As soon as Dante left, my parents arrived.

They came through the station's back entrance, the one reserved for families with enough influence to bypass the front desk entirely. Salvatore Moretti walked half a step ahead of his wife, his overcoat still buttoned, his jaw set in the particular way it always was when he considered an errand beneath him. Elena Moretti followed with her gloves still on, her fingers laced in front of her like a woman attending a funeral she had not wanted to attend. Neither of them looked at me the way a parent looks at a child found in a holding cell. They looked at me the way a Don looks at a failed arrangement.

Their faces were full of disappointment. Their voices cold and sharp, without a trace of sympathy.

"Bianca," my father said, and the single word carried the weight of a sentencing. "Admit your mistakes. Only then will Dante release you."

I couldn't help but give them a bitter smile.

Since the day they brought me home, I had been forced to admit fault for everything. If I scored higher than Serafina on an exam, that was my fault, because it embarrassed the daughter they had chosen to favor. If I won recognition in anything, a recital, a school prize, a whispered compliment from a visiting capo's wife, that was my fault too, because the light was supposed to fall on Serafina and nowhere else. If I didn't perform the same theatrical helplessness Serafina wore like a second skin, if I stood too straight or spoke too clearly or failed to shrink myself down to an acceptable size, that was the worst fault of all. The Moretti household had a single unwritten law more binding than any oath: Bianca exists to make Serafina shine, and any deviation from that purpose is betrayal.

But now, I no longer wanted to bow my head or admit to anything.

Swallowing the bitterness in my heart, I asked them calmly, "What's the point of admitting anything? Should I admit that I didn't push Serafina hard enough?"

The words had barely left my mouth when my father's hand struck my face with a loud smack. The sound was sharper in the concrete-walled room than it would have been at home, amplified by the bare floor and the steel door and the silence that followed. Pain stung my cheek, spreading hot and immediate from the point of impact up through my temple. Salvatore Moretti did not hit like a man losing control. He hit like a man correcting an error in a ledger, precise and without hesitation. I felt the heat bloom across the side of my face, felt the skin tighten where the bruise would form, and I held back my tears. I lifted my chin stubbornly and let out a cold snort.

"I was taken. Snatched right off a street that your soldiers were supposed to be watching." My voice came out steadier than my hands. "But you only worried about Serafina. Now she stages a fall so clean it wouldn't fool a child, and you force me to confess again." I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the familiar sting, held it. "Am I just some piece of trash you picked up off the street?"

My parents didn't even flinch. They stood shoulder to shoulder and stared at me as if I were a vicious enemy threatening their beloved daughter. Salvatore's thumb tapped once against the edge of the metal table between us, that single, measured tap he always made before reducing family to numbers. Elena smoothed the front of her coat where no wrinkle existed, her fingertips brushing the fabric as though flattening something invisible, something only she could see, a version of this moment she was already rewriting to protect herself.

"Bianca, you're being ungrateful," my mother said, her voice thin and final. "Just stay here then."

They did not look back. Salvatore held the door for Elena, and she passed through it without a word, and the door closed behind them with a mechanical click that sounded nothing like a lock and everything like one. Meanwhile, the Neris ignored my protests and shoved me into a small cell at the end of the corridor, the kind of room that existed in every precinct house touched by Family money, the kind of room where people who inconvenienced the right families were kept until they stopped being inconvenient. The room was pitch black, with only a thin beam of light slipping through a narrow window set high in the wall, barely wide enough for a hand.

My body trembled uncontrollably as my breathing turned shallow and ragged. The walls pressed inward, not literally but with the absolute certainty that only claustrophobia provides, the sensation of the ceiling lowering, the air thickening, the darkness acquiring weight and texture until it lay against my skin like something alive. My claustrophobia surged, choking me with terror that had nothing to do with the Morettis or Serafina or any human threat. This was older. This was the panic that lived in my chest like a second heart, beating only in enclosed spaces, only in the dark.

Instinctively, I called Dante's name. The syllables left my mouth before I could stop them, before pride could intervene, before the rational part of my mind could remind me that calling for the man who had put me here was its own kind of defeat. Yet there was no answer. Only endless darkness pressed down on me, heavy as earth, and the faint drip of water somewhere in the pipes behind the wall, and the distant sound of voices that did not care.

I had no idea how much time passed before the cell door swung open.

