Chapter 35
SCARLETT
Marco is dead.
The words keep repeating in my head, but they don’t feel real. None of this feels real. I’m still kneeling on the cold stone floor, his blood soaking into my jeans, his hand growing cold in mine.
He’s gone. Just like that.
Luca is clinging to my neck, sobbing, his small body shaking against mine. I should comfort him. Should tell him everything is okay. But I can’t make my mouth form the words because nothing is okay. Nothing will ever be okay again.
Around us, the gunfire continues. People are still dying, and Dante is still fighting.
And I’m hiding down here like a coward while the man I love fights for all of our lives.
Something shifts inside me, hard and settling into place, where the fear used to be. Marco died protecting us. He gave everything he had so that Luca and I could live. I’m not going to waste that.
“Luca.” My voice comes out rough, barely recognizable. “Baby, I need you to listen to me.”
He pulls back, his face streaked with tears and puffier now. “Mama?”
“I need you to go with these men.” I gesture to the two surviving guards who are watching us with stoic faces. “They’re going to keep you safe while I go help D.”
“No!” His grip on my neck tightens. “Don’t leave me! Please, Mama, don’t leave me!”
“I have to, baby. D needs me.”
“But what if you don’t come back? What if you—” He can’t finish the sentence. Can’t say the word. But I know what he’s thinking because I’m thinking it too.
What if I die up here, just like Marco?
I cup his face in my hands and force him to look at me. “I’m coming back. Do you hear me? I’m coming back for you, and then we’re all going home together. You, me, and D. But right now, I need you to be brave. Can you do that for me?”
He’s crying so hard he can barely breathe, but he nods.
“That’s my boy.” I kiss his forehead, then his cheeks, then his forehead again. “I love you more than anything in this world. Never forget that.”
“I love you too, Mama.”
I hand him to one of the guards, a young guy with kind eyes who looks like he might have kids of his own. “Protect him with your life.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I pick up my gun from where I dropped it earlier. Check the magazine. Still half full. It’ll have to be enough.
As the guards take my son back into the catacombs, I stand and face Isabella. My legs don’t want to work. My hands won’t stop shaking. The rational part of my brain is screaming at me to turn around, to go back to Luca, to hide until this is over.
But Marco’s face keeps flashing in my mind. His last words. His hand going limp in mine.
He died so I could live. The least I can do is fight.
The cathedral is still raging with violence, bodies everywhere, blood and smoke and the constant crack of gunfire. I spot Dante across the sanctuary, fighting like a man possessed, cutting through Isabella’s soldiers.
He needs help. He needs me. I raise my gun and start moving.
The first soldier who sees me doesn’t expect me to shoot. His mistake. I put two rounds in his chest before he can bring his weapon up, and I don’t even flinch. In fact, I don’t feel anything except cold determination.
The second soldier is faster, gets off a shot that whizzes past my ear, but I’m already diving behind a pillar. I lean out, fire twice, and he goes down.
I’m not the same woman who walked into this cathedral a few hours ago. That woman was scared and hesitant. Unsure if she could pull the trigger when it mattered.
But this woman is different. She knows exactly what she’s capable of.
I fight my way toward Dante, and when he sees me coming, there’s a moment of pure shock on his face.
“Luca?” he shouts over the gunfire.
“Safe. With the others in the passage.”
He looks like he will argue but nods. Then I fall in beside him, and we don’t need to say anything else. We just fight. We keep having each other’s back until we make it to Isabella at the altar.
And now, as I point my gun at her, I can finally see everything clearly.
Not just Antonio’s wife. Not just the woman who walked into this cathedral with an army at her back.
I see the architect of my six years of trauma and fear.
The woman who orchestrated the kidnapping that started all of this.
The shadow behind the monster who took me from my life and tried to turn me into merchandise.
She’s standing there against the ruined altar, her expensive suit splattered with other people’s blood, that cold smile still on her face like she’s posing for a magazine cover instead of staring down the barrel of a gun.
I hate her. I hate her so much it feels like poison in my veins.
“You don’t have the spine to pull that trigger.
” Her voice is calm, almost amused. Like I’m a child throwing a tantrum and she’s waiting for me to tire myself out.
