Death Bliss
The fear has been replaced by something else, something I do not have a word for, something that feels like the moment before a door opens and you do not know what is on the other side but you know you are going to walk through it anyway.
Two corridors away, in the chapel vault, the candle gutters out. The draft from the open vault door reaches the flame, and the flame bends once, twice, and then it is gone, and the chapel is dark, and the ledger sits in its hidden cavity beneath the granite altar stone, and the pages are still open to the authorization code that will burn the Armenise syndicate to the ground.