Matteo Vitiello POV:

The blinding lights of the Washington gala on the television screen clashed violently with the reality of my existence.

A freezing gust of wind howled through the shattered window of the Chicago basement, cutting straight to my bones. The single, cheap incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling flickered, casting long, ugly shadows across the peeling concrete walls.

I sat hunched over a wooden table that was missing one leg. I pulled the collar of my moldy, foul-smelling coat tighter around my neck. I was twenty-eight, but I looked like a man ten years older. My hair had turned completely white. Deep, jagged scars crisscrossed my ruined face, pulling my skin tight over my cheekbones.

My hands shook uncontrollably. I tried to grip the cheap tin of meat sauce, but my missing fingers made it nearly impossible. I pressed my thumb against the sharp metal lid and pulled. The jagged tin sliced deep into my index finger. Dark blood welled up, mixing with the grease of the can, but I didn't feel a thing. The high-voltage electricity from five years ago had completely destroyed the nerve endings in my extremities. Pain was a luxury I no longer possessed.

"Food," a slurred voice mumbled.

I looked across the room. Luca sat on a urine-stained mattress, his knees pulled to his chest. He was twenty-six years old, but the brain damage had permanently locked his mind at the age of five. He was clutching a filthy, torn teddy bear to his chest. Thick saliva dripped from the corner of his mouth as he stared at the open can of meat.

I picked up a rusty spoon. I scooped out a clump of the cold, gelatinous meat sauce and held it out to him.

Luca lunged forward and shoved the spoon into his mouth, swallowing the food without chewing. The brown sauce smeared all over his chin and nose. I stared at him with dead, hollow eyes. I raised my dirty sleeve and mechanically wiped the mess from his face. This was my punishment. My stupidity had broken my brother's mind, and now I was shackled to his ghost.

In the corner of the basement, an old, scavenged CRT television buzzed with static.

Suddenly, the snowy screen flickered and cleared. The news channel switched to a live broadcast of a charity gala in Washington, D.C.

My hand froze in mid-air. The rusty spoon slipped from my grip and hit the concrete floor with a dull *clang*.

I stared at the small screen. My cloudy, sunken eyes began to shake violently in their sockets. My chest heaved as my lungs fought for air.

Elena.

She stood at a podium, wearing a dark red gown that made her look like a goddess of war. She was glowing. The absolute authority and power radiating from her voice as she delivered her speech in fluent English pierced straight through my chest.

I placed my hands on the edge of the broken table and tried to stand up. I needed to get closer to her. But my cheap, twisted prosthetic leg buckled under my weight. My spine, permanently damaged by the electricity and years of malnutrition, gave out.

I crashed heavily onto the freezing concrete floor.

The impact tore the skin off my knees. Hot blood soaked through my thin pants, but I ignored it. I dragged my broken body across the filthy floor, pulling myself toward the television set. My breath hitched in my throat, sounding like a dying animal.

I reached the TV. I raised my trembling, mutilated hand and pressed my fingertips against the curved glass screen, right over her face.

A sharp jolt of static electricity snapped against my skin.

The tiny shock ripped me out of my delusion and slammed me back into reality. She was a queen accepting the applause of the world's elite. I was a rat rotting in a sewer. I had thrown away the most precious treasure in the world for a lying, manipulative bitch, and now I was paying the ultimate price.

A raw, guttural sob tore out of my throat. Tears mixed with the grime on my face, dripping silently onto my torn collar.

The sound of my crying frightened Luca. He dropped his teddy bear and scrambled off the mattress, squatting down next to me.

He followed my gaze and looked at the television screen. He tilted his head, his vacant eyes staring at the elegant, untouchable woman.

Luca suddenly reached out his dirt-caked finger and pointed at the screen.

He grinned, exposing his crooked teeth. A long string of drool fell from his lips and landed directly on my shoulder.

"Pretty lady."

Matteo Vitiello POV:

The overwhelming stench of cheap bleach and unwashed bodies filled the crowded hallway of the Chicago public hospital.

I sat on a chipped plastic chair, my chest caving in as a violent coughing fit seized my body. I doubled over, hacking until my throat tore. I spat a thick wad of blood-streaked phlegm onto the dirty linoleum floor between my boots.

The homeless man sitting next to me shot me a look of pure disgust. He covered his nose with his grimy jacket and slid his chair a few feet away.

