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He doesn’t answer me. His stubborn silence digs under my skin.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” I seethe, “When someone leaves you. When you think they don’t care enough to stay, even when you might never see them again. Why would I be the one to leave, Sal, when all I did was beg you to stay with me?”
“We found the shoe you lost on the way over the wall,” he says, so coldly matter-of-fact.
“Should we play Cinderella? See if it fits?”
“Noctus told me you were hurt,” I interrupt, ignoring his taunting, desperate for him to hear the truth. “He said you needed me, and I believed him. He put me in the back of a car; I never went near the wall!”
I can see it in his eyes—there’s some part of him that wants to believe me so badly, but I don’t know how to convince the rest of him. He has to understand. He has to. I can’t have him right in front of me and lose him like this. Donny’s wife’s sobs grow more hysterical by the minute, filling the sudden silence that sweeps in between us.
“You’ll say anything to save them,” he says, so sure of himself. “Anything to take the path of least resistance. Spill the least amount of blood. Do you know how pathetic it is,” he asks, “that I know that, and I still want to believe you? What the hell did you do to me to make me like this—”
My hands slam into his chest, forcing us apart.
“I loved you.”
The words stop Salvatore in his tracks. The cold haze in his eyes has lifted like a fog as he stares at me. Only me. He does not see it when James slides up behind him with a pistol. My eyes give it away before I can even gasp. Salvatore reacts whip-sharp, like muscle memory. He grabs James’s arm over his shoulder, snapping the bone in one clean motion, faster than I can see. I stumble away from the sudden brawl.
A shot goes off. They both lose their hold on the gun, and it skitters across the ground.
Salvatore rips James over his shoulder by his broken arm, like he weighs nothing. The smaller man lands hard, the breath knocked out of him, his arm twisted at a sickening angle through his rumpled suit.
Life or death, both men reach, single-minded, for the lost gun—
They find it already in my hands.
An unspeakable power surges through me as I stare at them. For the first time in months, I am the only one holding the key to my future.
I walk up to them as if possessed.
I take aim. In a moment of blinding clarity and simple, cold resolve, I lift the gun and pull the trigger.
I don’t feel the shot. I don’t hear it.
I only see James slump, all the fight going out of him, his mouth open and eyes empty.
Salvatore’s fingers slowly unflex, dropping the dead man to the ground.
I stare down at the warm corpse.
I study him, though it is more to see a part of myself dying, bleeding out on the floor. I begged James to be my first, once. I never thought it would be this first.
My hands are numb, blood rushing like the crash of the ocean in my head. I feel the bewilderment in Salvatore’s dark stare. It burns me up a little. The path of least resistance my ass.
“You and my father both,” I say, softly, “you both think I could never do the things you do, when all I ever asked for was a reason.”
He’s staring at me as though he’s never seen me before as we come face to face again.
His silence burns. I can see him wrestling with the truth, even as it spills out red across the floor. This is for him. On instinct, I look him over. He wasn’t hit.
He reaches out and scrubs his thumb against my lip. It comes way bloody. The dull pain from James’s strike throbs under my skin, forgotten in the chaos. I pull his hand away. There are lives hanging in the balance, and a dead man bleeding on a polished floor. The danger is still all around us, and I have no time to untangle the mess of emotions I hold for this man.
“I thought…” he begins.
“You already told me what you think about me. Right or wrong, you were very clear about that.
Now deal with this,” I demand, gesturing toward my family, the hostages sweating and sobbing in the clutches of his men.
