I Let Scarlett Die So Siena Could Burn His Empire

The concrete floor was slick with my own ruined legacy when the syndicate enforcer finally unbuckled my wrists.

I didn't fall so much as pour out of the chair — a slow, graceless collapse onto my hands and knees. The cold of the floor hit my palms like a slap, and I was grateful for it. Pain meant I was still here. Pain meant I hadn't finished dying yet.

No one helped me up.

Boots moved past my face. Voices exchanged words I couldn't process. Someone said *handle it* and someone else said *back alley* and then hands — rough, impersonal, the hands of men who did this the way other men filed paperwork — gripped me under the arms and dragged me upright.

I caught one last look at Dante as they hauled me toward the door.

He had his back to me. Already on his phone. Already somewhere else entirely.

Harper stood beside him, her hand resting lightly on his arm, her head tilted toward whatever he was saying. She didn't look up.

The door closed between us, and that was that.

---

They didn't bother with a car. They walked me out through the service corridor, down a stairwell that smelled of rust and old water, and through a steel door that opened directly onto the alley behind the estate. The cold hit me like a wall — a February night in New York with a storm already swallowing the skyline, the wind driving snow sideways through the narrow channel between buildings.

One of them said something. The other one laughed.

Then they let go, and I hit the ground.

The alley was a long, dark throat of shadow and ice. Garbage bags half-buried in snow lined one side. A dumpster hulked at the far end, and beyond it, the distant blur of streetlights bled orange through the curtain of falling white. The estate's rear wall rose behind me — smooth stone, no handholds, no mercy.

I lay there for a moment just breathing. Each inhale felt like swallowing glass.

Then I started to move.

Not because I had a plan. Not because I knew where I was going. But because the alternative was lying in this alley until my blood temperature matched the snow, and something in me — something that had survived the chair, survived the needles, survived watching the last of Dante's love for me turn out to be nothing at all — refused to give this city my corpse.

Not here. Not like this. Not for him.

I crawled.

My dress was soaked through, the thin fabric offering nothing against the cold. My knees scraped over ice and grit. Every few feet I had to stop, press my forehead to the ground, and wait for the wave of dizziness to pass before I could move again. The snow kept falling, patient and indifferent, beginning to dust my shoulders white.

My fingers found something in the slush. I closed my hand around it before I understood what it was.

The black onyx rosary. My grandmother's. I'd been wearing it when they took me, and at some point — the chair, the struggle, the second needle — the cord had snapped. Half the beads were gone. What remained was a broken length of chain with the cross still attached, the onyx dark as a bruise against my pale palm.

I held on to it.

I didn't pray. I didn't know what I would have said. I just held it, because it was the only thing I had left that was mine, and I kept moving.

The alley bent to the left past the dumpster. I rounded the corner on my hands and knees and stopped.

A car idled at the alley's mouth.

Not just any car. A Rolls-Royce Phantom, matte black, armored — the kind of weight that sat differently in the world than ordinary vehicles, the kind that said *the man inside this car has decided he is beyond the reach of consequences*. Its headlights were off. The engine was barely a whisper. It had no business being in this alley, which meant it had every business being here.

I didn't move. I didn't have enough left in me to run, and I knew it.

The rear window descended.

Smoke curled out first — cigar smoke, dark and expensive, the smell of it cutting through the cold. Then a hand, resting on the window's edge. A face, partially lit by the distant amber of the street.

Damien Voss.

I knew his face the way you know the face of a storm system you've been warned about your entire life — from photographs, from whispered conversations, from the way Dante's expression had always tightened slightly at the mention of his name. The rival patriarch. The man Dante called *the only person in this city I genuinely respect*, which in Dante's language meant *the only person in this city I genuinely fear*.

He looked at me the way men like him always looked at things — not with emotion, but with calculation. His dark eyes moved over me, taking inventory. The blood. The snow in my hair. The rosary clenched in my fist.

He took a long pull of his cigar and let the silence stretch.

I met his gaze and didn't look away. I had nothing left to perform. No dignity to protect, no position to maintain. Just whatever was left of me, kneeling in the slush at the mouth of an alley where my fiancé had sent me to disappear.

Damien withdrew the cigar and exhaled slowly.

"Get her in the car." His voice was low, unhurried, directed at someone beyond my line of sight. "If she survives the night, she might be useful."

He flicked the cigar out the window. It landed in the snow a foot from my hand, hissing out in a small curl of steam.

Two men materialized from the shadows near the car's front end — quiet, efficient, the kind of men who had clearly done this before. One of them crouched down and looked at me with something that was almost, not quite, human concern.

"Can you move?"

"Yes," I said. It was mostly a lie.

They helped me anyway.

The car door closed behind me with the soft, definitive sound of a vault sealing. Warmth enveloped me all at once — leather and heat and the fading ghost of cigar smoke — and my body began to shake in earnest now that it finally could. I pressed myself into the corner of the seat, the rosary still in my fist, and stared straight ahead.

Damien didn't speak. He looked out his own window, already elsewhere in his mind.

The car began to move, pulling smoothly out of the alley and onto the street. Snow swirled in the headlights as they finally clicked on.

I turned my head.

Through the rear window, past the curtain of falling white, I could see the alley receding. And at its far end — standing at the edge of the estate's service door, barely visible in the dark — a figure. Still. Watching. A man in a dark coat with his hands in his pockets, scanning the alley for something that was supposed to be there.

A body.

My body.

He would find nothing but snow.

I watched him until the car turned and the alley disappeared, and something hardened in my chest — not grief, not fear, not even the hate that had crystallized in those last seconds in The Vault. Something colder than any of those things. Something with edges.

Dante had sent a man to confirm I was dead.

I pressed my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes.

*Not yet*, I thought. *Not even close.*