I wiped the blood from my lips with the back of my hand. I looked down. Luca was squatting at my feet, happily spinning an empty, discarded pill bottle on the floor. He was completely oblivious to the disgusted stares of the people around us.

The door to the clinic opened. An exhausted African American doctor in a wrinkled white coat stepped out. He looked at his clipboard and called out the fake name I had registered under.

I placed my hands on my thighs and forced my body upward. My prosthetic leg groaned under my weight. I limped heavily into the cramped examination room, dragging my dead foot behind me.

The doctor didn't even look up. He tossed a thin stack of lab results onto the metal desk.

"Terminal liver cancer," the doctor said, his voice completely mechanical. "The cancer cells have fully metastasized to your surrounding organs. You have three months, maybe less. I suggest you look into a state-funded hospice center."

My pupils shrank to pinpricks. My dry, cracked lips trembled, but my vocal cords refused to produce a single sound.

I didn't ask about treatments. I didn't ask about the pain. I slowly turned my head and looked through the crack in the door. Luca was still sitting in the hallway, giggling as the plastic bottle spun in circles. A wave of suffocating, paralyzing panic crashed over me. The fear of my own death was nothing compared to the absolute terror of leaving a child-brained Luca alone in this hell.

I stumbled out of the hospital. The freezing Chicago wind hit my face, nearly knocking me backward.

I grabbed Luca’s hand and dragged him toward the South Side. We stopped in front of a rundown, neon-lit pool hall. This used to be a secondary base for one of my old mafia lieutenants.

I pushed the heavy door open. The thick smell of cheap tobacco and stale beer hit my face. A group of low-level street thugs were sitting around a poker table, tossing dirty bills into a pile.

One of the thugs, a massive man with a scarred cheek, looked up. His eyes widened in shock for a second before twisting into a cruel, mocking sneer. He recognized me. He used to kiss my ring.

I let go of Luca’s hand. I hunched my shoulders, stripping away the last microscopic shred of my dignity. I limped toward the table.

"Please," I rasped, my voice sounding like grinding stones. "Take my brother. Just let him sweep the floors. Feed him."

The scarred thug stood up. He pulled his leg back and kicked me squarely in the chest.

"Fuck off," he spat. "You're a dead dog. New York put a kill order on you. Anyone who touches you gets a bullet in the head from the Moretti family."

I hit the floor hard. The straps of my cheap prosthetic snapped, and the plastic leg detached, sliding across the dirty floorboards. I was completely crippled. But I scrambled forward on my bleeding knees and threw my arms around the thug’s heavy work boot, clinging to it desperately.

"Please!" I begged, tears streaming down my scarred face. "He doesn't know anything! Just keep him alive!"

The thug looked down at me with absolute revulsion. He hacked up a ball of thick phlegm and spat it directly onto my ruined face.

Luca shrieked. Seeing me on the floor, he charged forward with his fists raised, trying to bite the thug’s leg.

The thug didn't hesitate. He swung his massive hand and backhanded Luca across the face. The impact lifted Luca off his feet. He crashed headfirst into the sharp wooden edge of the pool table. A deep gash opened on his forehead, and blood poured down his face.

I let out a raw, deafening roar. I tried to drag myself across the floor to protect him, but two other thugs grabbed my arms and pinned my face to the sticky floorboards.

The owner of the pool hall stepped out from the back room. He held a baseball bat. "Throw this trash out. If they come back, call the cops and report a break-in."

They dragged me by my collar and threw me out the back door. I landed face-first in a pile of rotting garbage in the alley. Luca was thrown out right after me.

Snow began to fall from the dark, grey sky.

I dragged my useless body through the trash until I reached Luca. I pressed my freezing, trembling hands against the bleeding gash on his forehead. Hot blood soaked my palms.

Luca cried loudly, wrapping his arms tight around my neck. "Hurts! Brother, it hurts!"

I looked up at the falling snow. My life was draining away into the frozen concrete. I realized with absolute clarity that no one in this city, no one in this world, would dare take us in.

A black hole of despair swallowed my mind. My eyes hardened into a state of total, reckless madness.

I reached into the pocket of my coat and pulled out a crumpled ten-dollar bill. It was everything I had left.