A group of tall, rough-looking Sisters stepped inside. There were four of them, broad-shouldered and hard-eyed, dressed in the kind of plain clothes that suggested they had been brought in from outside, not pulled from any holding area. Their eyes gleamed with malice under the fluorescent light that spilled in from the corridor, and they moved with the coordinated ease of Sisters who had done this before.

"Is that her?" The first one spoke without lowering her voice, without any concern that a Neri might hear. "Miss Moretti said to teach her a lesson."

Miss Moretti. Not even the courtesy of a first name to distinguish which Moretti daughter had paid for this. But I knew. I had always known. The order carried Serafina's particular cruelty, the kind that hired others to do the bleeding so her own hands stayed clean.

As one of them spoke, a short-haired woman cracked her knuckles and stepped toward me. Before the first hit, the Sisters cracked gum in relay, one after the other, the sound popping through the small cell like a countdown. My heart dropped. I backed away until my shoulder blades hit the far wall, but another one grabbed my hair and slammed me to the ground before I could escape. The impact drove the breath from my lungs, and then the fists came, and then the kicks, and each blow sent sharp waves of pain through my body, layering on top of injuries that had never been given time to heal.

I tried to fight back. I drove my elbow into the nearest body, felt it connect with something soft, but my old injuries hadn't healed yet. The wounds from the kidnapping were still stitched and swollen beneath my clothes, and the first solid kick to my ribs turned resistance into agony. I was too weak to defend myself. All I could do was curl up and endure it silently as they vented their anger on me, pulling my arms over my head, tucking my knees to my chest, making myself as small as the room demanded.

They didn't stop until a Neri's voice shouted from outside the bars. "Enough! Stop right now!"

The shout came late. It came after the short-haired woman had pressed her boot against my spine and leaned her weight onto it. It came after I had stopped making any sound at all. Officer Neri stood in the corridor with one hand on his belt, and before he spoke again he rubbed the back of his neck with his free hand, the gesture of a man rehearsing the lie he had been paid to keep.

Finally, the Sisters backed away. They filed out without urgency, without fear of consequence, because there would be none. The Moretti name had purchased this hour the same way it purchased silence and loyalty and convenient blindness.

I was lying motionless on the cold floor. My body was covered in blood and bruises. The concrete beneath me had gone warm where my blood had pooled, and the smell of it filled the cell, copper and salt and something older, something that reminded me of the warehouse where Rocco Greco's men had held me. My back was torn open again, old wounds mingling with fresh ones, the stitches from the hospital split along their seams. Every move felt like my bones were shattering from the inside. Slowly, I lost consciousness, and the darkness that took me was not the darkness of the cell but something quieter, something that did not press down but simply erased.

After a long while, the cell door creaked open. I was dragged out by the arms, my feet trailing behind me, and their laughter echoed in my ears as they mocked me openly. But I didn't even have the strength to respond. The corridor lights passed overhead in a blur of fluorescent bars, and the words they said dissolved into sound without meaning.

A full day and night passed before they finally threw me out of the station. The morning air hit my face like a slap, and sunlight blinded me. I raised a trembling hand to shield my eyes, squinting against the brightness that felt violent after so many hours in the dark. Then I staggered to my feet and limped toward the family clinic on Via Serena, the one Dr. Ricci kept open for associates who could not afford questions at a proper hospital.

After my wounds were bandaged, the gauze pulling tight across the reopened gashes on my back, I turned to leave only to see Dante and Serafina walking toward me down the clinic corridor. He froze when he saw me. His eyes widened in shock, his gaze moving from the bandages visible at my collar to the bruises mottling the side of my face to the way I held my left arm close to my body because something inside it ground against bone when I let it hang. For a while, he was stuck in place, and I watched his right hand drift toward his signet ring before he caught himself.

"How… how did you end up like this?" he asked, frowning deeply as he looked at me with a flicker of heartache that surfaced and submerged in the same breath.

Dante tried to reach out, his hand lifting almost as if to help me, and for one fraction of a second the gesture looked real. However, I stepped back to avoid his touch. The movement sent pain screaming through my ribs, but I would have crawled before I let him steady me. Before I could speak, Serafina hurried to his side, clutching his arm like a devoted lover. She looked at me with fake worry swimming in her eyes, her lower lashes fluttering once too quickly, the way they always did whenever the lie mattered.

"Bianca, Dante arranged your release yesterday. Why didn't you come home last night?" Her voice was silk over glass. "And how did you get yourself into such a state?"

