CHAPTER 93:Her Brother’s Return

LILIANA

The bridge hummed in the distance, a dark spine over glassy water. I held Isabella's hand and felt the faint, steady rise and fall of her breath beneath the blanket. Her lashes lay like small shadows against her cheeks finally, for the first time in months, her face was unmarked by that animal's cruelty. For a moment I let myself believe she might sleep forever in peace.

Then the plan rose again, hot and precise in my chest. There was no other way. I pictured headlights cutting the night, two bodies crumpling into the river, the morning anchors on every channel: “Two corpses found under the bridge.” Faces blurred by water and mud, a pair of identical outfits, one gold ring drifting where a hand used to be. Damian would find wreckage — and he would start with the wreckage, not with the trail that led to us.

I moved like someone who had rehearsed each step a thousand times. The laptop on the table sent a pale rectangle of light across the room. I opened a file, thumbed through n