The car is already waiting by the back courtyard when I step out, my coat drawn tight around me and my hood low.
The dawn hasn’t yet touched the sky.
A deep gray presses over the land like a held breath, the quiet kind that belongs only to hours most people never see.
Yarik stands by the driver’s side, one foot planted on the gravel, lighting a cigarette with slow deliberation.
He looks up as I approach, his sharp eyes narrowing in assessment before the flame dies between his fingers.
‘You ready?’ he asks.
I nod once, my gloved hands clenched around the handles of the nondescript bag on my lap.
It has a few changes of clothing.
A forged passport.
A wallet fat with cash that does not trace back to any Lombardi account.
The driver tosses the cigarette to the ground and crushes it beneath his heel.
‘We have to stay ahead of the whispers,’ he says, pulling the car door open. ‘They’re going to start sounding like sirens any moment now.’
Inside, the car is quiet.
The seats are warm.
As he drives through the iron gates and onto the winding private road that snakes down from the estate, I do not look back.
Not once.
There’s nothing behind me that will make this easier.
Nothing that will make it hurt less.
Yarik drives with a steady, sure grip.
He takes the curves of the hills with ease, the coastal highway unfolding ahead of us like a silk ribbon laid over stone.
Below, the sea gleams silver, waves breaking in low, soft rolls beneath the cliffs.
I watch them without seeing.
Every turn in the road takes me further from my mother’s trembling hands and my father’s calculating eyes, from the breakfast table where they plotted to erase me until the scandal passed.
‘You didn’t tell them where exactly I was going, did you?’ I ask, my voice soft but sharp.
‘No,’ Yarik replies. ‘Your papa gave me a list of places I was supposed to lie about if asked. Said to make sure you vanished in a way that couldn’t come back to stain the family’s name. But your friend Luciana? She had other ideas.’
A smile touches the corner of my mouth, even as I am thoroughly unsurprised at hearing that my father would rather have me dead than caught—actually dead.
‘Of course she did.’
‘She said if you had to disappear, you ought to do it properly.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘She gave me full authority. Whatever I needed to make it real.’
The car crests a rise in the road, and the sky behind us begins to pale.
I glance toward the rearview mirror.
No headlights yet.
But they’ll come.
‘How real?’ I ask after a long silence.
Yarik exhales, adjusts his grip on the wheel.
‘Real enough that if anyone goes looking for you, they won’t find a girl. Only ashes.’
I nod once.
It is what I asked for.
What I agreed to.
Still, my fingers tighten slightly in my lap.
We drive for another hour, slipping from city edges onto unmarked roads and rural stretches of brush and pine.
Eventually, Yarik veers off the coastal route, turning onto a thin access road that cuts through a stretch of scrubland, dry and bleached by the salt wind.
A single dirt path branches from it, angling sharply toward a narrow canyon lined with jagged rock and low brush.
He pulls the car to a stop just before the bend and turns to me.
‘Time to get out,’ he says.
I obey without question.
My boots crunch against the gravel as I step into the cool dawn.
The light is rising now, but faintly, streaks of peach and gold just beginning to edge the horizon.
‘What happens next?’ I ask.
He opens the trunk and pulls out two things.
A long canister of gasoline.
And a duffel bag.
‘I prepped another car. Same make, same model. We douse this one, send it off the edge. There are two bodies already in the trunk. Not fresh, but fresh enough.’
He does not flinch when he says it.
Neither do I.
‘And us?’ I ask, watching him.
He zips open the duffel.
Inside are two sets of clothes, already scuffed and stained.
He tosses me mine.
‘We change. Then we walk. There’s a safe house ten kilometers north. A man there owes me his life. He’ll get us across the next border with new names. After that, we vanish. Just like you wanted.’
I don’t thank him.
It feels like a betrayal of everything I lost to need this.
Instead, I strip behind a thicket of brush, pulling on the worn jeans and frayed flannel shirt, boots that feel like they’ve already walked a hundred miles.
My coat, scarf, gloves—everything from the Lombardi world—gets shoved into the trunk with the dead.
When I return to the car, Yarik has begun pouring gasoline over the interior.
He does not look at me when he lights the match.
He tosses it in, and the car erupts.
Heat rushes up in a sudden, howling bloom.
It screams through the morning stillness, and for a moment I see it, as though outside myself—a fire eating everything I was, until all that remains is a silhouette against the smoke.
The flames claw fast and high, and soon, Yarik sends the car rolling, slow at first, then careening down the ravine.
It hits the bottom in a spray of sparks, catching on rock.
The second explosion is louder.
Final.
He turns to me. ‘We walk.’
And we do.
Through lowland brush and narrow tracks where no car could follow.
Through shadows that deepen before they recede.
As the sun climbs, we move deeper into isolation, no longer two people fleeing, but something else entirely.
By midday, we reach the safe house.
A squat structure built into the hillside, hidden behind a thicket of cypress and blackthorn.
The man who opens the door is older than I expected, with a scar that cuts through one eyebrow and a limp in his right leg.
He says nothing when Yarik introduces me under a different name.
He simply steps aside and lets us in.
Inside, it smells of cedar and old stone.
There is no television, no phone, no connection to anything beyond the hills.
There is food, water, a bed in the corner.
A fireplace is already lit against the chill.
I collapse onto the couch, not from exhaustion but from the sheer strangeness of being still.
Yarik disappears into the back with the old man.
I hear low voices, a transaction of plans and papers.
Eventually, he returns with a small envelope.
‘Your new life,’ he says, handing it to me.
I open it slowly.
Passport. Identification. Documents, all real enough to pass.
A new name. New birthday. Birthplace: Messina.
‘Where do I go?’ I ask.
‘There’s a train at dawn. After that, a car will be waiting to take you to the port. You’ll sail south, then disappear. From there, it’s whatever you want.’
I stare down at the name on the passport. Elena Rinaldi.
‘Elena,’ I murmur. The sound feels foreign in my mouth. But not wrong.
That night, I cannot sleep.
I lie by the fire, staring at the shadows that dance along the low ceiling.
Somewhere far away, Luca Salvatore is tearing his estate apart.
The city is whispering my name with knives behind their teeth.
My father is feigning innocence.
My mother is already measuring which heiress can take my place at the next gala.
I have vanished.
But something inside me has stayed behind, buried deep in the ash of that broken car.
I close my eyes, and all I can see is Enzo.
I wonder what he thinks when he hears the news.
The world I have stepped into is wide and cruel and uncertain.
But I would take it again and again, if it meant that my child would be safe.
Yarik speaks only once more that night, as he stokes the fire and lays a worn blanket at my feet.
‘Whatever you were before,’ he says, his voice low, ‘let it burn with the rest.’
I nod once.
Because I already have.
And in the stillness of that hidden room, the last of Aria Lombardi dies.
