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The fire before us blazed high and I flinched back.
The stable doors thrust open and I caught Yves with a blanched expression, yelling amidst the chaos, “Zeno!”
“Get help!” I screamed, my throat raw. “She’s barely breathing!”
Without a second thought, Yves ducked into the stables, narrowly missing the flames. I yelled at him to not put himself in danger for me. My stubborn father didn’t listen. Coughing, he fell to his knees beside us, spotting a wounded Darla…and his dead son.
Our eyes met and his features twisted in pain.
“It was Benjamin. It was Benjamin all along,” I heaved, my words choppy. “Pierrot.”
Yves’s eyes widened and then pinched closed. He said a prayer under his breath and shook his head, like he too couldn’t believe it.
When his gaze opened again, it was laced with torment. “We need to get out of here before it’s too late,” he bellowed over the crackling fire. “Let me help you!”
He tried to reach for Darla and I went feral, unable to part from her.
“No!” I growled, utterly anguished. “Don’t touch my wife.” I clutched her weak body to my chest. A broken sob left me. “Don’t touch my Darla.”
My wife smeared her bloody hand over my cheek, catching the tear slipping out of my eye.
If she died, I’d take a gun to my chin and kill myself.
I refused to exist in a world without her.
“We’re running out of time, Zeno!” Yves grabbed my shoulder and shook me. “We need to leave now if you want to save her!”
I furiously jerked off my blazer, wrapping it around Darla to carry her out without her burning. “Stay with me, Darla.” I stood up on shaky legs and glanced down at her, pleading, “Don’t leave me.”
My wife had the innate habit of never listening to me.
I witnessed the exact moment the fight left her body.
CHAPTER 40
The Hill Women
Darla
When I was a young girl, Alberto often took me and my sister to the park to play in the afternoons. My favourite activity was to lie on the grassy field and stare up at the clouds dotting the blue sky while imagining animal and object shapes out of the white fluffs.
“Berto, what do youthink it feels like to be up there with theclouds?”
“I like to think, Miss Darla, that it feelsweightless. Like a feather floating in the air.”
Like a feather floating in the air.
Weightless.
That was how I felt when my eyes opened to blinding lights and a dry cotton mouth. A head-splitting ache welcomed me and for a brief moment, I thought I had crossed the gates of heaven and entered the afterlife.
Through a bleary gaze, I captured the faces of Diane, Dacia, Alberto, and…Zeno. All of them dozing off in their respective chairs in what seemed to be a hospital room.
Everything came rushing back.
Benjamin shooting me.
The stables catching fire.
