Demetrio's POV
Forty-eight.
I stood at the front of the conference room and looked at the list projected on the wall and did not look away from it, because looking away would have been easier and easier was not what the list deserved.
Forty-eight names. Out of the hundred and twenty people who had arrived at my father's estate for my sister's wedding reception. Fathers and mothers. A husband who had been found in the garden trying to shield his wife. Three children, which was the number that produced the specific cold that bypassed every professional register and arrived somewhere fundamental.
The attack had not been indiscriminate.
The Bratva soldiers had moved through the estate with the targeting efficiency of people who had been given a layout and a priority list, and the forty-eight had been in the wrong position at the wrong moment, which was the specific cruelty of well-executed violence, the way it distributed its cost among people who had simply been present.
