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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