Chapter 8

I watched his ruin not with glee, but with the cold focus of a pathologist observing a terminal disease run its course.

The storm of rage had passed. It left behind a stagnant, toxic silence. That silence seemed to seep through the surveillance feeds. It filled the safe house. It chilled my bones.

The cameras we had strategically placed in his villa—a final, invasive layer of my revenge—showed a ghost now. A ghost haunting the ruins of his own life.

He was no longer the impeccably dressed Don. He was a hollowed-out man in a rumpled suit. The same one he'd worn for three days. He paced the vast, empty rooms. The echoes of his own footsteps were his only company.

A lonely king in a deserted castle.

I saw him pause by the grand piano I never learned to play. A wedding gift from his mother. His fingers, once so capable of bestowing both cruelty and fleeting tenderness, hovered over the keys. They did not press down. The silence remained unbroken.

He picked up a book I had left on a side t