Page 125 of Entangled

Unsurprisingly, his wife didn’t talk or move.

Gian took another couple steps across the large back deck, closer to her position. “The only thing you ever wanted was to be free, wasn’t it? Something I couldn’t give you, but by no fault of my own. It was your games—your schemes—that got us here, and you thought you could play your way out of them again. Get me locked up for good, maybe. File a divorce then, when it couldn’t be contested and it wouldn’t matter anyway. You would have it all and the rest wouldn’t make a fucking difference.”

Still, he got no response.

Elena’s arm slipped off the arm of the wicker chair, falling out from beneath the blanket. Maybe it was the ashen tone of her skin, or the slackness in her opened hand, but Gian knew right then that something was very wrong.

He clicked the safety on his gun, and tucked it away, crossing the space between him and his wife in three short strides. He came around the front of the chair, already bending down to grab her by the shoulders.

Elena was conscious, but barely.

Glassy-eyed.

Slack-mouthed.

Discolored lips.

Gian’s hands skipped to her face, and he tipped her head up to make her dazed gaze lock on his. Still, her eyes wavered, flickering between whatever she was seeing and whatever was just beyond her reach. She was cold to the touch, but not quite a dead-cold. Her breathing turned shallower with each inhale and no matter how high Gian tipped her head, he couldn’t seem to clear her passageways.

“What did you do?” he demanded.

She smiled, chilling and fleeting. “This is even better, you get to be here. It doesn’t hurt me at all, but it will for you.”

What?

On her lap, two opened prescription bottles lay empty.

Gian’s gaze darted back to the ashy face of his wife. “Elena, what did you do?”

“He’d have f-forgiven me for everything,” Elena said, her voice barely breaking a whisper, “but not for what I did to you. He wouldn’t have forgiven me for hurting you—I had to make you hurt him instead. Don’t you see?”

“Who?” Gian demanded, holding her face tighter. “Who, Elena? Your father?”

What difference would that make, now?

Gabriel was dead.

She shook her head, though it was weak and faint, her eyes glassier than ever. “No.”

“Who?”

“And if I can’t be happy, Gian, then neither can you. Neither can you. I’ll take it all away—all of them.”

He swore he watched the life drain out of her eyes in that moment—how death crept in around her pupils, and darkened them for good. She almost felt colder in his hands in that moment, if it were possible. Perhaps it should have made him relieved, as his problem was gone, and she had done it to herself, but he only felt empty.

And lost.

Because who.

Who had she meant?

The empty prescription bottles clanged to the deck, and Gian broke out of his daze. He picked one up, just to look at it and see what exactly Elena had used to end her life. The strong painkiller was not what caught his attention first—it was the name written on the label, to whom the prescription had actually been prescribed.

Domenic Guzzi.

Two bottles.

Both empty.