Then she turned to Dante and added, her tone softening into something almost maternal, "Don't blame her, Dante. Bianca probably just wants attention. Look at how badly she's hurt. Let's get her treated first, okay?"

Her gentle words worked like poison. The pain in Dante's eyes vanished in an instant, replaced by cold fury. The shift was so complete, so immediate, that I understood for the first time that Serafina did not merely manipulate him. She was the lens through which he saw me, and she could turn that lens whenever she wished. He glared at me coldly as he accused, "You're doing this again. Bianca, your lies are so obvious now. No one believes you anymore."

This time, I didn't answer. Instead, I just stared at him as I silently memorized the face I had once loved so deeply. The line of his jaw. The way his dark hair fell across his forehead. The shape of his mouth when it formed words designed to cut. His eyes were still beautiful, but now, they no longer held even a trace of love for me. Whatever had lived there once had been poisoned so thoroughly that he could stand in a clinic corridor, look at a woman covered in bruises his silence had permitted, and feel nothing but contempt.

Dante turned to Serafina, gently holding her hand, and spoke while looking at me. "If you have the strength to hurt yourself, then you have the strength to walk home."

He addressed the nearest soldier without raising his voice. "Watch her closely. Don't let her take a single shortcut."

After that, both Dante and Serafina walked away. His arm around her shoulder. Her head tilted against him. The picture of devotion disappearing down the corridor, past the clinic's front desk, through the door, and into the black car that waited at the curb.

Step by step, I forced myself to walk home. The Moretti estate was four miles from the clinic, and every step burned through the soles of my shoes and up through my shattered ribs and into the place behind my sternum where something had once been whole. The soldier followed ten paces behind, close enough to ensure I didn't deviate, far enough to make clear that helping me was not part of his orders. The city moved around me in its ordinary way, cars and voices and the smell of bread from a bakery I passed, and none of it touched me, and none of it mattered.

Every painful step burned the same words into my mind.

I would make them pay for this. All of them.

When I finally reached the house and pushed the heavy front door open, the sound of Serafina's sobs filled the living room. She sat on the leather sofa beneath the dim chandelier light, trembling as she cried in Dante's arms. Two of the Moretti soldiers stood near the far wall, gazes averted, hands clasped in front of them as though the scene unfolding on the couch were something sacred and private rather than a performance polished to a shine.

"Dante, I don't want to go through with the alliance marriage. I don't want to marry that lunatic. He's cruel and brutal. The Sisters from previous alliance marriages… they all died." Her voice broke on the word, and her lower lashes fluttered once too quickly before she pressed her face deeper against his shoulder. "Why does it have to be me and not Bianca?"

Dante stroked her back gently. His voice was soothing and tender, the same voice that had once made my chest bloom with warmth and now only hollowed it out. "Don't worry. With me here, no one will dare force you. It doesn't matter who has to go through with the alliance marriage. It won't be you."

My parents immediately chimed in, their voices full of reassurance. My father stood by the liquor cabinet, one thumb tapping once against the marble surface before he spoke, already reducing flesh and blood to arithmetic. "Don't worry, sweetheart. We would never agree to let you go. We'll protect you."

My mother sat in the wingback chair closest to Serafina, smoothing a wrinkle that was not there on the arm of her blouse, her expression already rewriting whatever inconvenient truth might have lingered from the night before. "You're our girl. No one touches you."

I stood silently at the doorway. No one turned to look at me. The soldiers did not shift. The warmth of the room, the low amber glow of the lamps, the faint scent of my father's tobacco, all of it curled around them like a wall I could not enter. Without a word, I walked straight to my room.

The moment the door clicked shut, memories flooded my mind like a relentless tide.

I remembered the time I casually mentioned wanting to see the sunrise. That very night, Dante chartered a private jet to fly me to a remote island. He even built a special observation deck so I could watch the sunrise in comfort. I remembered the feel of the wind at that altitude, how I had believed the whole gesture meant I was irreplaceable to him, as though a man who could reshape a coastline for a woman's whim would never let her stand alone in a hallway while her blood dried on her clothes.

Just to make me smile, he spent hundreds of millions creating a paradise for me. He took me skiing in the Alps, chased the aurora by my side, cooked my favorite dishes again and again and traveled with me to the farthest corners of the world. Every trip had felt like proof. Every meal he set in front of me had tasted like a promise.

