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“NYPSD! Halt! Halt, goddamn it or I’ll shoot you in the fucking back. I swear to Christ.”
The woman stopped, turned slowly. “That would be just like you.”
She stared into her mother’s face, watched the blood run in thin rivers from the gaping wound across her throat.
“You’re already dead.”
“I just look that way. How many times do you have to kill me before you’re happy?”
“McQueen killed you. I’d’ve put you in a cage, but you’d still be breathing.”
“I’d be alive if you’d minded your own.”
She had been minding her own, Eve realized. But why explain?
Even in dreams Stella would never comprehend.
“That’s an old tune, Stella. I’m bored with it. Put the kid down.”
“Why should I? You know what this little bitch is worth to the right people? I’ve got to get by, don’t I? You don’t know what it’s like now, here. It’s hell here. I lived through it. What do you think made me what I am?”
“I lived through it.” Mira stood beside Eve, spoke quietly. “So many of us did. She made her choices, Eve, just as I did, just as you did. You know that. Nothing made her. She made herself.”
“What the hell does she know? Fucking shrink with her fancy clothes, fancy ways. She just wants to fuck you over, like everyone else. I’m the one who carried you inside me. I made you.”
Mira barely spared Stella a glance. “You know the truth, and you know the lie. You always have. Say it to me, say the truth.”
“I made myself.”
“Yes. Yes, you made yourself, and did it despite her. She never controlled you, not where it matters. Why do you let her control you now, even here?”
“I can’t. It has to stop.”
“Make it stop,” Mira urged her. “Make it end. Make a choice.”
“Put the kid down, Stella, and walk away. Stay away.”
“You can’t stop me. Put a bullet in me, go ahead. I’ll just come back. And maybe I’ll snap her neck first. It’s easy, all those soft bones. I thought about snapping yours. Whining, crying brat, just like this one.”
“You left me with him instead, so he could beat me, rape me, torment me. But I got through it.”
“By killing. The blood’s still on your hands. Richie’s blood. My blood.”
“I can live with it.” That was the answer, wasn’t it? She could live with it. “Put her down.”
“What do you care?” Stella closed a hand over the soft, tiny neck.
Eve started forward, to end it, and the baby cried out.
“Das!”
Bella. Mavis’s Bella, with tears streaming, her arms held out.
On a hot spurt of fury, Eve pressed the barrel of the gun to Stella’s forehead. “Let her go, you bitch, or I’ll splatter your brains on the sidewalk.”
“She’s nothing to you.”
“They’re all something to me. Mira, take the kid.”
