That gentle voice still echoes in my mind like a cruel memory, a ghost of who he used to be:
"Baby, if you want the stars or the moon, I'll reach up and pull them down for you. What's a few stakes compared to that?"
I know now—what we had, it was real. Once. But people change. Hearts grow cold. And love? Love is never immortal. It can be killed just like anything else.
The boy who once held me like I was his whole world—he's long gone. Swallowed by time and ambition and the poison my sister dripped into his ear night after night.
Just as I ended the call, my phone lit up with a message from Colino.
[Calmed down yet? I've arranged the cemetery plot and paid for the funeral. Satisfied now? Stop testing my patience, Anneliese.]
Another one followed almost instantly:
[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.
Bold letters in the center screamed at me like a confession beaten out of a dying man:
Investments carry risk. All losses due to personal judgment errors are the client's own responsibility.
My mother's signature sat at the bottom. Her fingerprint pressed into the paper like a blood oath she never understood she was making.