Page 39 of The Bond

“No, you don’t. Enzo and I have been trying to end this war. Trying to achieve peace for months. You’re the one who’s continued it. You have kept the violence going all this time.” I thought about my dream of going legitimate. The future that I wanted for my children. It would be a permanent end to the bloodshed. A path to pace. A brand new beginning for all of us where no one had to get hurt anymore. Now, in the face of death, I saw just how badly I wanted that dream to succeed.

“Shut your mouth,” Dave barked.

For a moment I was so scared, I considered shutting up, but I was too horrified by what he had confessed to me. “You really thought you were going to get away with this. Well, you thought wrong. Someday, all of this is going to catch up to you. The same way our terrible choices caught up to us.”

“First of all, nobody gives a shit if a bunch of mobsters wind up dead,” Dave said with a roll of his eyes as he resumed smoking. “You’re the scum of the earth and no one respectable would miss you. But even if anybody cared, I made sure that every attack just looked like another battle in your war. If the cops bothered to look, they’d conclude that you and the De Lucas had started fighting again. Nobody would pin it on me, the lowly driver.”

My heart sank. He was right. We definitely couldn’t depend on the police or the FBI to help us. While we might be able to bribe law enforcement to look away, they wouldn’t come to our aid unless something far more valuable than money was on the offer. Nobody rescued people like us. Time and time again we had to rescue ourselves.

“You don’t have to keep this going,” I said. “You’ve taught us a lesson. A painful one. We’re sorry for everything that we’ve done to you. There never should have been any bystanders getting hurt. And when there were, we should have tracked all of you down and paid your medical bills. We failed you, Dave.”

“I’m not letting you go, Valentina, so you can drop the act,” he said.

“Please. I want to make up for things,” I said, meaning it. “We’ll pay off your medical debt. Set you up financially for life.”

“I don’t want your blood money,” Dave said in a deceptively soft tone.

“Please forgive us,” I said, a tear sliding down my cheek. “We wronged you.”

“You did. And on top of all that, you wouldn’t fucking die,” Dave said, his voice a low menacing growl. “No matter what I did, you just kept surviving. After I shot your father and managed to escape, I thought at least Enzo would let the old man bleed out. Same way I thought one of you would let the other drink poison. And during that fire...I’m guessing Enzo lived because of you. You saved him, right?”

“I wasn’t going to let him die,” I answered, my heart clenching.

“At first, I thought it would be easy to kill you because even if I messed up somewhere, you’d each let the other die,” Dave said, looking right through me. “But you kept saving each other. I couldn’t figure out why in the beginning. Then at the wedding shootout, it hit me.”

“We love each other,” I said.

“Yeah.” Dave smiled. Actually smiled. His eyes lit up and everything. “Such a touching romance. Two enemies finding love. Real shame that you two lovebirds have to die.”

“No. No.” I shook my head, refusing to believe that this would be Enzo’s reward for loving me. His reward for extending forgiveness to my father, even though Papa didn’t deserve it. “Do what you want with me but you leave Enzo out of this. Let him be!”

“No can do, Valentina,” the driver said, dropping what remained of his cigarette. “That’s why you’re here.”

Dread clawed its way down my spine. I could very well guess what he meant, but I couldn’t bear to face it. “What are you saying?”

“Thing is, the only way to get rid of you two is to separate you,” he responded. “Instead of relying on you to turn on each other, I do the opposite. Get one of you to try to save the other. Set a trap.”

“No. Don’t hurt him!” I cried out.

“You’re the bait,” Dave said with a gleeful laugh that chilled me down to the bone. “I make a call, tell him you’re in trouble, and give him directions to the warehouse to come save you. And you know he will because he can’t help it, even though it’s an obvious trap. Love makes people do irrational things.”

“Don’t tell him where I am,” I pleaded in anguish. “Just kill me. Leave him be. Let him live. Let him finally live.”

Violence had been all Enzo had ever known. Once he’d risked everything to try to leave the mafia. Once he had dreamed of freedom.

Together, we would have had a chance at really living. At making his dream a reality. Rather than cling to the shadows, we could have finally stepped into the light. But that wasn’t meant to be for me. Despite my abject terror, I would face my own end with dignity if I had to. What I refused to accept was that Enzo would never know true freedom.

How dare this man try to take that from my husband. How dare this man try to steal my husband’s life before it really got started.

I had originally wished I could use my phone to contact Enzo for help, but now, I was grateful that I hadn’t been able to make that phone call. Somehow, I had to stop him from getting in touch with Enzo. I just had to.

“It’s nice to have you finally begging,” Dave said with a sneer. “After everything, I have the power now.”

That was what this was about. As much as Dave wanted revenge for his wife’s death, for his heartbreaking circumstances, what he truly wanted was power. Now, after all this time, I could see how corrupting power could be. It blinded people from the truth. The truth right in front of them. The truth of their fragility. The truth of their own mistakes. After all, it had blinded my father, making him think he could never be wrong. Papa had refused to trust what I was telling him. Now lust for power was corrupting Dave. Blinding him to the truth that all this destruction wasn’t going to set things right.

Dave had started out wanting justice, somewhere along the way it had turned into doling out the very violence he had originally condemned. An innocent bystander was turning into us. Hardhearted, cruel, vengeful, misguided. He was making the exact same mistakes I had made until I learned to love Enzo.

I’d never be able to make up for Dave’s loss. But there had to be a way to restore his life without any more bloodshed and destruction. First, I would save Enzo, and then maybe, I could get Dave to accept an olive branch. For all our sakes.