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(edited)

I crouched behind my tallest brother, Chris, my heart pounding like a war drum in my chest. Gunfire roared around us, a deafening, constant crackle that rattled my bones. Alongside Vince and Enzo, I fired blindly at the swarm of guards outside the MS Mafia compound, our men, or at least what was left of them, spreading across the blood-soaked ground. Bodies lay crumpled in grotesque stillness, their eyes frozen open, slack lips with final breaths, blood seeping from their mouths like rivers of truth.

The air was chaos! Shrieks of agony, barked commands in Spanish and Italian, the metallic scent of gunpowder thick in my nose. And under it all, the sickening fear clawed at my chest: that any one of those screams might belong to one of my brothers... or to Valeria.

I was scared. Terrified, actually! But I didn't regret a damn thing. I'd do it again and again if it bringing meant her home. Valeria had never abandoned me. Never turned her back, never hesitated. This was my turn to fight for her. My turn to burn the world down if it meant getting her back.

"How many are they?" I shouted over my shoulder at Chris, breathless, squeezing off another shot.

"Shut up and keep going! We're almost done!" Vince snapped from beside me, his voice strained, furious.

I was dressed in black. Not a rare thing for me. Strapped with weapons like some action hero from a war film. Each weapon had already spoken in lead and rage.

Our men were dying around us. Only a few dozen enemies remained, scattered like the last dying embers of a wildfire. We'd carved through the MS ranks like vengeance incarnate, leaving behind nothing but ruin. Victory was within reach. Just a few more bodies, a few more heartbeats...

And then I saw him.

He emerged from the smoke like a nightmare summoned into daylight... Towering, brutal, unstoppable. His silhouette rippled with raw power, each step shattering the earth beneath him. And his eyes locked onto mine with a hatred so pure, so venomous, it sucked the oxygen from my lungs. Black. Empty. Bottomless.

The battlefield vanished.

In an instant, I was yanked back in time, no longer a fighter but a trembling child standing barefoot on cold tile, staring down the hallway as my father advanced. Each footfall a thunderclap, each breath a storm. That same look in his eyes. That same promise of pain...

My limbs went numb. My heart slammed against my ribs like a prisoner begging for escape. I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.

All I saw was him .

But this time... I wasn't that little girl anymore.

This time, I had teeth.

I forced in a shuddering breath and raised the gun with hands that trembled from more than adrenaline. My finger found the trigger. My eyes didn't leave his. I wouldn't give him the power of looking away.

And then... Bang!

The shot tore through the air like thunder through silence, slicing through smoke and memory and fear. It hit him dead between the eyes. His head snapped back. For a moment, he stood there, suspended in time... then collapsed to his knees, as if the weight of all his sins had finally crushed him.

He fell face-first into the dirt, and the ground drank him in.

The monster was dead.

And this time, I was the one who survived.

And yet... it wasn't just a kill.

It felt like I had just exorcised every ghost that had ever haunted me. Like the monster in the dark, the one that still crawled into my nightmares even after death, had finally been silenced.