Pain hammered into me—all at once in several places.My legs gave.The floor rushed up.I hit it hard enough to see sparks.
My gun skittered away.Boots pounded toward me.
I rolled onto my back, gasping for breath, my vision tunneling.One of the men kicked my gun farther down the hall.Another nudged me with his foot.
They were talking, laughing, checking my pulse with the back of a hand like I was nothing but a dead body cooling on marble.
One of them muttered something in Russian, then spat beside me.
The thought struck without warning, hollow and chilling.They think I’m dead.They think I’m dead.
Their voices faded as they spread through the penthouse again, flipping chairs, slamming doors, searching for her.I caught fragments of their conversation.
“Girl.”
“Find her.”
“She was here.”
My rage burned hotter than the wounds tearing through my body.But I was slipping.Going under.My fingers were numb, my chest tight.I might just be dying.
When the boots finally retreated, when the footsteps faded into the main elevator shaft, the silence felt heavy enough to crush me.
They were leaving.They thought they’d killed me.And I needed to move.If I had any chance of survival, I needed to get help.
I dug my fingers into the floor, dragging myself forward inch by inch.My blood smeared behind me, dark streaks across white marble.Every pull was agony, every breath a knife.But I kept going.Because they wouldn’t stop looking for Neve, and I needed to find her before they did.
I clawed my way to the front door, using the wall for leverage.My vision blurred.The floor tilted.My arm gave out.But I reached it.Somehow, I reached it.I collapsed against the doorframe and looked down, and my world stopped.
Alessio was crumpled at the threshold.He was folded wrong, like a body that had been dropped and never picked up again, and I could tell that he wasn’t resting.
His chest didn’t move.His eyes were half open, glassy and unfocused, staring at nothing.Blood pooled beneath him in a dark, ugly circle that kept spreading, soaking into the marble like it was twain’t part of him.
My little brother.My cheeky, soft-spoken, impossible rascal of a brother… was gone.
The word didn’t fit.Gone.It was too small for what this was.Too gentle for the way it felt like something had been ripped out of my chest with bare hands.
A sound tore out of me.Raw.Deep.Animal.A roar that shredded my throat and scraped my lungs on the way out.It didn’t sound human.It sounded like something dying.
I dragged myself closer, every inch agony, my blood-slicked hand clawing at the floor as if I could reach him fast enough and rewrite what had already happened.
“Alessio,” I choked.“God—Alessio?—”
I said his name like a prayer.Like a command.As though if I said it loud enough, he might hear me.
The hallway answered instead—quiet, empty, indifferent.The low hum of the building.The faint drip of blood.The slow, creeping cold sinking into my bones as the truth settled in.
He was gone.
And I was still here.
The weight of it crushed down on my chest, heavier than any bullet.Not just grief—failure.I was supposed to protect him.I was supposed to stand between him and this world.And now all I had left was his body on cold marble and the echo of his name stuck in my throat.
I tried to stand, but my legs gave out beneath me like they’d forgotten how to hold me.I shoved at the floor, teeth gritted, vision swimming, but the world tilted hard and I went down again, slamming beside him.My cheek struck the cold marble, the shock of it barely cutting through the numbness spreading in my limbs.
My hand found his shoulder.Warm.Too warm.And unbearably still.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered, the words tearing out of me like they were being dragged across glass.“I’m so fucking sorry…”