The rain didn’t stop.

It fell in sheets, pounding against the roof of the abandoned cathedral like war drums. Shadows flickered from the candlelight inside, but the warmth was gone.

Luciano stood silent by the broken altar, his gun in hand.
Serena stood beside him, her fingers stained with ink and blood—pages torn from her notebook clutched in her fist like prophecy.

“This is where it ends,” she whispered.
“This is where he dies.”

They had tracked Lorenzo’s trail to the cathedral—his final stronghold. No guards. No traps. Just a single message carved into the front door:

"Family is the deepest betrayal."

Luciano stared at the words.

“He’s waiting for me,” he said.

Serena’s grip tightened on the pages.

“No. He’s waiting for us.”

Inside, Lorenzo stood under the fractured cross, a drink in one hand, a gun resting casually at his side.

“I always knew,” he said, looking at them. “That you two would end me.”

“You ended yourself,” Luciano growled. “When you made her your target.”

Lorenzo’s eyes darkened as they landed on Serena. “She was never just a target.”

He stepped forward, slower now—older, broken.

“She was the ghost of the man I could’ve been. The life I never lived.”

Luciano raised his weapon.

“Then say goodbye to it.”

Lorenzo laughed softly.

“You think killing me will fix everything? You think blood is enough?”
He turned to Serena.
“He’ll hurt you. One day, he’ll become me.”

Serena’s voice came like a knife.
“Then I’ll write a different ending.”

She stepped forward and dropped the bloodstained pages at Lorenzo’s feet.

“That’s your legacy now,” she said. “You’ll never be remembered as a king. Only as a cautionary tale.”

Lorenzo’s smile faded.

Luciano pulled the trigger.

One shot.

No hesitation.

Lorenzo De Luca dropped to his knees, then to the floor.

And with that—

The war ended.

Outside, dawn broke over the city.
The rain had stopped.

Luciano and Serena walked away from the cathedral in silence, the weight of generations behind them.

At the safehouse, she wrote the final line of her notebook:

“He gave me ink. I gave him blood. Together, we rewrote fate.”

Luciano walked in, bruised and silent. He saw the page. Saw her.

And for the first time, he dropped to his knees in front of her.

“I’m not a good man,” he whispered.

“I never asked for one,” Serena said, pulling him close. “I asked for the truth. And you gave it to me.”

He buried his face in her stomach, and for a brief moment—

The devil cried.