REBUILDING FROM RUINS
Three days after Matteo’s death, the world kept spinning.
I wished it wouldn’t. Wished everything would just stop. Give me time to process. To grieve. To figure out how to carry the weight of everything that had broken.
But the world didn’t care about my grief. Vincent was still out there. The commission was still in chaos. Safe houses were still being destroyed. And Dante...
Dante was still the man who’d let my family die seven years ago.
That truth hadn’t disappeared. Hadn’t been erased by shared grief or late-night conversations or the tentative rebuilding we were attempting.
It was just there. Constant. Heavy. A wall between us that neither of us knew how to dismantle.
“Mama, why are you staring at nothing?” Luca asked.
We were in the safe house kitchen. M
