Page 83 of The Kingpin’s Bride

“The little girl…” He coughed, spat, kept going because he could see it landing. “I never even liked the kid. She cried too much. She was just the only leash that worked on her sister. You think you saved them? I had that baby on a dirty mattress while your wife was still learning how to smile on a pole. I told Morena what I’d do if the numbers dropped. I described it. She believed me. That’s why she danced. That’s why she begged in the hallway like a whore. Not because of you. Because of me.”

Something old and familiar moved under my ribs. The same voice that had lived in my head since I was twelve.

This is how it starts. You let yourself care and then you become him.

I looked at Dario Rizzo and saw every man who had ever put a hand on what was mine and called it ownership.

I saw my father. How monstrous he was to me, to my sisters.

I did not give him the dignity of a last name or a last breath he could spend on another threat. I raised the gun.

Dario saw it. The smirk died the way cheap things always die: fast, ugly, with nothing left behind it. For one second the man who had kidnapped a four-year-old to keep a girl on a pole looked exactly as small as he was.

Blood on his teeth. Dirt on his knees. Eyes wide with the first honest thought he had ever had in my presence: this is it. The end.

He opened his mouth to beg.

The shot was one clean decision. No warning. No pause for the part of me that still heard my father’s voice telling a twelve-year-old boy violence was always the answer. I refused that inheritance in the space between heartbeat and recoil.

The bullet took Dario in the forehead, slightly off-center, the way I had been taught when the goal was silence instead of spectacle. The back of his skull opened.

What had been Dario Rizzo jerked once, a useless animal twitch, and the light in his eyes went out before his body understood it was finished. He folded sideways into the wet dirt with his mouth still shaped around the last humiliating statement he would never get to finish. One hand stayed open, fingers curled like he thought he could grab us all on the way down.

The sound was flat. Final. It did not echo the way people pretend gunshots echo in stories. It simply ended.

I stood over him and watched the last of the blood darken the ground. I waited for the satisfaction I had promised myself when I first decided he would die. It did not come. What came instead was the old crack under my ribs, the one I had been trying to close since the night I carried Morena off that stage with my cum still on her thighs and my mother’s ring on her finger. It widened. It hurt. It felt like proof.

This is how it starts.

I crushed the thought the same way I had crushed it in the warehouse with the Vernizzi sons. I did not intend to become my father.

I did not make the dying man look at the people he had broken. I did not speak. I did not give the corpse the courtesy of a name.

I confirmed there was no pulse left worth respecting, then lowered the gun. I handed the weapon off without looking at the man who took it.

“Burn everything,” I said. “Nothing left that can touch them.”

In the penthouse, I watched them sleeping for a long moment. I crouched beside the bed. Camilla looked at me with the same flat, careful stare she had given the world since we pulled her out of the car. I kept my voice low.

“Can’t sleep? You’re safe here,” I said. “No one is going to take you again. Not while I’m breathing. Do you remember me, kiddo?”

She blinked once. Her gaze flicked to the blood drying on my shirt, then back to my face. “Yeah… Matteo.”

“That’s right,” I grinned. “Good memory, little lady.”

“Thanks for helping me find my sister,” Camilla said.

I smiled wider. “You’re welcome.”

The same way I had seen Aurora do with her girls. The same way someone should have done for this girl when she was with that man.

“You should sleep a bit more,” I said again, quieter.

Camilla did the last thing I expected. She leaned forward just enough to press her forehead against my wrist for a second, before she pulled back and curled into the pillow. She didn’t speak. She just stayed there for seven full seconds, forehead warm against the inside of my wrist, before she pulled back and curled into the bed like the contact had cost her something she wasn’t sure she could afford yet.

Shock was written clean across her face. Not fear. Not anger. Pure, raw shock that the man who had bought her and killed in front of her could also do this.

I held her gaze for a moment, then looked back down at Camilla’s sleeping form.Morena smoothed the blanket with hands that shook. I adjusted the pillow. Neither of us spoke.