Elena Vitiello POV:

"You dirtied my carpet."

My voice cut through the freezing wind, sharp and completely devoid of pity.

Luca didn't care about the insult. He was completely unhinged. He dragged himself forward, his knees scraping against the rough stone. His hands, caked in mud and grime, reached out desperately toward the hem of my black wool coat.

He used to recoil if I even brushed against his sleeve. Now, he was begging to touch the dirt on my shoes.

Before his fingers could even come close, my lead guard stepped forward.

The guard drove his heavy combat boot directly into Luca’s injured shoulder.

The impact produced a sickening *crack*. Luca was launched backward. He tumbled through the wet roses and landed face-first in a puddle of freezing mud.

Luca curled into a ball, clutching his chest. He coughed violently, a spray of red blood splattering onto the white stones. Yet, his eyes remained locked on me, wide and pleading.

Matteo hobbled forward, leaning heavily on his wooden crutch. "Elena, please! We have nothing left!"

Another guard didn't even hesitate. He swung the heavy stock of his assault rifle and smashed it into the small of Matteo’s back.

Matteo screamed. He collapsed forward, his stump hitting the hard ground.

The surrounding college students gasped collectively. The flashes of their phone cameras strobed like lightning, capturing every second of the Chicago heirs being treated like stray dogs.

I stood perfectly still. The wind whipped my hair around my face, but my expression remained carved from ice.

"I know I was wrong!" Luca sobbed, spitting mud from his mouth. "Give me one more chance, Elena! I love you!"

I let out a low, mocking laugh.

"Do you think this is moving, Luca?" I asked, gesturing to the crushed red roses. "Do you think a few dead flowers erase the basement?"

Before he could answer, a deep, mechanical rumbling vibrated through the soles of my shoes.

At the far end of the street, a massive, heavy-duty city sanitation water truck turned the corner. Its enormous yellow chassis dominated the road.

The truck slowly rolled up to the edge of the plaza, stopping right in front of the heart-shaped bed of roses.

The driver leaned out of the window and gave a sharp nod to my guard captain.

I raised my black-gloved hand and flicked my wrist forward.

The driver slammed his hand down on the control lever.

The high-pressure water cannon mounted on the front of the truck erupted.

A thick, violent stream of water blasted out with the force of a localized hurricane. It slammed into the ground, instantly shredding the thousands of red roses into a slurry of red pulp and mud.

The cannon swept across the plaza. It hit Luca dead center.

The sheer kinetic force of the water lifted his emaciated body off the ground. He was thrown backward, sliding helplessly across the rough stones for ten feet.

The water blasted Matteo next. His wooden crutch was snapped and washed away into the gutter. He lost all balance and face-planted directly into the freezing, red-stained sludge.

The freezing water soaked them to the bone. They lay in the mud, shivering so violently their teeth chattered, gasping for air as the cannon mercilessly pinned them down.

The crowd of students erupted into cruel laughter. The romantic gesture had been completely obliterated, turning into a humiliating circus act.

Luca lay in the puddle, sobbing uncontrollably. The last microscopic shred of his dignity had just been washed down the drain.

I looked at their pathetic, broken forms. The heavy knot of anger that had sat in my chest for years finally dissolved. They were nothing to me anymore.

I turned around to walk back to the Rolls Royce.

Suddenly, the tiny earpiece tucked into my right ear cracked with static.

"Queen!" Julian’s voice screamed through the comms, panicked and urgent. "The grey van! It just blew past the outer perimeter cameras! It’s coming in hot!"

I whipped my head around. I looked past the water truck, down the long avenue.

Three blocks away, a rusted grey van was tearing down the street. It ignored the red lights, swerving violently around civilian cars.

The engine screamed, a high-pitched mechanical wail of a machine being pushed past its absolute limit. White smoke poured from the tires as they burned against the asphalt.

My guard captain drew his weapon. "Protect the Queen!" he roared.

I didn't move. I stood at the top of the stairs, my eyes narrowing.

Through the cracked windshield of the speeding van, I locked eyes with the horrific, scarred face of the driver.