Dante documented every moment we spent together, as if each memory was a treasure. Back then, I truly believed he was my one and only. But now I understood that he barely loved me. It was because I was just a passing novelty, a distraction. Something shiny a man picks up because the light catches it, and sets down the moment something shinier cries in his arms on a leather sofa.

I quickly wiped my tears away while I pulled a small recorder from my pocket and took out the memory card. My thumbnail pressed into the inside of my wrist until a pale crescent appeared, steadying the tremor in my hands. I placed the card, along with the prison's surveillance footage, into an envelope and sent it to Sofia.

As I stared at the files on the screen, a bitter taste rose in my throat. At first, I'd only planned to record Serafina pretending to be pitiful in front of Dante and my parents. But in the end, I had also captured proof of her ordering The Sisters to beat me. The footage was ugly. The audio was worse. And now it lived outside this house, outside Moretti reach, in the hands of the only person who would touch a file's edge before pressing play and know whether the truth inside was intact.

The moment the files were successfully sent, I heard familiar footsteps outside my door.

My heart tightened. The door opened quietly. Dante's tall figure appeared in the doorway, backlit by the corridor sconce so that his face was half in shadow. Before I could react, he crossed the room in a few strides and pulled me tightly into his arms. The scent of cedar still clung to him, the same cologne he had worn the first night he kissed me on the rooftop of the Falcone estate, but it only made me feel suffocated now. His arms locked around me the way a man holds something he is not willing to lose but has never learned how to keep.

Dante looked at me as if he was heartbroken. He then rested his chin gently on top of my head before he weakly whispered, "Forgive me, Bianca."

I couldn't help but be stunned in his embrace. My lips pressed together, unable to speak. But Dante didn't seem to mind my silence. He never did. Silence from me had always been permission to him.

He continued speaking softly, as though nothing had happened. "Don't be so hard on Serafina anymore. She's different from you. You're the Moretti Family's biological daughter. You already have everything. Besides, I'll marry you one day."

"But Serafina… she has nothing. It's normal for her to be sensitive. You should try to understand her, to be more patient with her."

"I have everything…"

I muttered those words that tasted bitter, which made me want to vomit. Everything. A name no one honored. Blood no one valued. A place at the table where the chair was never pulled out for me.

So, this was his apology. He didn't come here to truly say sorry. Instead, he came to make excuses for Serafina and to demand that I keep indulging her. The Falcone signet ring on his right hand pressed cold against my shoulder blade where his fingers gripped me, and I wondered if he even noticed the bruises beneath my clothes, the ones his silence had permitted.

Dante thought that a hug and a few soft words would be enough to erase everything. That no matter how deeply he hurt me, I would forgive him like always. Even if just yesterday, he had sent me home bruised, broken and covered in blood.

It seemed that Dante believed he could slap me ninety-nine times… and then hand me a single piece of bone to make me wag my tail and come crawling back.

I lifted my head and looked at his face. My heart ached so fiercely it felt as if it might shatter into pieces. Sadly, he was wrong.

The next morning, I was pulled from sleep by a commotion rising through the floorboards of the Falcone estate — voices, the grind of something heavy being dragged across flagstone, a hollow metallic clang that didn't belong in the manicured quiet of this household.

Still groggy, I sat up in the narrow guest room they'd given me. The sheets smelled faintly of starch and someone else's perfume, as though the linens had been pulled from Serafina's closet and tossed my way without laundering. A dull headache sat behind my eyes. Before I could orient myself, knuckles rapped against the door — three crisp, evenly spaced taps. The way the staff knocked here: neither warm nor cold, just efficient. Just enough to say they'd done their job.

"Miss, Mr. Falcone has arranged a fire performance troupe in the courtyard. He asked me to let you know you're expected downstairs."

I pressed my thumbnail into the inside of my wrist, felt the half-moon of pressure form against the bone. Expected. Not invited. Expected. There was a difference in this world, and the Falcone household enforced it without needing to explain.

I straightened my clothes — the same ones from the night before, wrinkled and stiff at the collar — and stared at the closed door, disbelief pooling in my chest like something cold and heavy. A fire performance. Did Dante Falcone genuinely believe that spectacle and showmanship could paper over what had been done to me? That I could watch flames leap into the air and somehow forget the way his family had discussed my future like a shipping manifest, every line item negotiable, every cost already absorbed? I had never liked these kinds of performances. The heat, the noise, the forced gasps of admiration. It was always Serafina who craved spectacle — the louder and brighter, the better. Not me. I had always preferred silence to applause.

