Leon stood in the alley, the phone still pressed to his ear, Nico's words echoing like a shot in his skull.
She's his daughter.
The cold air didn't bite hard enough. His heartbeat thundered. His mind spun. Images of Ayla—smiling, broken, defiant—flashed before him. And all this time, she was Viper's daughter? The man who butchered his father. The man who destroyed his childhood. The man Leon swore to kill, even if it meant burning the world to do it.
He staggered backward, resting his palm against the brick wall, the rage in his chest seething beneath his ribs like molten steel.
It couldn't be real.
He remembered Ayla's warmth. Her lips. The soft cries she gave in the dark when the nightmares came. He had seen her at her rawest, had kissed away her fears. Had taken her pain into his arms like it was his own.
And now… now she bore the blood of his greatest enemy.
His fingers clenched into fists.
"Leon," Nico's voice crackled through the phone, softer now, hesitant. "What are you gonna do?"
Leon didn't answer right away. He didn't know. Part of him wanted to storm the estate, drag her out, demand an explanation—even if she didn't know. Even if she was innocent. Another part wanted to vanish into the shadows, lock his heart back into the steel cage it had lived in before her.
But what hurt most was that he still loved her. Even now.
"I need to think," Leon muttered finally and ended the call.
He leaned back against the wall and let his head drop. The silence around him wasn't silence at all—it was the roar of betrayal he couldn't silence.
Minutes passed. Then an hour. And when he finally stepped into his car, he didn't drive away. Instead, he stared through the windshield at the glowing city lights and whispered to himself:
"If she knew… if she knew and never told me…"
The rest of the sentence never made it out.
He didn't want to imagine that kind of pain.
Not yet.