“I’ve seen your type before, cara. Scared little nurses playing at being dangerous.
You’ll hesitate at the last second, and when you do, my men will finish what we started. ”
“Your men are dead.”
She blinks. Just once, the first crack in that perfect composure.
“Most of them anyway,” I continue, my voice steadier than I feel. “The ones who aren’t dead are running for their lives. It’s just you now, Isabella. Just you and me and six years of nightmares you created.”
“You think killing me changes anything?” She laughs, and it’s such a cold, empty sound. “The ledger is already out there. The families will fight over it for decades. You’ve started a war that will outlive all of us.”
“Maybe. But you won’t be around to see it.”
Her smile wavers a little. But enough for me to see the fear and uncertainty behind her cold facade.
Good. I want her to be afraid. I want her to feel even a fraction of what I felt when I was nineteen years old and trapped in her husband’s mansion, surrounded by girls who were just as scared as me, not knowing if we’d live or die.
“Think about what you’re doing,” Isabella says, and there’s an edge to her voice now. “I have connections. Resources. I can make you rich. I can make you disappear so completely that no one will ever find you again. You and your son, safe forever. Isn’t that what you want?”
“What I want is for those five girls to be alive. Can you do that?”
That stops her, and her eyes narrow.
“What five girls?”
“The ones you killed. The witnesses. The girls who were with me at the mansion, who saw what happened, who could have testified against you.” My hand is shaking now but I don’t lower the gun.
“I found out about them. Every single one. Dead within a year of Antonio’s murder.
Car accidents. Overdoses. Suicides that weren’t suicides.
You hunted them down like animals because you wanted the ledger and you couldn’t risk anyone talking. ”
Isabella’s face goes blank. Not out of denial or guilt. Just nothing, like I’m talking about something normal instead of five murdered women.
“They were loose ends,” she shrugs simply. “Loose ends get tied up. That’s how this world works.”
Loose ends.
Five girls with names and families and dreams and futures. Five girls who were just as scared and helpless as I was when Antonio’s men grabbed us. Five girls who survived his nightmare only to be murdered by his wife months later.
And she calls them loose ends. Like their lives meant nothing at all.
I think about the nineteen-year-old girl I used to be. Terrified. Helpless. Crying in a locked room while men in suits decided her fate. That girl couldn’t have held a gun. Couldn’t have looked a monster in the eye. Could barely get out of bed some mornings because the memories were so heavy.
I think about the girls again. They had futures that Isabella stole from them because they were inconvenient.
I think about Luca’s tear-stained face when we found him in that basement. His small body shaking. His voice breaking when he called for me. My son, terrorized because this woman wanted leverage.
I think about Marco throwing himself on that grenade. The light leaving his eyes while I held his hand. His last words asking me to take care of his family.
All of this because Isabella Marchetti wanted power. Wanted control. Wanted to tie up her loose ends no matter how many innocent people had to die.
“You should have stayed hidden,” Isabella says, and there’s venom in her voice now.
The mask is slipping. “You should have kept running and never looked back. But you had to come back here, had to fall in love with another monster, had to drag your son into this world. Everything that’s happened is your fault.
Those girls died because you survived. If you had just—”
I pull the trigger.
The shot isn’t clean or heroic like in the movies.
There’s no slow motion, no dramatic music swelling in the background, no sense of righteous victory washing over me.
It’s just loud and violent and absolutely terrifying.
The recoil jars my arms hard enough to hurt, the sound makes my ears ring, and the smell of gunpowder fills my nose until I almost gag.
Isabella jerks backward like someone shoved her, her eyes going wide with shock and disbelief. Her hand goes to her stomach where blood is already spreading across her expensive suit.
She looks down at the wound, then back up at me, and for the first time since I’ve known her, she looks human. Scared and confused. Like she can’t believe this is actually happening.
“You,” she starts.
I shoot her again.
Center mass this time, just like Dante taught me. The bullet hits her chest and she stumbles, her back hitting the altar, her legs giving out beneath her.
She’s sliding down the stone, leaving a smear of blood behind her, her mouth opening and closing like she’s trying to say something but can’t find the words.
