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BLACK OUT DAYS - PHANTOGRAM ᴠᴏʟᴜᴍᴇ : ▮▮▮▮▮▮▯▯▯
Chapter thirty one
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"You should've died instead."
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My heart tightened with a pain I could barely endure as the girl clung to my chest, holding on to me as if I were the last fragment of life she had left.
But I wasn't.
I couldn't stay, yet I couldn't leave either. No matter what I chose, I would end up hurting her—and the thought of causing pain to someone I cared for so deeply was unbearable.
So deeply... that it hurt.
It hurt so much that, in moments of weakness, I wished I had never met her at all—just so she wouldn't have to suffer because of me.
When I walked through the door and saw her on her knees, trembling, staring at her father's lifeless body... the sound of her crying was like something torn out of her soul.
I sat in my office watching the footage caught by the ctv camera over and over. Her desperate hands trying to push the blood back into her father's body, the same man who had hurt her so much.
I watched her try to return the shattered pieces of his brain to where they once were, as if she could rebuild him, as if she could rebuild the last piece of her world that had just been destroyed.
"The footage has been wiped. There's no trace of her," Luca said, settling into the chair across from me. He slid a stack of papers my way—endless forms, signatures, lies I had to make official. "It'll look like he drank too much, lost his balance, and cracked his skull on the floor."
Technically, that's exactly what happened. Except for the part where Sollana shoved him—small, desperate, terrified—and then crumbled under the weight of believing she'd killed him.
"The only issue," Luca continued, lowering his voice, "is the footage disappearing at the exact moment he died. It's going to look suspicious. People will assume someone wanted him dead."
"As long as they're not after Sollana," I muttered, slamming my laptop shut. I couldn't watch the footage of her again. My chest felt like it was collapsing in on itself. Every sob, every frantic shake of her hands—it was carved into my skull.
Sollana had no idea who her father really was. No idea that behind his small-time business, he was hiding ties to one of the most powerful Italian mafia families in the city.
The Bellos and the Angelos—two names soaked in blood—had been at war for years. Recently, there'd been an arrangement to quiet things down. A fragile peace. A connection between the families would strengthen the empire.
