Page 146 of Broken Crown

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out.

“Is that—” He took a halting step forward, then recoiled.

Our father’s throat yawning open like a grotesque second mouth. The blood-soaked steps. And me, standing over all of it with stained hands and an expression that I suspected was far too calm for the scene he’d discovered.

“Answer me!” He grabbed my arm, his fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. “What did you do?”

What did you do.

Not what happened.

What did you do.

The same question I’d answered for him three nights ago, standing in the wreckage of the ballroom with my father’s blood on my fists and a promise on my lips.

If I ever set eyes on you again, I swear to fucking God I’ll kill you.

Rafaello had been there when I’d said it. When he and three of my guards dragged me off our father’s broken body. Now he was looking at a man who kept his promises.

I met his eyes. Held them. Said nothing.

His eyes widened, the color draining from his face as he stepped back—not from the corpse at our feet. From me.

He released my arm as if the contact burned him and then staggered back, already reaching for his phone. “Security! Get me security at the main entrance—now!” he shouted into the phone, his composure shredded, his hand trembling as he pointed at me with the other. “Lock the building down. No one in or out.”

“Rafaello—”

“Don’t say a fucking word until I understand what I’m looking at.”

A sound from the street. A woman had stopped at the base of the steps.

She looked at the body.

At the blood.

At me.

The coffee cup she held hit the pavement, and she screamed. Not a gasp. Not a startled cry. A raw, full-throated scream that shattered the morning quiet and sent pigeons scattering from the eaves of the building.

“POLIZIA! AIUTO! C’È UN MORTO! POLIZIA!”

A man across the street turned. Then another. Then a cluster of people. Within seconds, a crowd formed at the base of the steps—phones out, faces twisted in horror, voices overlapping into a growing wall of noise.

“Oh God⁠—”

“Is he dead?”

“There’s so much blood⁠—”

“Someone call the police!”

“Look at his hands⁠—”

I looked at my hands again. Through the crowd’s eyes, I understood what they saw. A dead man on the steps. His son standing over him, drenched in his blood. A living confession.

Rafaello barked into his phone. Guards materialized from the building’s interior, fanning out across the entrance, trying to push the swelling crowd back.

But it was too late.