Ruin my life 2

“Celine, listen to me — you cannot — I cannot let you leave.”

His hand closed around my arm before I could get three steps away

.

“Your father isn’t who you think he—”

“Let go!” I yanked against his grip and when that didn’t work I swung. My palm cracked hard across his face.

The sound cut through everything. The reporters. The sirens. All of it and I watched Salvatore go still.

I’d never hit anyone in my life. My hand was stinging and I didn’t care. I stepped into his space so he could hear every word clearly.

“You ruined my family,” I said, my voice shaking so hard it barely came out. “My father is being thrown behind bars because of you. And you’re standing here telling me to come with you? Why? So you can throw me behind bars too?”

His jaw was tight.

A red mark was already rising where my hand had connected and he wasn’t touching his face, wasn’t flinching, just standing there looking at me with an expression I couldn’t read and didn’t want to.

“Celine—”

“Read my lips.” I stepped even closer. “This is the last time you will ever see me.”

My eyes were burning. I refused to let it turn into anything he could see.

“You are dead to me, Salvatore Moretti.”

Bianca’s hand found my arm and she pulled me back, body between me and him, turning me away before I could see whatever his face did next. I let her. I didn’t look back.

I didn’t trust myself to look back.

She pulled me around the corner and into the narrow space between two news vans where the cameras couldn’t reach us. Rain had started coming down, thin and cold, and I hadn’t noticed until it was soaking through my jacket.

“You have to leave,” Bianca said. Low and urgent, her eyes darting toward the building.

“No.” I pulled my arm free. “There has to be something we can do. We’re not just going to let Dad go to jail for something he didn’t do—”

“He’s already been sentenced.”

The words landed like a door slamming shut.

“What?”

“He’s already been sentenced, Celine. There’s no one who can fight the Morettis. The accounts are blocked, the lawyers are backing out—”

“That’s impossible.” I shook my head, stepping back. “Dad always had protections. Investors. Partners. We have lawyers who handle—”

“Had.” Her voice was flat. Final. “Everything’s been seized. The government froze the accounts this morning. Salvatore gave them documents, transactions, and recordings. He’s been building this case for months.”

The words went into my ears but didn’t go anywhere. I stood in the rain and let them roll around in my skull without connecting to anything that made sense.

The Russo family had been powerful for decades. You didn’t just, one didn’t just lose everything overnight. That was not how it worked. That was not something that happened.

“Nothing left,” I repeated. My voice cracked on the second word. “What do you mean nothing left?”

Bianca grabbed my shoulders. Both hands. Forced me to look at her directly.

Her mascara had smudged under her eyes. Rain was flattening her hair against her face. She looked like she’d been crying, or close to it, but her hands were steady and her eyes were sharp and something in her expression was urgent in a way that cut through the shock still wrapping itself around me.

“Listen to me,” she said. “You need to leave. Now.”

“I don’t have anything with me, my passport, Bianca, I can’t just, we need to fight this—”

“Fight it with what?” she said. “Think. The money is gone. The lawyers are gone. Dad is going to prison and there is nothing, nothing — left to fight with.”

“Then I’ll stay. I’ll figure something out—”

“And do what?” Her grip on my shoulders tightened. “You think Salvatore is done? He threw your father behind bars, Celine. You think he’s going to let you walk around this city like nothing happened?”

I stared at her.

“You need to go,” she said again, quieter now. Almost gentle. “Not tomorrow. Now.”

“Bianca—”

“Your tickets are at the airport.” She flagged down a cab with one hand, not releasing me with the other. “Your passport. Your luggage. I arranged it this morning when I heard. It’s all there.”

I blinked at her.

“You…when did you—”

“It doesn’t matter.” The cab pulled up to the curb and she reached past me to open the door. “Stay and watch what’s left of your father’s name get torn apart, or go. Those are the only two options you have right now.”

The rain was coming down harder now.

Behind me, I could still hear the reporters. Still hear the questions being shouted into the air about trafficking and Moretti and Russo. Still see, when I closed my eyes, my father being folded into the back of that police car. And Salvatore standing in front of me in his black suit telling me he had saved me. Saved me.

“Go,” Bianca said softly. “Please.”

I looked at her face.

She looked back at me and her eyes were full of something that looked like sorrow, the realest thing I’d seen on her face in years, and I was nineteen years old and my entire world had just collapsed in the space of an afternoon and I had nothing and nowhere and no one.

I got in the cab.

“Bianca.” I grabbed her hand before she could close the door.

She stopped.

“Thank you,” I said. “For being here.”

Something crossed her face too fast for me to name it.

“Of course,” she said quietly as she closed the door.

The cab pulled away from the curb and I watched Russo Tower shrink in the rear window, getting smaller and smaller until a turn took it from my sight entirely. I faced forward. I pressed my hands flat against my thighs.

I did not cry.

I sat in that cab and I made a list in my head of what I was leaving behind. The apartment. The accounts. My mother’s jewelry, still in the safe in my father’s office. Five years of a life that had been built on something I’d never looked at closely enough to question.

I did not think about Salvatore’s face when I hit him.

I did not think about the way he’d said I saved you like it was the truest thing he’d ever spoken.

I stared through the windshield at the wet New York streets sliding past and I thought about nothing at all.

And one month later, in a small flat in Lisbon with a pregnancy test on the bathroom sink, I understood that I hadn’t left with nothing after all.