I bit down on my lower lip until I tasted copper. I had to do it. I had to shatter my soul into dust.

"Only her... only she can keep him alive."

Matteo Vitiello POV:

The Chicago blizzard locked the city in a cage of ice. Outside our broken basement window, the wind screamed, driving the temperature well below zero.

I took the only torn, moth-eaten blanket we possessed and wrapped it tightly around Luca’s shivering body as he slept on the mattress. I wore nothing but a thin, threadbare sweater. The cold chewed through my skin, accelerating the decay of my failing organs.

I had spent my last ten dollars on a stack of cheap, yellowed drafting paper and a leaky blue ballpoint pen.

I sat at the broken wooden table. The faint, orange glow of a distant streetlamp bled through the shattered window, providing just enough light to see the paper.

I pressed the pen to the page. My hand shook violently. The liver cancer sent waves of agonizing, stabbing pain through my abdomen, making my muscles spasm. The first line I wrote was horribly crooked.

I bit down hard on my lower lip. My teeth broke the skin, and hot blood ran down my chin. I used the sharp sting of pain to force my brain to stay awake.

I didn't use her first name. I didn't dare. I had forfeited the right to speak her name the day I let Sofia burn her.

I wrote, *Respected Mrs. Moretti.*

The metal tip of the pen scratched harshly against the rough paper. Thick blue ink leaked from the casing, staining my missing fingers.

I wrote down everything. I dissected my own soul on the paper. I detailed how my pathetic jealousy had blinded me, how I had eagerly swallowed Sofia’s venomous lies because my ego couldn't handle Elena's strength.

When I reached the part about the fireworks, my vision blurred. Heavy tears dropped from my hollow eyes, splashing onto the paper and bleeding the blue ink into messy puddles.

I didn't write a single word of defense. Every sentence was a brutal, self-inflicted execution of my own character.

Suddenly, a massive cramp seized my stomach. I doubled over the table. I opened my mouth and violently vomited a thick puddle of black, coagulated blood onto the edge of the wood.

I gasped for air, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. I didn't care about the mess on myself. I just carefully shifted my body to shield the stack of paper, terrified of staining the letter.

By the tenth page, I began to write about Luca. Every word was a bleeding, desperate beg.

*I know I do not deserve forgiveness,* I wrote, my hand cramping. *I will burn in hell and suffer every day for eternity.*

I paused, pressing my forehead against the cold table to catch my breath.

*But I beg you. For the sake of the time Luca called you sister, give him a way out.*

I didn't ask her to adopt him. I didn't ask her to forgive him. I only asked her to use her power to place him in the lowest-level public mental asylum in New York—just a place with four walls and a hot meal so he wouldn't freeze to death in an alley.

Twenty pages. I poured the last drops of my life force into twenty pages of the most humiliating, pathetic begging a man could produce.

Dawn broke. The grey light filtered into the basement.

My fingers were completely stiff from the cold. I slowly folded the thick stack of papers and shoved them into a cheap, flimsy envelope.

I took the pen and wrote the address of the Moretti Group headquarters in New York. Writing each individual letter felt like dragging boulders up a mountain.

I grabbed my coat and crawled out of the basement. I dragged my broken body into the raging blizzard, heading toward the corner of the street.

The wind hit me like a physical punch. I couldn't walk. I crawled on my hands and my one good knee, my broken prosthetic dragging behind me, leaving a twisted trench in the deep snow.

I finally reached the red USPS mailbox. I pulled myself up, leaning heavily against the freezing metal.

My trembling, ink-stained fingers gripped the edge of the envelope.

I knew what this meant. Dropping this letter meant taking the absolute last piece of my pride, throwing it on the ground, and offering it for her to step on.

I didn't hesitate. I opened my fingers.

The envelope slipped into the dark slot and vanished.

I collapsed against the side of the mailbox, my chest heaving violently. I felt entirely empty, as if I had just completed a grand, sacrificial ritual.

I turned my head and looked east, toward New York. A faint, delusional spark of hope flickered in my dead eyes. She used to love me. Maybe, just maybe, she would read it.

A sudden, blinding spike of pain erupted in my liver. My vision went entirely black. I pitched forward and crashed face-first into a snowbank.

Minutes later, a postal truck pulled up to the curb. The driver unlocked the box and tossed all the mail into a canvas bag.

"Please, save him."