They shoved me to my knees on the cold cement just outside the entrance. Rain soaked through my clothes. My hair clung to my face. My lip stung. My hands trembled. My stomach twisted.
I was kneeling.
In front of his men. His world.
And somehow, I didn’t cry.
Because something deeper than heartbreak was settling in. Something colder.
Something dangerous.
---
I don’t remember collapsing. One second I was kneeling in the rain, soaked to the bone, heart hollowed out, and the next... black.
But I remember the cold. How it clung to my bones. I remember hearing muffled voices, someone shaking me, calling my name—but I didn’t care enough to answer. Maybe I thought if I didn’t open my eyes, the pain would finally leave me behind. Maybe part of me hoped I wouldn’t wake up at all.
When I did, it was to fluorescent lights and the low beep of machines. The bed was too soft. The sheets too white. My arm had an IV line taped down and my body felt like it’d been hit by a truck.
I stared at the ceiling for a long time before I turned my head. No Zeus. No Zoraya. No guards.
Just me.
Alone, like I always really was.
I reached for the hospital phone with shaking hands, my fingers numb and clumsy. I dialed the number Dominic gave me. It rang twice before a voice answered.
“Savannah?”
“P-papa…”
It slipped out like breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.
“Papa,” I whispered again, weaker this time. “I’m pregnant… and I’m dying.”
Silence. Then a sharp inhale, followed by something I never imagined hearing from a man like him—my father, the feared and whispered-about Mr. Moretti.
He cried.
Softly. Like a man who didn’t know how to be weak, but just found out he had no choice.
“Tell me everything,” he said. His voice cracked like glass under pressure.
So I told him. Every goddamn thing. The betrayal. The bruises. The nights I choked on my own silence. How I found out I had cancer too late. That I kept it to myself, because Zeus had already looked at me like I was broken even before he knew. That I didn’t want to give him another reason to throw me away.
“You are not dying,” my father said after a long pause. “Not while I breathe, Savannah. Not while I still have power in my name.”
His voice changed after that—back to steel, to power, to blood and fire.
He called in a name I didn’t expect to hear: my brother.
My half-brother. A world-class neurosurgeon.