No Mercy

No Mercy
I sat on the edge of my bed, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like myself.

No tears left. No strength left. No Camilla.

The silence pressed in on me like a vice, so thick I thought I might choke on it. My heart didn’t ache—it was worse than that. It felt hollow, scooped clean, like someone had reached into my chest and ripped out a piece I could never replace. A wound that would never stop bleeding.

Tomorrow would come, and she wouldn’t.

Tomorrow there would be no Camilla. No mischievous grin pulling at the corners of her lips when she was about to drag me into trouble. No ridiculous jokes. No serious words that always sounded too wise for her age, even when she was pretending to be grown before either of us actually were.

Just gone.

The thought made my chest seize. My eyes burned, and though I had already cried so much that my body felt dry, the tears still came. Hot. Angry. Unstoppable. I bit down on my lip hard enough to taste blood, but it didn’t stop them.

I didn’t just cry—I screamed.

The sound ripped out of me raw, jagged, shaking the walls of my room. I didn’t care if the whole damn house heard. I wanted them to hear. I wanted the entire world to feel this suffocating, unbearable ache in my bones.

I screamed again, louder, until my throat burned and my voice cracked. Then I buried my face in my pillow and screamed into the fabric, the words breaking free without permission.

“They’re going to pay.”

The words came again, muffled but sharp, until my voice was hoarse. “They’re going to pay!”

I kicked the sheets off me, rolled off the bed, and landed hard on the floor. The cold marble shocked through my skin, grounding me for just a second before the pain roared back in. My head hung low, my hair falling into my face, strands sticking to the wetness on my cheeks.

God, it hurt.

I pressed my palms into the ground until they stung, like maybe if I hurt myself enough on the outside, it would distract me from the cavern in my chest. It didn’t. Nothing could.

Memories attacked me all at once.

Camilla and I as little girls, sneaking into my mother’s vanity and smearing lipstick all over our faces. Her laughing so hard she snorted, and me shoving her playfully because she looked like a clown.

Us hiding in the garden behind the fountain, whispering secrets about boys we thought were cute, and making promises—always promises—that we’d never let anyone or anything come between us.

The nights we stayed up too late, sprawled on her bed, scrolling through Instagram and pointing out the most ridiculous wedding dresses, swearing that when our time came, we’d walk down the aisle in gowns that were nothing short of iconic.

I laughed then—except it wasn’t a laugh. It was a sound born from pain, sharp and wrong, twisting my face into something I didn’t recognize. A sound that made my chest clench tighter because there was nothing funny about it.

Nobody would ever understand what this felt like. Not Alessandro with his cold commands, not my father with his barked orders, not even Rosetta or Julia, even though they loved her too. This grief wasn’t something you could share. It wasn’t something that dulled when you split it between people.

It was mine.

Mine to carry.

Mine to drown in.

And the worst part? No matter how much I screamed, no matter how much I cried, nobody—nobody—was ever going to bring her back.

I slammed my fists against the floor, once, twice, three times until my skin split. The sting barely registered. My body shook as sobs ripped through me again, this time shameless, broken, loud. My breath hitched so hard it felt like I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t stop.

She was gone.

Gone.

Gone.

I curled into myself, forehead pressed against my knees, rocking back and forth like some part of me believed I could rock away the grief. My tears soaked through my pajama pants, my breath hot against my skin.

“She was supposed to be with me forever,” I whispered to no one, my voice breaking. “She was supposed to stand beside me at my wedding. She was supposed to be my kids’ godmother. She was supposed to… she was supposed to…”

The words died because I couldn’t finish them. Because the supposed-to’s would never happen now.

The hollow inside me deepened until it felt like a black hole, dragging everything down with it. My happiness. My hope. My future.

And then, slowly, that darkness shifted.

Grief didn’t leave—it never would—but something else seeped in around it. Hotter. Sharper. Stronger.

Rage.

I sat up slowly, wiping at my swollen eyes with the back of my hand. My chest still ached, but underneath it was a simmering fire that made my pulse quicken.

“They will pay.”

This time my voice wasn’t a scream. It wasn’t broken or ragged. It was quiet. Low. Deadly. The kind of promise that sank into your bones and rooted there, unshakable.

Whoever did this, whoever ripped Camilla out of my life, would pay with their blood.

I didn’t care who it was.
I didn’t care how powerful they thought they were. I would tear the world apart piece by piece until I found them.

I stood, my knees shaky, and stumbled to my dresser. The girl in the mirror barely looked like me—eyes red and swollen, cheeks streaked with salt and mascara, hair tangled like I’d just come back from a storm.

But behind all that? I saw something else.

A hardness that hadn’t been there before.

A girl who had been broken—and was already starting to weld herself back together in fire.

My hand curled into a fist on the wooden dresser.

I thought of Camilla’s laugh. The way her eyes lit up when she was plotting something ridiculous. The way she used to squeeze my hand so tightly when she was scared, pretending she wasn’t.

I thought of her lying still on that hospital bed, her skin cold, her blood all over me.

I thought of the gurney wheels squeaking as they wheeled her away.

And I knew.

Grief would not be the end of me.
This hollow would not consume me.

It would fuel me.

Because the only thing worse than living without Camilla was letting her death mean nothing.

I pressed my forehead against the mirror, whispering the vow again, my breath fogging the glass.

“They must pay,”

For a long time, I just stood there, listening to the silence of the mansion. Somewhere down the hall, footsteps echoed faintly—probably Alessandro, always lurking, always watching. My father, no doubt waiting for me to “behave,” to fit neatly back into the box he always tried to shove me into.

But I wasn’t the same girl I had been yesterday.

Something in me had snapped in that hospital room. Something I couldn’t put back together, even if I wanted to.

Tonight I would grieve.

Tonight I would scream until my throat was raw.

Tonight I would promise her, over and over again, that this wasn’t the end.

Not for me.

Not for her memory.

But tomorrow, I would start hunting.

And by the time I was done, the people responsible for Camilla’s death wouldn’t just regret it.

They’d beg for mercy.

Mercy I would never give.