didn't know about.
The one where I hid the money from selling my sketches online under a pseudonym. My escape fund.
I had enough.
Enough to disappear.
My phone—the one still in my pocket—vibrated against my hip.
It was a text from Josiah.
*Grace. Please. Answer. We had to evacuate. Protocol. I'm coming back for you. I swear.*
Protocol.
The word echoed in the silence of the room.
He left me in the kill zone for protocol.
I typed one word.
*No.*
Then I pried the SIM card out of my phone and dropped it into the red medical waste bin.
Dr. Evans was already stitching my leg, his hands shaking slightly.
"Josiah is going to tear the city apart," he said quietly, his eyes on the needle. "He's outside your apartment right now. I heard the chatter."
"Let him," I said.
My voice was getting stronger. Cold. Detached.
"You need to rest," Evans insisted.
"I need a passport," I corrected him. "And a ride to the airstrip. Not the Family one. The commercial one."
"Where will you go?"
I looked at the map pinned to the wall.
Europe.
Far away from the Vitiellos.
Far away from the Morettis.
"Somewhere loud," I said.
Two hours later, I was in a cab.
I watched the city blur past the window, a smear of neon and concrete.
The skyline where Josiah ruled.
The skyline where I had been a prisoner of his "protection."
I touched the fresh bandage on my knee where the mud had cut me.
It would heal.
But the memory of his back turning away from me?
That would stay. That was a scar that wouldn't fade.
I arrived at the terminal.
I bought a ticket to Paris.
One way.
As the plane taxied down the runway, I felt the pressure build in my ears.
The engines roared to life.
For the first time in ten years, the noise didn't scare me.
It sounded like freedom.
I closed my eyes.
The girl who knelt was gone.
The girl who waited was gone.
The Ghost was dead.
And finally, for the first time, I was alive.
