Chapter 25
I was still in deep pain from losing Peter when the second crack in my soul split me clean open.
The call came during the briefing. I was reviewing new surveillance routes with three of our Velenza scouts when my burner rang once..then again. Coded number. Only three people had that access. Jeremiah was one of them.
I excused myself, stepped outside with the wind slapping cold against my cheek, and answered.
The voice on the other end was stiff, shaken. One of Jeremiah’s pilots.
“Ma’am!” he said, breathing too fast. “We’ve lost Cassian’s jet.”
I didn’t understand what he meant at first. I blinked and asked again. Calmly. Too calmly.
“What did you say?”
“His plane,” the man whispered, “it went off radar twenty minutes ago above the Eastern mountain range. Search protocols are active. Signal dead. They’re calling it a probable crash.”
I didn’t say anything. My lips just parted and no sound came out. The world around me blurred, and all I could hear was that old goddamn echo in my head–Jeremiah’s voice, that night before he left.
By noon, the news had already hit black–market media.
“Jet belonging to anonymous Ferrante–linked executive found scattered across Eastern forest ridge. No survivors. Body inside burned beyond identification. Crash declared non–suspicious.”
I stood in front of the screen while my guards froze behind me. No one dared speak.
They kept looking at me like I was glass about to break. But I wasn’t glass. I was bone and grief and a rage so deep it made my hands shake without moving.
I didn’t cry right away. I didn’t scream yet. I walked upstairs, closed the door, locked it, and stood
in the dark.
Then it hit me.
All of it.
I fell to my knees and screamed into the fucking floor. Screamed until my throat burned and my fists bled from punching the bedpost. I threw the lamp. The mirror. My blade collection. The picture frame. The whiskey bottle. The damn red mask from the gala.
Jeremiah wasn’t supposed to die. Not him. Not the one who stayed. Not the one who knew me even when I didn’t know who I was anymore.
I clutched the corner of the bedsheet and sobbed into it like a child. The kind of sobs that don’t sound human. The kind that pour out of your bones when the only person who never asked you to be strong is now ash in a crater.
“Why him?” I cried to no one. “Why him and not the bastard who ruined me first?”
I didn’t sleep that night. I didn’t speak either. And by morning, something else had changed in
- me.
I wasn’t just going to kill Elodie anymore.
I was going to erase her name from every hallway, ledger, photo, and fucking memory in this city.
I was going to bury her legacy.
Just like the world buried Jeremiah and Peter’s body.
–
I immediately called for an emergency war council. Not because I believed they’d come, but because I needed to know who still had a spine and who deserved to be carved off my list first.
The Velenza war room felt colder than usual when I walked in. The marble table that once pulsed with heat and strategy was quiet, untouched. Only seven men showed up. Twenty–two were supposed to. And I knew right then–I was being abandoned.
Rico was the first to speak. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“Miss Aria,” he started, clutching his cap like he was in front of a fucking priest instead of me, “I served Peter because he spared my son. You gave me my rank, but my loyalty was… more personal. Without Peter, I don’t have orders I understand. Forgive me, but I can’t fight Ferrante I’ve got a family.”
I stared at him and said nothing. He walked out without raising his head once. The silence after that was suffocating.
Then it was Leo–the one Peter trusted with his offshore funds.
“I was just the numbers guy,” he said, laughing nervously, like that would save him. “I don’t dc blood. I don’t do war. I did it for Peter and Cassian because they were clean and smart and they always paid on time. But now? Harvick has put bounties on anyone connected to Jeremiah or your name. I’ve already received death threats on my daughter. I’m sorry.”
He placed his encrypted drive on the table like it was a peace offering.
“You don’t get to be sorry,” I told him.
He didn’t wait for my permission to leave.
One by one, they peeled off.
Luca said he had a mole inside his own unit now, someone blackmailing him with footage that could bury his brother in prison.
Matteo said his sister was getting married and he “couldn’t bring war to her doorstep.”
Dorian said he heard whispers that Ferrante was paying triple what we could afford–and he
needed to survive.
‘Cowards,” I muttered. “All of you smell like smoke but not one of you has ever stepped in fire.”
And then silence. Real silence.
The last two men looked at each other, then stood without saying a word. They couldn’t even look me in the eye. I let them go. I wanted them to live with the shame of turning their backs on the only person who ever gave them power.
I was alone in the war room now.
No guards. No soldiers. No tech team. Not even Jeremiah’s elite hackers remained. They disappeared in the night, their comms wiped and locations dead. The encrypted monitors blinked to black. The tactical board lost signal. The servers failed to boot.
