No flowers for the dead - Chapter 12: Chapter 12

The meeting point was an abandoned airstrip outside the city. Cracked tarmac. Dying floodlights. Silence thick as dust.
Elias stood alone in the center of it, wind biting through his coat, jaw locked like steel.
No gun.
No backup.
Only one thing in his pocket—a photo. The one she loved. Them, barefoot on the beach in Amalfi, her laughter caught mid-motion, his eyes on her instead of the camera.
The only thing real in a life that had been manufactured in marble and blood.
Headlights broke through the dark.
A black SUV rolled to a slow stop thirty feet away.
From the passenger side, a man stepped out—older, silver-haired, sharp as cut glass. Elias recognized him.
His uncle.
The real puppeteer behind his father’s throne.
“I told them this would happen,” the man said casually, approaching with his hands behind his back. “You fall in love with a girl like her, and suddenly you think your bloodline doesn’t matter.”
“She’s not just some girl.”
“No,” his uncle said. “She’s the bullet you’re willing to take.”
A smile. Cold. Cruel.
“We took her to show you the edge. To remind you what you’re gambling.”
“I’m not gambling,” Elias said. “I’m done. With all of you. With the board. With the name.”
“And yet here you are. Still playing the game.”
“You have until sunrise,” Elias said flatly. “Then I make my next move.”
His uncle chuckled. “What? You’ll kill us all?”
“I’ll do worse,” Elias said. “I’ll make us irrelevant.”
That made the smile vanish.
“Where is she?” Elias asked.
“She’s safe. For now. But safety is temporary. Influence is permanent.”
“Then let me make something permanent,” Elias growled. “You touch her again, and I dismantle everything. I will go to war with myself if I have to. You want to see what I become without her? Try me.”
The man studied him for a long moment. “You sound just like your mother before she disappeared.”
Elias’s breath caught. The scar of that name still fresh after all these years.
“You’re bluffing,” his uncle said at last. “You won’t destroy what she helped build.”
“I already started,” Elias said.
He turned and walked away.
Didn’t look back.
Because the next time they crossed lines—it wouldn’t be to talk.
⸻
Back at the estate, Alina knew something had shifted.
The woman brought no food that night.
Only silence.
The kind that slithered under the door.
And then, in the early hours of dawn—when even fear slept—she heard it.
Footsteps.
Slow. Deliberate.
And then the soft click of a lock turning.
A door opening.
And a voice.
“Time to go.”