I opened my mouth to refuse, the word already half-formed on my tongue, but the door swung open before I could speak, as though my consent had never been part of the equation.

Serafina entered first, her arm looped through Dante's with a possessiveness so practiced it looked like muscle memory. She wore a pale silk blouse unbuttoned one notch lower than modesty required, her hair swept into a careless knot that had probably taken twenty minutes to arrange. The sweetness on her face was instant, automatic — a smile that bloomed like something painted on porcelain, bright and hard and completely hollow. Her lower lashes fluttered once too quickly as she crossed the room toward me, and I knew before she opened her mouth that every word out of it would be performance.

She grasped my hand with both of hers, squeezing just hard enough to make the gesture feel like restraint rather than affection, and her voice dropped to that coaxing, honeyed register she reserved for moments when someone was watching.

"Bianca, come on. Just come downstairs. Dante's been planning this for a long time — all for you. If you don't go, he'll be hurt."

Dante stood behind her, framed by the doorway's heavy molding. His gaze fixed on me with a faint, cautious glimmer of anticipation, as though this circus in the courtyard were some grand peace offering and all I had to do was accept it for everything between us to reset. He rolled the signet ring on his right hand absently, one slow rotation over the knuckle, and his jaw was set the way it always was when he wanted to appear generous but couldn't quite hide the calculation beneath it.

"Let's just go take a look," he said. His voice carried the quiet authority of a man accustomed to having suggestions treated as orders. "Alright?"

The two of them were perfectly in sync — their timing, their expressions, the angle of their bodies toward me — like a well-rehearsed duet performed so many times the performers no longer noticed the artifice. I felt as if a heavy stone was pressing down on my chest, suffocating me. Each breath cost more than the last. But with Serafina's fingers locked around my wrist and Dante's gaze pinning me in place, I had no choice but to follow. I was dragged downstairs like a prisoner being walked to a verdict already decided.

The Falcone courtyard had been transformed. A makeshift stage of blackened iron and fireproof canvas occupied the center of the flagstone yard, surrounded by a cordon of rope and weighted stanchions. The morning air was already warm, but here, close to the performance area, the heat pressed against my skin like a living thing. A fire-breather stood at the stage's edge — bare-chested, scarred along the ribs, the kind of man who looked like he'd served time and found his talent afterward. He inhaled, tipped his head back, and sent a blazing column of orange-red flame shooting high into the grey sky. The heat reached me from six paces away, fierce enough to tighten the skin on my cheeks and dry the moisture from my eyes.

Serafina positioned herself at Dante's side with the ease of someone who had claimed that spot a thousand times. She leaned into him, whispering something against his collar, her lips brushing fabric, and then laughed — a soft, musical sound engineered to carry just far enough for me to hear. Dante responded without thought, the gestures instinctive and damning: he wiped a sheen of sweat from her forehead with his thumb, tucked a strand of dark hair behind her ear, let his fingers linger on the curve of her jaw a beat longer than necessary. They moved together like a couple deeply, effortlessly in love, and every tender motion was a blade slid between my ribs.

I stood off to the side. Completely forgotten. Just a silent observer, my thumbnail pressed into the crescent already forming on my wrist, watching the man who was supposed to be mine gentle another woman's face as though I didn't exist.

Then Dante's phone rang — a sharp, vibrating buzz against his jacket pocket that cut through the roar and crackle of the performance. He leaned close to Serafina, murmured something against her temple, and she nodded once with that practiced look of patient understanding. He stepped away, moving toward a shaded corner of the courtyard to take the call, his voice dropping into the low, clipped register he used for Family business.

And I was left with her.

I couldn't help but stare at the raging flames. The fire-breather had switched to a spinning baton, twin heads of fire carving arcs through the air, and the heat pulsed outward in rhythmic waves that I could feel against my breastbone. There was an uneasy feeling creeping over me — a cold, animal awareness that had nothing to do with the performance and everything to do with the silence at my side. My instincts screamed that something terrible was about to happen. The way the courtyard staff had drifted toward the far gate. The way no one stood between me and the cordon. The way the morning felt suddenly, deliberately empty.

And then I met Serafina's gaze.

