POV: Carmen → Marco
I don’t warn Marco because I want his permission.
I warn him because timing matters, and because death—real death, not the symbolic kind men like us trade in—has a way of rippling outward if it isn’t anticipated. Arianna Ricci has crossed the line where survival is possible. She just hasn’t realized it yet.
We meet in a place that isn’t neutral but isn’t intimate either. An old municipal archive repurposed into a temporary command site, all stone corridors and echoing ceilings. History stacked in boxes along the walls, the weight of forgotten decisions pressing in from every direction. It feels appropriate. This is where records end, not where stories begin.
Marco is already there when I arrive, standing near a window that doesn’t open, staring out at a city he can’t touch from here. He doesn’t turn when he hears my footsteps. He doesn’t need to. We’ve reached the stage where pretense wastes energy.
“She’s running out of space,” I say, skipping greeting entirely.
He nods once. “I know.”
Good. That means we can be precise.
I move closer, placing my tablet on the table between us. I don’t open it. The information isn’t the point. The conclusion is.
“Arianna will die soon,” I tell him calmly. “Either by your hand, or by the Consortium’s.”
That finally makes him turn.
There’s no shock in his expression. No anger. Just a tightening around the eyes, the look of a man who has already reached the end of a calculation and is waiting for confirmation.
“They won’t let her live,” I continue. “Not now. She’s too visible, too compromised. She’s useful only as long as she destabilizes us. The moment she stops being efficient, she becomes evidence.”
“And if I move first?” he asks.
“Then you deny them the spectacle,” I answer. “You control the fallout. You close the loop.”
He exhales slowly, hands braced on the table. “You’re telling me this isn’t a question anymore.”
“No,” I say. “It stopped being a question the moment she tried to sell you.”
Silence settles between us, dense but not hostile. This isn’t a moral debate. Arianna’s choices burned that bridge long ago. This is about sequence. About minimizing collateral.
“She’ll try to force a confrontation,” I add. “She believes proximity still gives her leverage. She’ll want to be seen. Heard.”
Marco’s mouth tightens. “She always did.”
“She’s already dead,” I say gently. “She just doesn’t know which version yet.”
He looks at me then—not defensively, not challengingly. Searching. “And you?”
“What about me?”
“Do you want me to do it?” he asks.
I consider the question carefully. Not because it’s difficult, but because it deserves honesty.
“I want it done cleanly,” I say. “Without noise. Without mythology. She doesn’t get to become a martyr.”
A flicker of something passes through his gaze—regret, perhaps, or the ghost of an old affection that no longer has a place to land.
“I understand,” he says.
I nod. That’s all I need.
There’s nothing more to say from my side. The warning has been delivered. The future is already moving. I turn to leave, pausing only briefly at the doorway.
“When it happens,” I add, “you don’t come looking for absolution.”
He meets my eyes. “I won’t.”
Good.
—
POV: Marco
The moment Carmen leaves, the room feels emptier—not lonelier, just stripped of illusion.
I stand there for a long time after the door closes, replaying her words not for content but for certainty. She didn’t threaten. She didn’t plead. She stated an outcome. That’s how I know she’s right.
Arianna is already dead.
Not biologically—not yet—but strategically, existentially. She has no future that doesn’t end in silence. The Consortium doesn’t forgive failure. It doesn’t even acknowledge it. It erases and moves on.
And I won’t let them erase this on their terms.
I sit down heavily, hands folded in front of me, staring at the grain of the table. I think of Arianna as she was the first time I met her—sharp, brilliant, intoxicatingly confident. A woman who made ambition feel like intimacy. I also think of the last time I saw her smile, and how little warmth there was behind it.
She didn’t love me.
She loved the way I amplified her.
And I let her.
The acceptance doesn’t break me. It settles me. For months, I’ve been disentangling guilt from responsibility, emotion from obligation. This is the final knot.
I don’t call Luca immediately. I don’t issue orders. I sit with the truth until it stops trying to provoke me into reaction.
Arianna Ricci will not survive this war.
Whether I pull the trigger or sign the order is almost incidental. What matters is that it ends without chaos. Without legend. Without leaving room for her to be remembered as something she wasn’t.
She chose power over everything else.
She dies with that choice intact.
I stand and move to the secure console, opening the file marked with her name. The red flags are already everywhere—intercepted communications, failed negotiations, aborted escape routes. She’s been testing exits for weeks now. Every door she opens leads back to us or straight into Consortium hands.
She thinks she’s negotiating.
She’s being evaluated.
I authorize phase containment, my voice steady as I record the command. No personal notes. No qualifiers. Just execution parameters.
As I finalize the order, something inside me quiets completely.
This isn’t vengeance.
It’s closure.
Carmen was right. Arianna stopped being a living variable the moment she believed she could sell loyalty she no longer possessed. All that remains is logistics.
I don’t feel relief.
I feel inevitability.
And as the system confirms receipt of my command, one final thought crosses my mind—not of Arianna, but of the child Carmen holds, the future that exists because we didn’t let her burn everything down.
Arianna tried to erase tomorrow.
That is why she cannot be allowed to see it.
By the time I shut down the console, the decision is already moving beyond me, carried by systems that don’t care about past affection or old illusions.
Arianna Ricci is already dead.
All that remains is the timing.