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‘Don’t fucking touch her!’ Dornan yelled at his father. ‘I’m about to shoot my fucking wife,’ he choked out. ‘Give me a goddamn minute, will you?’
Emilio fixed his son with a hard glare. ‘You’ve got five minutes,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Then you’re on your own.’
CHAPTER FORTY
DORNAN
Emilio was gone. John was dead. The boys had all cleared out, taking an unconscious Juliette and a crazed Jason with them. It was just Dornan and Mariana, locked in a room together. They were ending exactly as they’d begun, only this time there was a dead man lying on the floor between them, a man they’d both loved dearly at one time in their lives. A man who Mariana had just spent the past few moments trying to save.
But there were some things that were beyond repair. A bullet in the brain, for example. John was dead. He’d been dead since the moment Jason planted a bullet in his skull. Now Mariana was standing again, only this time she was covered in John’s blood.
‘Hurry up,’ Mariana said, her eyes full of tears, her entire body shaking violently. ‘Just do it. Just kill me!’
Dornan was crying now, too. The shock was starting to dissipate, and the rage along with it. Now he just felt a hollow ache inside, that familiar emptiness that defined his existence. He’d killed John. Juliette was almost dead. And his wife stoodin front of him, begging him to kill her, and he couldn’t bear to end her life like this.
He still loved her. Despite the treachery, the betrayal, the lies, he loved her. He would always love her.
‘I don’t want to kill you,’ he rasped. ‘I want to save you. I want you to run.’
‘No,’ she protested. ‘No, Dornan.’
‘You have five minutes,’ he said to her, his hand coming to rest on her cheek. His fingers burned where their skin met.
She was sobbing. Hysterical. ‘What if I don’t run?’
He shrugged, his own eyes burning with regret. ‘Then I take you back to Emilio, and he can do whatever he wants to you.’
Her sobs stilled. She looked up at him, her eyes wide, hands thick with John’s blood. The sight made him bitterly jealous, for no good reason. John was dead; he was gone. But blood had been their thing, the thing that bound Dornan and Mariana together, from the very first time he’d bandaged her wounds all those years ago.
‘Did you ever really love me?’
She slapped him across the face, hard. Enough so that he tasted blood. How did somebody as small as his Mariana slap him so he bled? The taste of his own blood set off something primal, and he growled, grabbing her wrist and twisting it until she cried out.
She ripped her hand away and stepped back. ‘Of course I fucking loved you. I loved you so much I thought I would die. Don’t you know the things I did for you? For us?’
All he saw was her with John. It consumed him until he thought he might go totally insane.
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Enlighten me.’
She shook her head, laughing mirthlessly. ‘You stupid bastard,’ she said. ‘I loved you until the end. I loved you even after I saw what you did to Stephanie. What you did to your own son. I still loved you.’
He nodded, his throat tight. ‘So what was it, then? The thing that destroyed us?’
She straightened, took a step back. ‘Youknow.’
And it was true, he did know. He’d killed their child. Hurt her so much, it had died and bled away.
This was his fault.
‘It was always going to end like this,’ she whispered, tears dripping onto her dirty cheeks. Her words stunned him, physically, to the point that he had to step back to keep his balance.
‘Like what?’ he asked.
‘With blood. We started with blood, and that’s how we ended.’
‘Is this what this is?’ he asked sadly. ‘The end?’ He’d been so fucking happy when he married her. It was the first day he’d truly been able to say that she was his and not his father’s. But now, looking at the weeping mess in front of him, the traitor, the seductress who’d been lying to him all this time, Dornan Ross had to wonder – had she ever been his at all?
‘Yes,’ she said, looking down at John. His eyes were still frozen open, unseeing. It wasn’t fair.
