I knelt beside him and touched his cheek, and his skin was cold. His face looked peaceful in a cruel way. Too quiet. Too still. His lashes didn’t move. His chest didn’t rise fast enough. I pressec my palm to his wound and leaned down.
“Don’t you
dare die when I still hate you,” I said quietly. “You don’t get to die yet. Not until I tel you what Eli looked like when he drew your face with a crayon. Not until you see how strong Elle has become without you.”
Elle was now behind me when she asked, her voice so small it cut deeper than any wound, “Is Papa okay, Mama?”
I swallowed and turned my head just enough to say, “I don’t know, baby. But it’s okay now. I’n here. I’m so sorry I was late. There’s no more bad guys, I promise. No one’s ever taking you from me again.”
We lifted Niccolo onto the evac gurney, and I watched as the medics worked on him. I didn’t cry. just stood there with my hands stained in his blood and my daughter’s arms around my waist.
Margot was dragged out screaming. Her mouth was full of curses and lies, but no one cared to listen anymore. She was bound and bleeding and still trying to spit fire through cracked lips. It didn’t matter. She wasn’t fire anymore. Just ash.
I didn’t look at her when she was thrown into the Montenegro transport cage. I didn’t speak. I
had Elle’s hand in mine and that was all I needed to hold.
But I knew what waited for her at the prison.
I visited later. Alone.
I walked past the iron gates and cold stone halls and into the chamber where her own blood sat waiting. Her mother looked up from her chair and stood when she saw me. She didn’t fight. She didn’t deny anything.
She looked toward the bars where Margot was chained and muttered, “We raised a queen and gave birth to a curse.”
Her father walked past me without a word and slammed his fist across Margot’s face. She didn’t even flinch. She just laughed, broken and wild.
“You think this breaks me?” she said. “You think rotting down here kills me? Geneva already did that.”
I leaned in and met her eyes through the rusted cell.
“No,” I said softly. “You did that to yourself.”
I turned and left as her screams echoed behind me. They faded slower than I liked. But I walked out of that place knowing something she would never understand…
Power doesn’t come from cruelty.
It comes from surviving it.
Chapter 31
OF O
1:04 pm Pppp.
Vienna smelled like antiseptic and steel. Cold and sterile and far too quiet. The hospital wing where they kept Niccolo had three layers of security and two armed guards at every entrance, all under Salvacion and Montenegro combined command. But none of it mattered to me.
I walked into his room alone.
He looked half–dead already. Machines kept him breathing, and his face was pale, lips chapped arm heavily bandaged from where the shrapnel tore through muscle and bone. I stood at the edge of the bed and stared.
Five minutes. I gave him five.
I didn’t touch him. I didn’t cry. I didn’t curse.
I just whispered, “You chose to bleed. And for the last time… I forgive you for that.”
Then I turned and left. I didn’t look back. That was the only mercy I had left to give him.
Elle didn’t speak after that night.
Not a word.
She clung to me like her small body was trying to melt into mine, and every time she woke up, her hands searched blindly for mine. Her therapist called it trauma–induced mutism. I called it
silence soaked in horror.
I pulled her out of school and flew us straight to the Montenegro coast. One of Papa’s old villas- fortified, isolated, and facing the sea. I didn’t want anyone near us. Not press. Not friends. Not even guards unless absolutely needed.
Elle painted in the mornings and clung to me in the evenings. She had started to draw again. Most of it was vague shapes at first. Clouds, beaches, waves but then I saw something familiar. A woman with long hair and two children standing under the sun. It was shaky, but her little signature was in the corner: Elle.
Nathaniel came by often.
He never asked for anything. Never overstepped. Just brought new paints or snacks for Elle and helped her hold the brush when her hand shook too much. Sometimes, he sat on the veranda with me, drinking Montenegro coffee in silence.
“She’s healing,” he said one evening, watching Elle press bright colors into the paper.
“So am I,” I answered. “But not fast enough.”
He looked at me then. Not with pity. Just quiet understanding.
“You lost a son. Almost lost your daughter. The fact that you’re still standing, Geneva… that’s not just healing. That’s power.”
I didn’t respond.
That night, I slept beside Elle again. She curled into me in her sleep, fingers fisted in my shirt. I held her close and stared at the ceiling for hours, wondering if Eli would’ve been proud of me. If he’d think I was strong. If he knew I would’ve burned the whole world to keep his sister safe.
Because I almost did.
And I would do it again.
Chapter 31
1:04 pm P ppp.
The lawyer came unannounced.
I was in the garden watching Elle sketch under the orange sun, the waves slow and kind behind her. Her silence had started softening. She hummed again. That was enough for me.
The man stood at the edge of the patio, holding an envelope sealed in red wax.
‘From Niccolo Salvacion,” he said.
My heart didn’t move. My hands didn’t shake. I took the envelope and nodded for him to leave. didn’t open it until Elle was asleep that night, curled into her pillows surrounded by colorec pencils and drawings of suns and oceans.
read it in the study. Alone.
nside was a single letter, Niccolo’s handwriting, still rough but more steady than I remembered He wrote as if he bled every word onto the paper.
‘Geneva… If you’re reading this, I either died saving her or died failing. Both were mine to carry. never got to be the man you and Eli deserved. But maybe, just maybe, I get to be the father Elle can remember without shame.”
Chapter 31
