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“Jesus,” he says quietly, shaking his head, a sneer on his lips. “Je. Sus.”
“Alistair!” I blurt as his hand drops from my neck and he steps away from me, unblinking, staring at me in horror and disgust. “Please! Let me?—”
“No, Eloise,” he hisses thinly. “Just…no. I don’t trust a single fucking thing that’s ever come out of your fucking mouth.”
It feels like both a slap in the face and punch to the stomach. I gasp for air, my eyes burning as I stare at him.
“Please—”
“This…” he growls quietly. “Whatever the fuck this was?” His jaw grinds. “It’s done. I was an idiot to ever trust you.”
“Alistair!”
He’s turning, striding across the room.
“Alistair!”
“Don’t ever fucking contact me again,” he hisses as he reaches for the doorknob. He stops and glares pure malice at me over his shoulder. “Needless to say, you’re fucking fired.”
He opens the door. And then, it’s like the whole world goes into frame-by-frame slow motion. I hear myself scream as if listening from another room as the gunshot explodes.
As Alistair wrenches sideways in a spray of blood and tumbles backward into the room.
As his white shirt quickly blossoms to red as he drops to the floor.
This isn’t happening.
It feels like my body is frozen; like my brain is numb, and reality has stopped making sense. I’m still staring at Alistair lying on the ground when Massimo steps into the room, a gun in his hand, flanked by five of his men.
Oh God.
My heart turns to ice as he smiles dangerously at me.
“What an age we live in,” he says with a sardonic grin on his lips. “Chicago, Illinois, right here on Central Park West.”
I bolt toward Alistair. Massimo’s men grab me and I try to scream but a hand slams over my mouth. I choke on my own breath as Massimo and his goons surround me, my heart jackrabbiting. Massimo’s eyes land on the letter and the will on the ground. He stoops to pick them up, his brows arching.
“My, my, my,” he muses quietly. His gaze slides from the documents in his hands to me. “I think we have a lot to talk about, don’t we…wife?”
Two of his men grab a motionless Alistair under the arms. I try to scream again, but a gag wraps tightly around my mouth.
A bag is yanked over my head.
And then all I know is darkness and fear.
34
ALISTAIR
My father used to talk a lot about “perspective”. He’d walk in on Gabriel and I fighting over a stupid video game or something, pull us apart, then sit us down and tell us we needed to see things from the other’s perspective.
“If you only view the world through your own eyes, you’ll miss out on some great views,” he’d tell us.
That’s what I find myself thinking about when I come to, lying flat on my back on a cold, hard floor.
Perspective.
Granted, my first “view” when my eyelids open is looking up at a grimy metal and concrete ceiling with two bare bulbs on wires hanging down, with no windows. So my initial “perspective” is that I’ve died and gone to Hell, which, for whatever reason, looks just like the set from one of the Saw movies.
