Page 131 of Arrow

Somewhere outside, sirens wailed blankly into the night, fading in and out on swells of city wind. My uncle circled, reading the tension in the room like braille. He wanted to see if I could finish something. Wanted to know the measure of violence inside me.

“He’s the reason your mother’s dead,” my uncle whispered into my ear, like a lullaby. “He’s the reason our family bleeds.”

I knew it wasn’t true. At least, not all of it. The war between the Virellis and the Romanovs went back decades—bigger than me, bigger than Luca. But none of that mattered in this room. The truth didn’t live here.

Only power.

The blade caught the warehouse light. I was the quiet type—the observer. The kid at the back of the church with a pocket full of switchblades, waiting for the grown-ups to lose. I glanced at Luca.

He recognized it—the flicker of nerves—and he smiled with bloody teeth.

“Not so easy, is it, Romanov prince?”

He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t right, either. I wasn’t scared of the kill. I was scared of getting it wrong.

“Watch, nephew. Learn what happens to loyalty misplaced.”

Luca started coughing, and the sound was wet. Blood bloomed down his shirt in waves, each pulse another second he was losing.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, not sure if I meant it or not.

Luca smiled. Or tried to. “You don’t have to become him.”

“Do it,” my uncle commanded.

I stared at the knife.

He scoffed. “Still soft. Still your mother’s son.”

My uncle ripped the knife out of my hand and carved an R into Luca Virelli’s chest.

“I’m going to make your little brat of a sister suck my cock. I’m going to leave her alive just long enough that every time she says her name, she remembers it’s mine.”

“You motherfucker. I’ll fucking ki—” Luca said as my uncle slid the knife across his throat.

When you cut a man’s throat, it doesn’t explode like in the movies. It peels open with a silent red smile, and the body tries to talk, words gurgling out in punctuation instead of grammar.

For a moment, Luca’s good eye was pure crystal—no hate, no fear, just the surprise of it. His body jerked once in the chair, and then slumped forward, blood soaking through the ropes.

His eye—the one that was still open—stared at me even in death, like it was asking if I’d ever sleep again.

I wouldn’t.

Luca made it easy, in his way. He provoked it. Maybe that was his real talent. He died like he lived, with his throat wide open, looking for air where there was none.

Sleep didn’t come for a week. Not from the blood. Not even from my uncle’s cackling. But from the eye—that moment when death crosses into the body and something else looks back. You never forget it—the question it asks without speaking.

What I saw in Luca’s face after the light died . . . I never told anyone. Couldn’t afford to. Because admitting it would mean admitting my mother was really gone. That no amount of Virelli blood spilled in the dark would bring her back. That all these scars, all this violence . . . it was just me trying to fill a hole that couldn’t be filled.

My uncle exhaled like it had been a religious experience.

“There. You’ve seen it now. You’ve been baptized.”

I didn’t say anything.

He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “Next time, it’ll be you ending a Virelli’s life. That’s how you become a king.”

Looking down at Luca’s corpse, the truth was simple: I didn’t feel like a king.