Prologue: The Last Cigarette
The alley reeks of wet asphalt and copper. Valentina Moretti is already soaked—rain, sweat, blood—when she straddles her uncle’s twitching corpse. His eyes are still open, glassy with shock, mouth frozen in the middle of begging. She doesn’t care. The adrenaline is a live wire in her veins, pooling hot and vicious between her thighs.
She grinds down once, hard, dragging her soaked cunt along the cooling fabric of his trousers. The friction is brutal, obscene, perfect. A low, broken moan tears from her throat as she rocks again, chasing the edge she’s been riding since the first bullet punched through his chest. Her free hand fists his blood-slick shirt; the other still grips the warm Sig she used to end him.
She comes fast—sharp, punishing, silent except for the ragged hitch of her breath. Her hips stutter, thighs clamp tight around his lifeless hips, and she rides the aftershocks while staring into his dead face. No remorse. Only release. Only power.
When the spasms fade, she exhales shakily, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out his gold lighter. The flame flares bright against the dark. She lights the last cigarillo he’ll ever own, draws deep, lets the smoke curl into her lungs like a lover’s tongue.
“No more mercy,” she whispers to the rain, voice wrecked and reverent. “No more fucking anyone who doesn’t bleed for me first.”
She stands, smooths her ruined suit jacket, steps over the body without looking back. Sirens are rising in the distance—too late, always too late.
Miles away, in the oldest cemetery in Queens, Sienna O’Malley kneels in the mud before her brother’s headstone. Rain plasters her red hair to her skull, soaks through her leather jacket, her thin tank top. Her knuckles are raw from punching concrete earlier; fresh blood mixes with the downpour.
She presses her forehead to the cold granite, one hand braced on the stone, the other already shoved down the front of her jeans.
She’s furious. She’s grieving. She’s so goddamn alive it hurts.
Fingers circle her clit—rough, impatient—then plunge inside. She bites her lip until copper blooms on her tongue, matching the storm. Her hips jerk forward, fucking her own hand like it’s someone she can punish. Like it’s Valentina Moretti herself.
“I’ll ride their queen,” she snarls into the wind, voice cracking on a gasp as she curls deeper, thumb grinding hard. “I’ll ride her until she chokes on my name—until she begs for the Irish bitch who broke her.”
Lightning cracks overhead. Thunder rolls through her bones.
She comes with a choked sob—violent, shattering—thighs trembling, cunt clenching around nothing but her own rage. Tears mix with rain on her cheeks. She doesn’t wipe them away.
She pulls her hand free, licks her fingers clean, tasting salt and iron and herself.
Then she stands, sways once, and spits on the grave of the war that took her brother.
“Watch me burn it all down,” she promises the night.
Somewhere in the city, two women light their separate cigarettes with shaking hands.
Both already tasting blood.
Both already starving for the war—and the fucking—that comes next.
