Page 62 of Sins of the Father
Please understand and respect that I don’t want to bear a child who inherits this darkness. I don’t want to bring life into a world where strength is measured by how much one can destroy. I want a life where laughter isn’t shadowed by fear, where safety isn’t bought with blood. A life where love can exist without dread. You once told me you’d take a hundred bullets to keep me safe. But all I everwanted was to live beside you without fearing that one day, I’d lose you in a hail of them.
I will always be grateful for what we shared—for how you made me feel: seen, desired, alive. But I can’t belong to you if belonging means losing myself.
Please… let me go.
Mia
The words blurred before his eyes. Luc reread them once. Twice. His pulse roared in his ears.
Gone. She was gone. It had been only nine days since the attack at the club. Each night, he took her into his arms, loving her until she melted against him, spent and trembling. Yet there had been something different in her eyes, something he couldn’t name. She no longer smiled as easily, no longer laughed at the movies they watched, and he’d told himself it was only the shadow of what they’d survived. Violence took time to bleed from the soul. He thought she was healing, rebuilding what had been shaken. But while he believed they were drawing closer, she had already begun planning her escape.
He folded the letter with care, his fingers trembling once before closing into a hard fist. A hollow pain opened in his chest—an ache so sharp it stole his breath. It felt like loss, dark and ugly, tearing through him from the inside out. Rage and disbelief warred beneath his skin, but beneath them both was something worse: grief. He had given her space no one else had ever been granted, had allowed her to step past the walls he’d built from violence and control—and she’d walked out, leaving him with nothing but a letter.
She was neither loyal nor trustworthy. Because if she had truly loved him and still left, then everything he had ever understood about loyalty, about power, about the way the world worked, was meaningless.
He pressed a hand to his chest, as though he could still the pounding ache there. The place he’d allowed her inside his mind, his heart—she didn’t deserve to be there. And yet she was. Every breath, every memory, every echo of her laughter felt like glass beneath his ribs.
Luc stared out the window, jaw tight, fighting the sickening realization that he’d never anticipated this kind of loss—the kind that didn’t bleed, didn’t bruise, but hollowed him out all the same. Gone. She was gone, and all she’d left him was paper and pleading:Please… let me go.
“Antonio,” he said, voice low. “Drive faster.”
Antonio glanced at him in the rearview, hesitation flitting across his face. “What is it?”
“Mia left,” Luc said. “She told Gabriella not to tell me and asked not to be chased.”
Antonio exhaled, hard. “You can’t simply walk away from this life.”
“I know.” Luc stared at the dark glass, at his own shadowed reflection. Outside, the city lights smeared past like dying stars.
No one walked away.Not from this world. Once someone stepped into their circle, they were bound by it. The life didn’t let go. It wasn’t simply about loyalty; it was about survival. Those who tried to leave didn’t just endanger themselves—they endangered everyone tied to them.
Information was currency. Weakness was leverage. A single whisper in the wrong ear could unravel an empire. Anyone who left could be tortured for names, flipped into witnesses, or used as bait to draw out the powerful. Even silence could be brokenunder enough pain. Once in… one stayed in. That was the only rule that kept the entire world from collapsing.
Luc had seen men die trying to break free, women vanish into shallow graves, and children hidden away because their fathers had made the mistake of thinking they could live ordinary lives. He’d never deluded himself with that fantasy. The life claimed everything it touched.
And now Mia had walked straight into the open, carrying his name, his secrets, and every reason his enemies needed to strike again. Luc’s jaw tightened. She might believe she could disappear. But no one disappeared fromthis.
He thumbed his phone and called Carlos. The line clicked and then—on the second ring—Carlos answered. “Boss.”
“Find her,” Luc said without heat, barely audible.
“Should I call you when I find her?”
“Yes.”
“Will I be bringing her back?” Carlos asked.
Luc considered the question for a long, measured second. “No.” He let the single word hang there before adding, “Ensure she’s buried at the convent.”
“Yes, Boss.”
The reply was obedient, immediate. Luc ended the call and felt something inside him harden—an iron excision of the weakness he had permitted to grow in his chest. No sentiment. No bargaining. The business of consequence began.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Mia sat at a small café tucked between a laundromat and a bookstore, the kind of place no one looked twice at. The air smelled faintly of sugar and frying oil. Her fingers were sticky from the glaze of the donut she’d been nibbling at for half an hour, and the condensation from her iced tea had formed a wet ring on the chipped table.
It had been almost three weeks since she’d left Luc and the world she’d built with him, and there was still no joy in that accomplishment. She’d thought freedom would feel like lightness, like being able to breathe again. Instead, every breath ached. She missed him so fiercely it was as if a knife had cleaved her in two. His voice haunted her in the quiet, his scent lingered in her dreams, and sometimes, when she closed her eyes, she swore she could still feel his hands on her body, his lips between her thighs, the safety felt in his arms when she fell asleep atop him.