The sweet, sisterly smile she had worn moments ago had vanished. In its place was a strange, twisted smirk — the corners of her mouth pulled tight, her eyes flat and bright and utterly without warmth — that sent chills racing down my spine. It was the expression of someone who had already decided what was going to happen and was merely waiting for the moment to arrive.

Before I could react, she lunged forward and grabbed my arm with a grip like iron, her manicured nails digging into the soft flesh above my elbow. The force of it stunned me — Serafina, who played at fragility, who let Dante carry her bags and hold doors — suddenly had the strength of someone driven by something far uglier than performance. She shoved me toward the flames, past the safety line, and the heat hit me like a wall.

"Ah!" I screamed. I struggled desperately to pull free, twisting my arm, planting my feet against the flagstone, but her fingers were locked around me and her weight was behind the push and the fire was right there, leaping and snarling and reaching for my skin with tongues of white-edged orange. The searing heat rushed against my face, my neck, the bare skin of my arms, and I felt something beyond pain — a raw, primal terror that turned my bones to water.

Then Serafina let go of me in a single, deliberate motion. And with a loud, pitiful cry that could have won her a theater award, she flung herself even closer to the fire, stumbling against the cordon, throwing her arms up as though she'd been the one shoved.

"Help me! Dante!" she screamed.

Dante's head snapped up the instant he heard her voice. The phone dropped from his hand, clattering against the flagstone, and he charged across the courtyard through the cordon like a man possessed. In one swift move, he scooped Serafina into his arms and stumbled back to safety, his body between hers and the flames, shielding her with every inch of himself.

After he managed to keep his balance, his face changed. The concern drained away and what replaced it was something colder, something rigid and grim that hardened every line of his jaw. He turned to me. His eyes blazed with fury — not the hot, impulsive kind, but the deep, settled rage of a man who had already decided the verdict.

Without warning, his hand struck my cheek with a sharp crack that echoed off the courtyard walls.

He shouted at me through gritted teeth, his voice shaking with a violence barely leashed. "Why did you push Serafina? Do you want to kill her?"

My ears rang. My whole body went still, stunned into a silence so complete I could hear my own pulse thundering behind my eyes. I stared at him, utterly bewildered, unable to comprehend what had just happened — how the world had inverted itself in the space of a heartbeat, how the victim had become the accused and the liar had become the wounded. Dante didn't wait for an answer. His expression twisted with disgust, and he shoved me hard with the flat of his palm against my shoulder.

I lost my balance and fell backward, hitting the ground. The flagstone was hot beneath me, baked by the radiant heat, and my shoulder struck the edge of the spreading flames — close enough that I felt fabric catch, felt the instant searing bite of fire against skin.

Immediately, I screamed.

The sound made Dante freeze. He looked down at me lying on the ground, my arm clutched to my body, smoke curling from the scorched fabric of my sleeve. For a brief second — one single, fractured moment — a flicker of heartache flashed in his cold eyes. Something human, something that remembered who I was to him, surfaced and then was smothered.

Because Serafina clutched at his chest, her fingers curling into his jacket, and weakly said, "Dante… Bianca looks more seriously hurt than I am. Take her to the hospital first…"

The performance was flawless. Her voice trembled at exactly the right pitch. Her eyes glistened with unshed tears. Her lower lashes fluttered once — just once — and Dante looked at her as though she were the most selfless creature ever born.

Without further deliberation, he glanced back at me with visible disgust. Then he looked at the fragile woman in his arms, and his voice went cold and commanding — the voice of a man giving orders to soldiers, not tending to someone he'd once promised to marry.

"Take her too," he ordered the Soldiers. "We're going to the hospital."

Then he carried Serafina to the waiting car like she was the most precious thing in the world, cradling her against his chest, his hand cupped protectively over the back of her head. He did not glance back at me. Not once.

I lay on the courtyard ground. The pain in my shoulder deepened with each breath, spreading outward in waves that turned the edges of my vision white and then grey. The flagstone was rough beneath my back. Somewhere above me, the fire-breather had stopped his performance, and the silence that replaced the roar of flames was worse — a hollow, ringing emptiness that seemed to confirm what Dante's retreating back had already told me. I was nothing.

Just as the Soldiers' hands closed around my arms to lift me, the grey at the edges of my vision rushed inward, swallowing everything — the courtyard, the pain, the smoke, the sound of the car pulling away — and everything went black.