"She was pregnant?" Victor asks, his voice low and shocked.
"What the fuck," Matei says, shaking his head.
I don't move. I just stare at my father.
Nicolae looks at Elena like she's something he stepped in on the street and shrugs.
"Collateral damage," he says, waving his hand and brushing her off entirely. "The child would have been another distraction. Another anchor dragging him down."
Something inside me snaps. A violent, explosive energy unlike anything I've ever felt before.
I don't think. My body just responds to it.
I reach behind me with my right hand, my fingers supposed to wrap around the grip of my gun.
But I freeze. My hand is empty.
The gun is gone.
My eyes go wide, panic flashing through me as my father's men reach for their weapons.
And then I hear a bang.
33
ELENA
"Collateral damage."
The words hang in the air, and something inside me fractures.
Not breaks, but fractures. Like glass splintering into a thousand pieces.
My baby. The life that grew inside me for those brief, beautiful months before it was stolen. Before Nicolae Ionescu decided my child, Adrian's child, was nothing more than an acceptable loss in his sick game of control.
Collateral damage.
My vision tunnels. The edges of the room seem to blur as Nicolae's face sharpens into crystal clarity. He stands there, indifferent and unbothered. Like he didn't just dismiss the most devastating loss of my life as if it were a minor inconvenience.
Like he didn't put me through 18 months of fucking hell, where I was drugged, raped, and held captive. Or allow my family to knowingly grieve the loss of their daughter and sister.
I feel Adrian's body tense, and I look up at him. His face is stone cold, his breathing coming in short, fast bursts. Harder than I've seen before.
And then his lip twitches. That tiny, almost invisible warning that violence is coming.
My gaze drops without thinking, drawn to the dark grip of Adrian's gun peeking out from the back of his waistband, and suddenly I know exactly what he's about to do.
He's going to kill his father.
He's going to pull that gun and put a bullet in Nicolae's skull, and it won't matter that Nicolae deserves it. It won't matter that the man is a monster who orchestrated my kidnapping, my torture, and the loss of our baby.
What will matter is that Adrian will have to live with it for the rest of his life.
The guilt. The weight. The knowledge that he murdered his own father with his own hands.
I can't let that happen.
I won't.