Shouka's p.o.v.
The night sky was quiet, stripped bare of the moon, as if the universe had dimmed its light in sympathy.
I lay on my side in my dark room, watching the stars from the open glass window above my bed, each one flickering like a distant wish I hadn’t dared to speak aloud.
Please… let Rome be okay.
I whispered that prayer again and again into the dark, as if the stars might carry it wherever Rome is now—beneath the hospital lights, surrounded by doctors sworn to silence, and guards armed not just to protect Rome but to kill the doctors if anything goes wrong or they tried to open their mouth outside.
Because the truth is just too dangerous to speak.
If word got out that Rome—the Italian Mafia boss, one of the last bloodline of the Moretti Family—is sick, it would shatt
