He Killed Us Both Chapter 08

He Killed Us Both Chapter 08

The interrogation room was cold concrete and dim light.

They played the security footage. Linus watched Lydia cut the brake line-his adopted sister, his Principessa, smiling as she lit the gasoline. He watched it three times, four.· By the fifth viewing, his hands began to tremble uncontrollably. He gripped the metal table until his knuckles were white as bone. When the footage showed Lydia fleeing the flames as I lay bleeding, he made a sound-a wet, broken gasp, like a man whose chest had just been pierced by a bullet.

“She was reborn, too,” he finally said, his voice like grinding stones. “She remembered everything. She set it all on fire, twice. And both times… she made me the one to kill

you.”

I said nothing. I stood in the shadows, watching him fall apart.

Lydia, in the next room, was screaming hysterically. Not from pain, but from desperation. She slammed against the bars, her perfect silk wedding dress torn and soiled, her face a mess of snot and tears. “Cassandra!” she howled, crawling on her knees toward the dividing wall. “Please! I’ll confess to everything-the fire in both lives, all the lies, the manipulation! Just say one good word to the judge! Just one!”

She pressed her face against the cold concrete, sobbing. “I don’t want to die in a cage! I don’t want to-” Her voice broke into a dry, retching cry. “You stole him from me in our last life! You stole my future! I was just trying to get it back!”

I walked to the door that separated us and looked down at her through the grate-the woman who had killed my child twice.

“No,” I said, my voice like ice on steel. “The maximum sentence. No mercy. Let her rot.”

They dragged her away, her screams echoing down the hall until they were finally muffled. The ensuing silence was blissfully sweet.

Then it was just Linus and me.

He didn’t fall apart right away. He first tried to stand, to reclaim his dignity as the Don. But his legs gave out. He collapsed onto the concrete floor, a slow, clumsy

disintegration, as if the bones in his legs had turned to sand. The great heir of the Valeriano family, trembling like an autumn leaf, crawled two steps toward me, his face buried in his hands.

“I was wrong,” he choked out. He looked up, and I saw the ruin of his face-eyes swollen and desperate, black hair matted with sweat, the proud mouth that had ordered my death now slack with grief.

“I killed him. Not with my own hands”-he stared at his fingers in horror-“but with my choices. I take back every curse, every accusation. I was blind. I was a fool.”

He crawled closer, stripped of all dignity, broken. His fingers brushed my shoe. “I have no right to ask,” he whispered, his forehead pressed to the floor by my feet. “But… one thing. Next to his grave… save a place for me. When I die-I want to be buried with my son. Let me be near him. Please.”

I looked down at him. At the man who had murdered my child twice, now groveling at my feet like a beaten dog. I saw the cowardice beneath his grief-a cheap desire to escape judgment through death, to use emotion as a shield.

I said nothing.

I turned and walked out. The crisp sound of my heels echoed on the concrete, each step a final severance. Behind me, I heard him whisper my name one last time, “Cassandra,” the sound dissolving into a sob.

The findings of the investigation were released the next morning. The online storm turned, cursing Linus’s name, but he was already behind bars, unable to hear it. The family soldati who had ignored me at the crash site were stripped of their positions, their suits torn from their backs, and cast out to wander the streets.

Three days later, the news reached me.

Linus had committed suicide in his prison cell. They found him at dawn, hanged from the bars. On the wall, written in his own blood, was a single sentence: “I set fire to my own paradise.”

Lydia lasted three more weeks. The women in her cell block had daughters of their own. They showed her no mercy. She was sent to the infirmary three times-for broken ribs, for sheets of skin scalded off by boiling soup. The final report said she was in the ICU, life hanging by a thread, but it didn’t matter. Her mind was already gone, completely shattered.

I sat in a leather chair overlooking the city, in the office of the top law firm, Sterling & Associates. The founder, Eleanor Sterling, a living legend in Chicago law who had apparently followed my case, placed a contract on the mahogany desk in front of me.

“I don’t hire victims,” she said calmly. “I hire survivors. There’s a fundamental difference.”

I looked at the contract. The position of Special Counsel. A future.

I signed my name.

I buried myself in work-not to escape the pain, but because I had finally found something worth building. The past was ashes. The future was solid concrete, real beneath my feet.

A week later, I saw the final news report. I read it twice, then raised a glass of wine to the city skyline.

Justice is a patient hunter.

And it always gets its prey.