Grace POV

I sprinted until my lungs burned like they were filled with broken glass.

The humiliation from the lodge was a physical weight, pressing down on my chest harder than the impending storm.

I needed air.

I needed the sanctuary of the woods.

The sky had turned a bruised purple, heavy with unshed rain.

Thunder vibrated in my chest before I even registered the low, rolling growl in the distance.

I reached for my ear and realized too late that I had left my hearing aid on the nightstand in the chaos.

The world was instantly muffled.

Dull.

It felt like I was underwater. I was half-deaf in the darkening forest.

Desperate to orient myself, I turned back toward the lodge.

That's when I saw them under the shelter of the old woodshed near the tree line.

Josiah and Lexi.

They were arguing.

I couldn't hear the words, but I saw Josiah's aggression in the rigid set of his shoulders.

He was slashing his arms through the air, violent and erratic.

I stepped closer, my boot crushing a twig.

I didn't hear the snap, but the vibration must have traveled, because they turned.

Josiah saw me.

He stormed over, closing the distance in three long strides and grabbing my shoulders.

His mouth moved rapidly.

I focused, forcing myself to read his lips.

*Liability.*

*Stupid.*

*Go back inside.*

"I am not a dog!" I screamed.

My voice tore through my throat, raw and bleeding, vibrating strangely in my own skull.

Josiah froze.

Lexi gasped, her hand flying to her mouth.

"You're a coward!" I rasped, the words clumsy but loud enough to bridge the silence. "You let her break me!"

Josiah's face twisted in frustration. "I am saving you! You don't understand the—"

*CRACK.*

I didn't hear the gunshot clearly.

It sounded like a dull pop, like a cork pulled from a bottle across a crowded room.

But I saw the wood of the shed splinter inches from Josiah's head.

Dirt kicked up around us in violent puffs.

Ambush.

Men in black tactical gear emerged from the tree line like shadows detaching from the darkness.

Rivals.

Probably sent to kill the heir.

"Get down!" Josiah lunged and tackled me.

We hit the mud hard.

More shots flashed.

The ground shook.

An explosion ripped through the air near the main lodge.

Suddenly, the earth beneath us gave way.

The heavy rain had loosened the soil on the ridge, turning it into a slurry.

We slid.

Mud, rocks, and darkness swallowed us whole.

I tumbled down the ravine, hitting trees, tearing my skin on unseen roots.

I landed hard at the bottom of a gully.

My leg screamed in white-hot pain.

I gasped, wiping sludge from my eyes, and looked up.

Josiah was ten feet away, covered in mud but standing.

Lexi was screaming, clinging to a root halfway up the slope.

"Josiah! Help me!"

She was the alliance.

She was the future.

She was the trade routes.

I was the mute ward. The liability. The theft suspect.

The gunfire was getting closer, popping rhythmically above us.

The assassins were coming down the ridge.

Josiah looked at me.

I was hurt. I couldn't walk.

He looked at Lexi.

He had to make a choice.

He could only carry one.

Our eyes locked across the muddy divide.

I saw the apology in his eyes a split second before he moved.

It was the most cruel thing I had ever seen.

"I'm sorry," he mouthed.

The syllables were perfectly clear.

He turned his back on me.

He scrambled up the mud bank.

He grabbed Lexi.

He hauled her up.

They ran toward the extraction point.

They ran away from me.

I lay in the mud.

The rain washed the blood into my eyes.

I was alone.

I was deaf.

I was weaponless.

And the man who had swore to be my voice had just left me to die in the silence.

Grace POV

The cold wasn't just temperature; it was a physical entity.

It wrapped itself around my bones, seeking to shatter them with a lover's embrace.

I didn't move.

I lay pressed into the ravine’s freezing mud, buried under a shroud of dead leaves and forest debris.

I held my breath as heavy treads thudded past my hiding spot.

The assassins were looking for bodies.

They were looking for the Vitiello heir.

They didn't find me, because I had already decided to become a ghost.

I waited until the forest went pitch black.

Then, I crawled.

My left leg dragged behind me, dead weight trailing a wake of fire.

I didn't go back to the lodge.

I went to the creek bed.

I followed the water.

Water flows away from the source. Water escapes.

I crawled for three miles.

Adrenaline is a liar; it told me I could move when I shouldn't have been able to breathe.

By the time I reached the old service road, the sun was hemorrhaging red light into the horizon.

A trucker found me.

He saw the blood and the mud, and he didn't ask a single question.

He just took me to the city limits, eyes fixed on the road, knowing that ignorance was his best defense.

I didn't go to the hospital. The Family owned the hospitals.

I went to the basement clinic of Dr. Evans.

He was a mob doctor, on the payroll, but he still had a soft spot for the mute girl he had once coaxed into speaking.

I banged on the heavy metal door.

When he opened it, he dropped his coffee mug. Ceramic shattered against concrete.

"Grace? My God. They said... the radio chatter said you were MIA. Presumed dead."

I pushed past him, limping into the sterile, fluorescent room.

"Phone," I rasped.

My voice scraped against my throat like broken glass.

He didn't argue. He handed me his burner.

I logged into my secret account.

The one Josiah didn't know about.

The one where I hid the money from selling my sketches online under a pseudonym. My escape fund.

I had enough.

Enough to disappear.

My phone—the one still in my pocket—vibrated against my hip.

It was a text from Josiah.

*Grace. Please. Answer. We had to evacuate. Protocol. I'm coming back for you. I swear.*

Protocol.

The word echoed in the silence of the room.

He left me in the kill zone for protocol.

I typed one word.

*No.*

Then I pried the SIM card out of my phone and dropped it into the red medical waste bin.

Dr. Evans was already stitching my leg, his hands shaking slightly.

"Josiah is going to tear the city apart," he said quietly, his eyes on the needle. "He's outside your apartment right now. I heard the chatter."

"Let him," I said.

My voice was getting stronger. Cold. Detached.

"You need to rest," Evans insisted.

"I need a passport," I corrected him. "And a ride to the airstrip. Not the Family one. The commercial one."

"Where will you go?"

I looked at the map pinned to the wall.

Europe.

Far away from the Vitiellos.

Far away from the Morettis.

"Somewhere loud," I said.

Two hours later, I was in a cab.

I watched the city blur past the window, a smear of neon and concrete.

The skyline where Josiah ruled.

The skyline where I had been a prisoner of his "protection."

I touched the fresh bandage on my knee where the mud had cut me.

It would heal.

But the memory of his back turning away from me?

That would stay. That was a scar that wouldn't fade.

I arrived at the terminal.

I bought a ticket to Paris.

One way.

As the plane taxied down the runway, I felt the pressure build in my ears.

The engines roared to life.

For the first time in ten years, the noise didn't scare me.

It sounded like freedom.

I closed my eyes.

The girl who knelt was gone.

The girl who waited was gone.

The Ghost was dead.

And finally, for the first time, I was alive.