The driver's scream shattered the silence. Mia's head snapped up. Through the windshield, the grille of an eighteen-wheeler filled the entire world, headlights blazing white and merciless. The driver wrenched the steering wheel hard to the left, tires shrieking against wet asphalt, but it was already too late. The truck struck them with the force of a collapsing building. Metal screamed. Glass exploded inward. The sedan flipped, rolling once, twice, the world spinning into a roar of grinding steel and shattering bone before everything came to rest upside down in a cathedral of silence.
"Mom... Dad... elder brother."
The words fell from her lips like prayers. Fragments of memory surfaced through the pain: her mother's perfume, her father's voice at the head of a long table, Felix pulling her onto his shoulders when she was small enough to believe the world was kind. The images played again and again like a broken record, looping through the dark behind her eyelids.
She was faintly aware of the blood running down her shoulder, warm and steady, soaking into the crushed upholstery. Her fingers found her phone in the wreckage. She could barely see the screen through the blood in her eyes, but muscle memory guided her thumb to the contact she had not called in three years.
She pressed dial.
He picked up on the very first ring.
"What is it, Mia?" Don Vittorio Valducci's voice was stern, commanding, the voice of the most powerful man in the underworld. But beneath the authority, threaded so faintly that only a daughter would hear it, was concern. "How is it that you remember your father now?"
"D-Dad..." She could barely breathe. Each word cost her something vital, something she could feel draining out of her along with the blood. But she needed to say it. She had always needed to say it.
"Mia! Where are you?! What is happening?!"
"Dad, I a-am... s-so..." A wet, rattling cough tore through her chest. "...s-sorry to disa-appoint y-you and Mom. I love you all..."
The phone slipped from her fingers and clattered against the crumpled roof of the overturned car. The screen cracked. Her eyes drifted shut. She accepted death calmly, quietly, like an old friend arriving at the door. Not once did her fading thoughts turn to the people who had made her life so miserable.