SerafinaPOV

The pain stopped.

Not faded. Not dulled. Stopped. Like a door slamming shut.

I opened my eyes.

I was looking down at a room from somewhere near the ceiling. White lights hummed overhead. Stainless steel gleamed on every surface. Men in scrubs moved below me with brisk, practiced efficiency.

I knew this place. The Rossi family's underground clinic, buried three stories beneath the estate. I'd been stitched up here more times than I could count—broken bones, allergic reactions, the occasional knife wound from a rival crew's hazing ritual. Usually without anesthesia.

Pain builds character, my father always said.

I tried to take a breath. My lungs didn't move.

I tried to feel my heartbeat. There was nothing.

I was dead.

The realization didn't hit me all at once. It crept in at the edges, cold and quiet, filling the spaces where fear should have been.

I'm dead.

Dante killed me.

No one came.

I didn't panic. I didn't scream. There was no adrenaline left to fuel it—no body to produce the chemicals that would have made me fight or flee. Just a vast, hollow stillness where my physical self used to be.

And underneath that stillness, something else. Something I hadn't expected.

Frustration.

It rose up from whatever was left of me—a desperate, clawing need to move, to speak, to reach down and shake the people below me until they understood. I was right here. I was right above them. And I couldn't do a single thing.

I drifted downward, pulled by an invisible current. The closer I got to my father, the stronger the pull became, like he was a gravity well and I was a dead satellite falling into orbit.

Vincenzo Rossi stood by the main operating table, dressed in a dark suit, his face a mask of stone. He was in his late fifties, but he looked older tonight. The lines around his mouth were deeper. The grey at his temples had spread.

I hovered inches from his shoulder. I tried to touch him. My hand passed through his arm like smoke through air.

Dad.

He didn't turn around. Didn't flinch. Didn't feel a thing.

Dad, I'm right here. Please. Look at me.

The double doors swung open. Capo Rossi burst through, drenched from head to toe, rainwater streaming from the hem of his coat.

"We found them in an alley deep in Moretti territory," he said. "Three body bags. Untouched by the rain. Whoever left them wanted them found."

He stepped closer to my father, lowering his voice. "The dismemberment is Dante's signature. You know what this blood feud means."

Rossi grabbed my father's arm. "You need to double the guards on Carmela and Serafina. Dante is hunting your bloodline—"

My father's forearm went rigid. He pulled his sleeve free with a single, violent motion.

"My traitorous daughter should have died a long time ago."

The words hit me like a physical blow. I knew my father didn't love me. I'd known it for eight years. But hearing him say it—hearing him wish me dead while my skinless body lay in bags three feet away from him—

Dad. Dad, I'm in there. I'm right there. Please.

Rossi froze. The medics dropped their eyes to the floor.

I kept trying. I threw everything I had at him—every ounce of will, every shred of whatever energy a ghost was made of. I screamed into his ear until the effort tore through me like fire.

He didn't hear me.

My father snapped on a pair of surgical gloves.

He reached for the zipper of the first body bag.

And pulled it down.

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SerafinaPOV

Rossi made a sound low in his throat.

"I tore this city apart when Luca died. Three days without sleep. Your wife didn't eat for a week." He stared at the back of my father's head. "Where is that man now, Vincenzo?"

My father didn't answer. He was already reaching into the body bag with forceps.

The tissue he peeled free was grey and stiffened, stripped of skin—a length of what used to be a human being. Rossi, a man who'd spent three decades in the bloodiest corners of the Cosa Nostra, swore and turned away. One of the young medics vomited into a biohazard bin.

I watched from the corner of the ceiling. I'd stopped trying to scream. The effort was too much—it drained something from me, some essential residue of life that I couldn't afford to lose. But I couldn't look away, either.

My father worked for hours. He pieced the ruined torso back together with sutures and measurements and dictated notes. His hands didn't shake. His voice didn't waver. He approached the body the way he approached everything—with the cold precision of a man who'd decided that feelings were a weakness he couldn't afford.

He had no idea he was stitching up his own daughter.

Look at her, I thought. Look at her face. Look at her hands. Look at anything and recognize her.

He couldn't. The face had been obliterated by acid. The hands were ruined. There was nothing left to recognize.

But there was a clue.

On the metal tray beside the sink sat a tiny gold canary, crusted with dried blood. The charm Dante had torn from my taser. The charm my father had soldered onto the weapon with his own hands when I was fourteen years old.

My father finished dictating his notes, peeled off his gloves, and walked to the sink to wash his hands.

The charm was six inches from his left hand.

I threw myself at him. I poured every fragment of my being into the space between us. I tried to move the charm—just a millimeter, just enough to knock it off the tray and onto the floor where he'd have to see it. I tried to whisper in his ear. I tried to appear in front of him, to manifest as something, anything.

Nothing happened.

Dad. DAD. Turn your head. Look at the tray. It's right THERE.

He picked up a towel.

Wiped his hands.

Turned his back on the only clue that could have told him he was staring at the butchered remains of his daughter.

If he had looked—if he had just turned his head six inches to the left—he would have known. He would have dropped to his knees. He would have held what was left of me and wept.

But he didn't look.

And I couldn't make him.

That was the moment I understood what it meant to be a ghost. Not the floating. Not the silence. The helplessness. The unbearable, suffocating helplessness of watching everything unfold and being unable to change a single frame of it.

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