Chapter 66 #3
For a moment, I forget about the body lying on the floor, the dire reality, until the footsteps in the corridor grow louder.
Eero walks in first, his face white, his eyes sweeping from the body on the floor to me to Ayanna and back.
Tassilo behind him, already calculating the scene with his usual cold efficiency.
More men behind them file in, surrounding the body, removing the weapon, beginning the careful, practiced work of making a death disappear—the kind of work that happens in houses like this and is never spoken of again.
“We’re fine,” I say to Eero, who glances at me, my voice rough, my arms still locked around the woman who saved my life with shaking hands and steady aim.
Eero nods, then turns to help Tassilo. Eventually, the noise fades. The footsteps recede. The body is covered, then moved, then gone.
And I still hold my wife, sobbing into my chest, fists clenching my shirt. I hold her with everything I have because nothing else matters.
The Gods execute Leandro four days after I hand him over. The Council convenes, the evidence is laid before them, and the sentence comes down with the same cold efficiency that governs everything in our world. A man who moves against a God forfeits his life. That is the law and it bends for no man.
I’m told it took hours. I’m told he begged, at the end, though he’d never once begged for anything in his life that I saw.
I don’t ask for the details, and I don’t want them.
The only thing that matters is that he’s gone from the world the same way he removed so many others from it—Anabella, Luca, and the countless people who had the misfortune of standing between Leandro Almaviri and the thing he wanted next.
The scales are balanced now. Or as close to balanced as scales like these ever come, which is to say not truly. Not ever. Because no weight on earth brings back an eight-week heartbeat. But it’s the closest thing to justice this world has to offer, and I’ve learned to take what it gives.
Nesrine moves into a hotel in the village.
She insists on it. She says she couldn’t bear to accept kindness beneath a roof her husband tried so hard to destroy.
Couldn’t bring herself to accept our hospitality after everything Leandro did, though she comes to the estate every day and rarely leaves before nightfall.
She swears she didn’t know her husband’s dealings.
I think Nesrine saw the devoted father, the shrewd businessman, the man who would do anything for his family.
She simply never understood that his anything had a body count.
That his daughters were assets on a ledger rather than children he loved.
That every warm memory she’s carried for three decades was a performance staged for an audience of one.
I recognize the specific devastation in her, because I’ve seen its cousin on my wife’s face. She and Ayanna are grieving the same thing from opposite ends of a life. They’re both mourning a man who never existed.
The rebuilding between them is slow. It’s awkward, and it comes in fits and starts—long silences, and longer conversations, and tears that arrive without warning in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.
There are questions neither of them can answer and forgiveness that can’t be rushed.
But Nesrine keeps showing up. That’s the part I didn’t expect, and the part that earns her something from me.
She keeps arriving, and keeps apologizing, and keeps sitting in the wreckage instead of fleeing it.
My wife has already lost her father, her daughter.
She will not lose her mother too—not while there’s any chance of salvaging something real from what Leandro left in ruins.
So Nesrine becomes a fixture, tentative at first and then less so, a woman folding herself carefully back into a life that her husband nearly took down with him.
Naomi, in turn, never leaves. I expected her to go back to Monsera when the dust settled—to reclaim the life and the freedom her father tried to sell out from under her before she ran. But she stays… with Eero.
I watched my brother circle Naomi for months. The flowers that kept appearing. The shooting lessons that ran longer than any shooting lesson needs to run. The way his eyes found her across every room she entered.
I warned him once, early, not to play with a girl who’d already been treated like a thing to be traded. He looked at me and told me he wasn’t playing. He wasn’t.
So it’s my brother on one knee in the garden, in the pale northern light, asking Ayanna’s sister to marry him with a ring that belonged to his grandmother.
Naomi says yes. Ayanna cries. Naomi cries.
And Eero, who has spent his whole life turning everything into a joke so the rest of us could breathe, looks suspiciously wet around the eyes—though he’ll deny it to his grave.
I stand at the edge of it and watch my family widen. Watch the broken pieces of all of us rearrange themselves into a shape none of us could have drawn a year ago—something new, something I never once believed a house like this could hold.
Family.