"Sofia."

Elena Vitiello POV:

"Sofia."

The grey van hit the plaza curb with a violent, metal-crunching slam. It didn't slow down. It launched into the air for a split second before slamming back onto the paving stones, acting like a missile fired directly at me.

Through the shattered windshield, I saw Sofia. Her burned, centipede-like scar stretched tight as she mashed the accelerator to the floor. She was laughing—a wide, manic, soundless scream of pure insanity.

She wasn't afraid of dying. The fear had been entirely consumed by her hatred for me.

My guards reacted instantly. A barrage of gunfire erupted.

Bullets shattered the van's windshield, spider-webbing the glass into a million pieces. I saw a red mist spray inside the cabin as a bullet tore through Sofia’s shoulder.

She didn't even flinch. Her foot stayed pinned to the gas pedal.

I stood frozen on the steps, my brain calculating the distance and speed. She was going to hit the stairs.

In a fraction of a second, Dante’s chief driver inside the Rolls Royce slammed his foot on the gas and cranked the steering wheel hard.

The massive, heavily armored luxury car lurched forward. The tires shrieked against the stone. With a flawless, aggressive drift, the Rolls Royce slid sideways, parking parallel right at the base of the stairs.

It formed an impenetrable wall of military-grade steel between me and the incoming van.

Sofia saw the black wall of the Rolls Royce block her path. Her eyes widened in absolute, furious despair.

She knew the physics. If she hit the armored Rolls Royce, her cheap van would crumple like an aluminum can, and I wouldn't even feel the vibration.

In that split second of realization, her manic eyes darted to the right.

She saw Luca and Matteo.

They were still lying in the freezing mud, exactly where the water cannon had blasted them.

I saw the exact moment Sofia’s hatred pivoted. Luca had used her, abandoned her, and thrown her to the wolves in Chicago. If she couldn't kill me, she was going to drag the men who ruined her straight to hell.

Sofia yanked the steering wheel violently to the right.

The van’s bald tires lost all traction on the wet, mud-slicked stones. The heavy vehicle went into a massive, uncontrolled slide, its trajectory shifting directly toward the two men on the ground.

Luca lay paralyzed in the mud. He looked up. His eyes bulged out of his skull as the massive grill of the van filled his vision.

He tried to scramble backward, but his broken ribs made his body completely useless. He just lay there, screaming soundlessly.

Matteo dug his fingernails into the cracks of the paving stones, trying to drag his one-legged body out of the way.

It was too late.

The van’s front bumper slammed into Matteo’s back first.

A sickening, wet *crunch* echoed over the roar of the engine. Matteo was instantly sucked underneath the chassis, his body rolling beneath the spinning tires.

A millisecond later, the center of the grill struck Luca.

The impact launched Luca’s body into the air like a broken ragdoll. He flew backward, his head slamming with a horrific, hollow *thud* against the sharp edge of the stone steps.

The van rolled over Matteo’s legs and completely lost control.

It veered sharply and plowed headfirst into the massive, solid stone pillar in the center of the plaza.

The impact was catastrophic. The van’s engine block folded inward, metal shrieking and tearing. A shower of bright orange sparks erupted from the crushed hood.

The sheer kinetic force ejected Sofia through the remaining shards of the windshield. Her body slammed into the stone pillar and dropped to the ground like a sack of wet cement.

Inside the crushed cabin, the violent impact triggered the crude blasting caps taped to the steering wheel.

A blinding, white-hot flash of light erupted from the center of the van.

Then came the boom.

A massive fireball expanded outward, vaporizing the rain and mud. A shockwave of pure force ripped through the plaza, tearing streetlamps from their bolts and turning the crushed rose petals into burning shrapnel.

Before the heat could even touch my face, my guard captain tackled me hard to the stone floor, pinning me safely behind the thick steel chassis of the Rolls Royce.

The deafening roar stripped away all hearing, the world burning in fire.

Elena Vitiello POV:

The deafening roar stripped away all hearing, the world burning in fire.

