Chapter 181 ~ Can This End?

Chapter 181 ~ Can This End?
{Daisy's POV}

We stayed on the ground for a while, all three of us, the tension in the room dropping just enough to breathe in without it hurting.

Roman Volkov lay a few feet away. Still. Not breathing. Dead.

I still couldn't fully process that. My brain kept circling back to it like it needed the repetition to make the fact stick — dead, actually dead — because thirty seconds ago he'd been standing there in total, absolute control of everything in this room, and now he was just a shape on the floor.

Aria knelt nearby, crying. Bitter, quiet tears, shoulders shaking. It would have been easier to make sense of if she weren't his daughter. She was. And the man she'd just shot twice, killed with her own hands, was lying exactly where he'd fallen.

I blinked several times, half expecting the scene to rearrange itself into something less impossible.

It didn't.

Alexandro sat slumped against the far wall, coughing, choking wetly around the wound in his side, still fighting to stay conscious. Bad. Genuinely bad. But better, somehow, than the man who wasn't moving at all.

Movement pulled my attention sideways.

My mother rose to her feet.

I watched her, confused, still holding onto DeLuca, as she crossed the room slowly and crouched in front of Volkov's body. Gentle. Calm, in a way that made absolutely no sense given everything I knew about the last several hours.

She reached out and cupped his cheek.

I didn't understand it, not fully, but something in the gesture read as a goodbye. Her expression carried no anger. No hatred. No fear, no disgust. Just a strange, quiet stillness, something underneath it I couldn't name.

Then she reached into her dress, drew out a small purse, and pulled something free from inside it.

A ring.

She opened his hand and placed it in his palm.

I stopped breathing for a second.

Because that ring looked exactly like what it was. A wedding ring. And seeing my mother place it there, gently, like a final closing of something, removed every last shred of room I'd left myself for doubt.

Roman Volkov was my father.

I ran through it all in my head, fast, methodical, the way you check a math problem you already know the answer to but need to prove anyway. The comments Volkov had made, over and over, each one I'd tried to dismiss. The Kinlock reading my own palm without hesitation, the door swinging open under my hand like it had been waiting for me my whole life. Every half-formed theory I'd refused to finish thinking.

None of it left room for doubt anymore. This did it completely.

I didn't feel a void. I want to be honest about that, because I kept waiting for one, some aching absence where a father should have lived, and it never showed up. I never knew him. My mother had told me he left when I was young, and that had been a lie, but even learning the truth now didn't create a hole shaped like him. Whatever he was — and I'd watched exactly what he was, tonight, in person — I hadn't missed it. I couldn't miss something that evil and call it loss.

Still, the weight of it sat there. Real. Heavy. Something I'd need more than the next five minutes to actually finish carrying.

My mother rose again, stepping back from his body.

Beside me, DeLuca groaned, and I turned my focus back to him, helping him rise as my mother moved to his other side to steady him too. He picked up the gun from the floor as he climbed to his feet, unsteady, breathing hard through the effort.

All of us standing now. Except Aria. Except Alexandro.

Tension coiled tight in the room again, because DeLuca had a gun in his hand and I genuinely didn't know what he intended to do with it. Alexandro, I understood. That felt almost inevitable. Aria, though — Aria had just saved us. If she hadn't come through that door when she had, DeLuca would already be dead. But she'd also spent months tearing down every ounce of trust I'd ever given her, and rebuilding it just enough to tear it down again. I didn't know what she deserved. I genuinely didn't.

I didn't get long to figure it out.

DeLuca raised the gun.

"No, please, no—"

He fired before I finished the sentence.

Alexandro's body dropped, limp, and DeLuca's hand shook slightly from the effort, weakened, still bleeding under my palm where I'd been pressing against the wound.

I flinched hard, and the air went taut with whatever came next.

"Come here."

My mother's voice.

I turned to find her looking at Aria, who slowly lifted her head at the sound, eyes red and swollen, sniffing.

"Come to me, dear."

Confusion flooded through me so fast I couldn't hold it in. "But Mom—"

"She's confused, Daisy," my mother said, cutting me off gently.

I stared, still tense, still completely lost, as Aria rose on shaking legs and started toward her.

"She might be tagged the enemy," my mother continued, "but let me speak to her. She saved us in that restraining room. That was real. I could tell."

Aria reached her, hesitant, tears still falling, studying my mother's face like she expected the warmth there to vanish at any second.

It didn't.

My mother pulled her in, one arm settling over her shoulder.

"What's your name, dear?"

"Aria." Her voice cracked. "My name is Aria, ma."

"Call me mother."

She said it so gently, so simply, that it took my brain several full seconds to catch up to what I'd just heard.

I had absolutely no idea what to make of any of it.



We moved as a group now — me and my mother supporting DeLuca between us, Aria walking close at our side, all of us pushing through the hallways in search of a way out.

I still didn’t know what to make of Aria bombing with us but then I was distracted from that as we moved. 

My mother had already shot two people since we left that room. Casually. Efficiently. Like flicking off a light switch. Aria carried a gun too, and so did DeLuca, despite barely being able to keep his footing, but it was my mother doing the actual work, dropping threats without so much as a change in her breathing.

I was supposed to be losing my mind over that.

I filed it away instead, next to everything else tonight had handed me that I didn't have room to process yet. There'd be time for a full meltdown about my mother's secret assassin skill set later. Right now, survival came first.

Volkov was dead. That fact hadn't slowed down the rest of his organization even slightly — gunfire still cracked somewhere in the distance, proof the fight raged on even without him at the center of it, just quieter now, more scattered.

Which was, honestly, the smaller problem.

The bigger one sat heavy in my chest the entire time we moved: none of Volkov's men scattered around the base knew yet that he was dead. The second they found out, whatever discipline still held them together was going to shatter into something far worse— grief curdling into rage, a whole organization suddenly hunting for someone to make pay for it. We needed to be gone, completely gone, before that particular storm broke loose.

We kept moving, cautious, hugging the edges of hallways that told their own quiet story of the battle that had swept through them— scorch marks along the walls, spent shell casings scattered across the floor, a body slumped near a doorway that none of us stopped to examine too closely.

My mother shot a man crawling weakly along the ground as we passed, one more, then kept walking like it hadn't happened at all.

We reached an opening that let out into the evening air, and for one brief, foolish second I let myself hope we'd made it. Then the sound of gunfire drifted toward us again, distant but real, and the hope shriveled right back down to caution.

We couldn't risk running straight into the bulk of Volkov's remaining men; the corrupted officers, the loyal soldiers, all of it still scattered somewhere out there.

So we moved slower. Scanned everything. Waited.

The gunfire thinned out gradually, spacing wider apart, less frantic. A lull, maybe. A window.

"We have a window," DeLuca said, voice tight with effort. "That corner. The northern gates. We go now."

We turned, following his lead, my mother and I still bracing him upright, Aria close behind, and I let myself focus entirely on the goal in front of us. Getting out. Getting everyone out.

We moved fast, quiet, careful.

Then everyone around me froze at once.

I only realized it a half-second after they did, my own steps stumbling to a stop as I looked past them to find out why.

A crowd of armed men stood ahead of us, blocking the path completely, guns already raised. At the front of them stood Nico— alive, apparently having survived the battle after all, with a genuinely alarming number of men still loyal to him.

And then, beside him, to my reoccurring shock, stood Lillian, my roommate.

Smiling.

Can this please end?