I should stop. She’s dying. It’s over.
But I think about those five girls again. About Luca screaming for me. About Marco’s last breath. About six years of looking over my shoulder, six years of nightmares, six years of being afraid to live my own life because this woman and her husband decided I was property.
I pull the trigger one more time.
The third shot hits her somewhere in the upper chest and Isabella Marchetti stops moving. Her eyes are open, staring at nothing, that cold smile finally gone from her face forever.
She’s dead.
The woman who haunted my nightmares for six years is dead on the cathedral floor, and I’m the one who killed her.
I stand there shaking, the gun heavy in my hands, my ears ringing from the shots. I can’t move but stare at the body of the woman I just murdered.
Because that’s what this is. Murder. I can call it justice or self-defense or protecting my family, but at the end of the day, I pointed a gun at another human being and pulled the trigger until she stopped breathing.
I’m a killer now. Just like Dante. Just like all the men who died in this cathedral tonight.
The gun is shaking in my grip. Or maybe I’m the one shaking. I can’t tell anymore.
Then Dante is there.
He comes up beside me slowly, carefully, like he’s approaching a wounded animal. His hand covers mine on the gun, warm and steady, and he gently pries my fingers loose.
“I’ve got it,” he says softly. “I’ve got you. It’s okay.”
“I killed her.”
“I know.”
“I shot her three times.”
“I know.”
“She’s dead because of me.”
He sets the gun aside and wraps his arms around me, pulling me against his chest. I should push him away. Should stand on my own. But I can’t. I bury my face in his shoulder and let him hold me up because I don’t think my legs are working anymore.
“You did what had to be done,” he says, his voice low and steady in my ear. “She would have killed us all. Luca, you, me, everyone. You protected our family, Scarlett. That’s not murder. That’s survival.”
“It doesn’t feel like survival.”
“It never does. Not the first time.”
I pull back enough to look at his face. There’s blood on his cheek and exhaustion in his eyes and something else. Pride and respect.
“I’m not the same person I was six years ago,” I say, and I’m not sure if I’m telling him or telling myself.
“No. You’re not.”
“I don’t know if that’s good or bad.”
“It’s neither.” He cups my face in his hands, forcing me to meet his eyes. “It’s just what happened. You survived. You adapted. You became someone who could protect the people she loves. That’s not weakness, Scarlett. That’s strength.”
“Then why does it feel like I lost something important?”
He doesn’t answer. Maybe because he doesn’t have an answer to give or because he lost that same something so long ago he doesn’t remember what it felt like to have it.
Around us, the gunfire is dying down. The last of Isabella’s forces are falling or fleeing, my ears picking up the scattered shots and shouted orders as Dante’s surviving men finish the job. The cathedral is finally going quiet for the first time since this nightmare began.
I look around at the destruction surrounding us. Bodies everywhere, too many to count. Blood coating the stone floors in pools and rivers. Smoke still drifting through the shattered windows where the stained glass used to be.
This is what victory looks like in this world. It’s not triumphant or heroic. It’s just death and exhaustion and the hollow feeling of having survived something that should have killed you.
“Luca,” I say suddenly, panic cutting through the numbness. “I need to see him. I need to make sure he’s okay.”
“He’s safe. The men are bringing him up now.”
“But I need to see him. I need to hold him. I need—”
“I know.” Dante takes my hand. “Come on.”
We walk through the carnage together, stepping over bodies, avoiding the worst of the blood. My legs are still shaky, but Dante keeps me upright, his grip firm and warm.
Somewhere behind us, Isabella’s body is cooling on the cathedral floor. I don’t look back.
The nineteen-year-old girl I used to be would never have imagined this moment. Would never have believed she could survive something like this. Would never have thought she could pull a trigger and take a life.
But that girl is gone now. She’s been gone for years, replaced piece by piece by someone harder, someone fiercer, someone capable of violence when the people she loves are threatened.
I don’t know if that makes me stronger or just different. Don’t know if I should mourn the girl I was or be grateful for the woman I’ve become.
All I know is that my son is alive and safe, the woman who threatened him is dead, and somehow, against all odds, we survived this nightmare.