A high-pitched ringing pierced my ears as the shockwave rolled past us. The air instantly thickened with the acrid, choking stench of burning rubber, vaporized gasoline, and cordite.

I didn't panic. The smell of explosives and the heat of the fire triggered a cold, detached calmness in my brain. It was a familiar sensation, a dark echo of the brutal gang wars I had survived in Chicago.

A shower of shattered glass and twisted metal fragments rained down on the plaza, clattering against the stone paving like deadly hail.

I pushed against the heavy weight of the guard captain on top of me.

"I'm fine," I said, my voice steady.

He scrambled off me, his gun still drawn, scanning the smoke.

I stood up. I brushed the dust and ash off my black wool coat. I looked at the side of the Rolls Royce. The pristine black paint was scorched and blistered from the heat, but the military-grade armor hadn't yielded an inch. It had done its job.

I stepped around the hood of the car and surveyed the plaza.

It looked like a war zone.

The grey van was a twisted, unrecognizable pile of burning metal. Flames licked aggressively at the blackened frame.

At the base of the stone pillar lay Sofia. Her body was contorted into an impossible, broken angle. The fire had caught her clothes, burning away whatever was left of her. She was dead.

I stared at her charred remains. There was no triumph in my chest. Just a cold, hollow irony that her vanity had ended in ash.

I shifted my gaze to the right.

In the mud, ten feet from the burning wreck, lay Luca and Matteo.

Matteo was pinned beneath the heavy steel door that had been blown off the van. His left leg—the one that still had flesh—was crushed. A jagged piece of white bone had pierced straight through his skin and pants, leaking dark blood into the muddy water. He was conscious, his fingers digging frantically into the dirt, but he couldn't even draw enough breath to scream.

Luca lay flat on his back near the steps. The impact against the stone had cracked his skull open. A steady, thick stream of blood pulsed from a gaping wound on his forehead, pooling into the ruined, red rose petals around his head.

His eyes were half-open, staring blankly at the grey sky. His pupils were rapidly dilating, losing focus. His chest barely moved.

I walked slowly toward them. I stopped exactly three steps away.

I looked down at the men who had once controlled my entire existence. I didn't reach for my phone to call an ambulance. I didn't smile. I just watched them bleed with the absolute indifference of a stranger.

In the distance, the wailing shriek of police sirens and ambulances tore through the Manhattan air, growing louder by the second.

The surviving college students were huddled behind the police barricades down the block, screaming and crying.

Suddenly, the screech of heavy tires drowned out the sirens.

Three black, heavily armored tactical SUVs jumped the curb and slammed to a halt at the edge of the plaza.

The doors flew open before the trucks even fully stopped.

Dante erupted from the lead vehicle.

He looked like a man possessed. His face was pale, his eyes wide and wild with a terror I had never seen in him before. The childhood trauma of losing his family to a car bomb had ripped open the second he heard the report.

He sprinted past the burning wreckage. He ignored the guards, the fire, and the blood on the ground.

He crashed into me.

His massive arms wrapped around my body, crushing me against his chest with a force that bruised my ribs. He buried his face in my neck, inhaling my scent.

I felt his massive frame trembling.

"I'm here," I whispered, wrapping my arms around his waist. "I'm safe."

Dante let out a ragged, shaking breath. He ripped off his heavy black trench coat and wrapped it tightly around my shoulders, cocooning me.

He raised his large hand and gently pressed it against the side of my face, physically turning my head away so I wouldn't have to look at the carnage anymore.

He pressed a fierce, desperate kiss into my hair.

"We are going home," Dante rasped, his voice thick with adrenaline and fear.

He kept his arm locked around my waist, practically carrying me toward his SUV.

As we walked away, the paramedics rushed the plaza, dropping to their knees beside Luca and Matteo with trauma kits.

Dante paused by the open car door. He turned his head and shot one final, freezing glare at the two dying men on the ground. He looked at them like they were nothing but dirt waiting to be swept away.

He guided me into the back seat and climbed in after me. The door slammed shut, cutting off the sirens and the smell of blood.

He pulled me onto his lap, burying his face in my hair.

"No one can take you from me. Not even death."