[Did you not see my message? Get to my office at the club. Now. Sign the non-prosecution agreement for Piper. This matter needs to disappear.]
Something in me finally broke. The last thread holding together the woman who'd loved him, who'd believed in him, who'd built her entire life around his promises—it snapped.
I called him. My voice was shaking with rage, but beneath it was something harder. Something that had been forged in the fire of betrayal.
"Why the hell should I sign that form for her? She killed my mother. She murdered her, Colino. And if I say no, what then?" I laughed, the sound bitter and broken. "You gonna press my bloody finger onto the damn paper yourself? Hold me down while your soldiers force my hand?"
The silence on the other end was deafening.
He hung up. Cold. No hesitation.
The silence that followed was absolute—the kind that settles over a room when a death sentence has been passed.
Seconds later, my phone buzzed. A photograph. A scanned document materialized on the screen, its edges crisp and damning.
An investment contract. My mother's name beside Piper's, bound together in ink and betrayal.