The silence in the room was a living thing, thick and suffocating. It pressed in on us, broken only by the ragged, whimpering gasps of the man kneeling at my feet. The weight of the pistol in my hand felt absolute, a small, dense star of finality. Marcus Valerius, the ghost of my past, was about to become a memory.
He flinched as the cold metal of the barrel grazed the back of his neck. A shudder wracked his entire body.
“Elena… please,” he sobbed, the name a foul relic he had no right to use. “I raised you. I took you from the gutter. Everything you are… you owe it to me. Have you no gratitude? No heart?”
His words were pathetic, the last desperate gambit of a man with nothing left. He was trying to appeal to a debt that had been paid in blood and pain long ago. He spoke of gratitude a
