Chapter Thirty-Four Larissa
Chapter Thirty-Four
LARISSA
ASEISMIC WAVE OF pain and humiliation seizes me whole, awareness crushing me in its undertow as I study the weapon in my palm.
The force of its blow too much to stomach.
Unable to help the mewl that escapes me, my vision blurs as the level of his deceit makes itself known.
The weight of it imperceptibly light where it lies in my hand, even as the gravity of it levels me.
The reality of it unmistakably clear—he was never with me.
Not once.
Images of us that day and the days after start to swarm me, the view he gave me in that firelight igniting the fuse directly connected to my seizing heart—which detonates instantly. Unable to absorb the blow, I free my tears, powerless to mask my surprise at the length and depth of his deception.
For several sobering blinks, I allow him to witness his deserved win, granting his victory before seizing that pain altogether. Sweeping every drop back toward me to forge the fire that fuels me to take the last inevitable step over his battle line.
“Now this”—I close the bottle in my hand, unable to stand the sight of it—“is your point,” I commend, voice shaking as I will myself to continue.
“Play the guarded, jaded hero—though let’s be honest, that came naturally.
Make her earn your trust. Intrigue her. Appeal to her morality.
Play on her attraction, amp it up, use her jealousy. ”
I grip the tiny bottle, knuckles whitening around it despite my cool delivery. “Make her come as hard as possible. Convince her it’s some grand push-and-pull romance. Give her just enough to win her heart and trust, until she gives you every key to her father’s kingdom.”
Tossing the newly crushed bottle like the grenade it is at my feet, I lift my glistening eyes to his, allowing him to see the truth. “And when she’s given you every last drop of intel, take her out with the rest of the trash.”
My insides rattle as he stands at the ready, intent on destroying what’s left of me. “So, you finally realized it was real for me.” I tilt my head. “The question is when.”
His face remains blank as I realize why he fought it, us, so hard before finally playing into it, more so, using it.
“I was always going to die, wasn’t I?” I conclude as a rogue cough escapes me. The tightening in my chest unbearable. “It was just a matter of when.”
If his silence wasn’t damning enough, the visceral rage rolling from him due to his fallen brother remains the shift that changed the whole of his game.
As I study his resolute, soulless second face, a side of him I’m well acquainted with, I curse my stupidity in not trusting my gut and believing it all along.
As he watches me recognize it, he lifts his gun, indicating I do the same.
“I’m your enemy, Larissa. Point your gun at your fucking enemy. ”
“No,” I whisper as I allow my tears to fall, to fuel my own resolve. “Because you have never, not once, been mine.”
His eyes flicker in confusion before again going metal as I release myself—and the truth he’s continually refused me to bear at every turn.
“Well played, Marine,” I commend through a lifeless laugh. “So well played. A foolproof plan … You succeeded on every count. But do you want to know how I would have played it … hypothetically?”
Distant shouts start to ring out just beyond the tree line, but I step forward anyway, knowing he’s behind his trapdoor while absorbing every word.
“Hypothetically,” I say, my voice foreign to me as I strengthen it and begin speaking my truth.
“If I were capable of being a normal teenage girl, I’d have been listening to my friends at the Asheville mall that day, not trying to formulate some way to hide my bruises before we got to the pool and to escape that fucking house. ”
Throat burning, I manage to speak through the threatening tickle.
“I’d have tuned into their conversation, not searched for a way to escape my life since my brother left. My only ally losing his own battle, doing my father’s bidding. Becoming his trained killer and my brother’s replacement. The brother who left me and our helpless brother trapped in hell.”
“Pathetic, weak fucking whore, you will die for this,” Ciro spits, still struggling with his bindings. His wrath and words utterly meaningless in comparison to the pain recently inflicted by the man standing opposite me.
“Had I been a normal girl, I wouldn’t have been searching that crowd at the mall for something, anything to help me escape that hell.
Contemplating ending my own life seconds before I noticed the most beautiful man I’d ever laid eyes on walking out of that jewelry store, and his tattoo.
A tattoo exactly like the one I saw freshly inked on my brother the night he disappeared.
The one my fingernails dragged along as I begged him not to desert us.
Not to leave us in the dark, creepy house, within reach of my father’s special friends.
The friends who raped his oldest son while he looked the other way. ”
“Lies, all lies,” Ciro snarls. It’s with his easy, dismissive denial that I snap, rearing back and striking him so hard with the Beretta that I know I’ve silenced him for good.
I mute the shouts growing louder while purging enough of that pain-fueled fire inside to lock eyes with the answer to my prayer that day.
The man I followed from that mall all those years ago—my beacon of hope. My light. My way out.
“If I were typical, I wouldn’t have followed him to Triple Falls that day and the days after.
Skipping school while trying to gather the courage to ask him about the mark and the whereabouts of my brother.
But by following him, watching him, I saw, understood why Roc got the mark …
felt something I’d long lived without—hope.
Understood that he found a purpose to redeem himself for the evils he’d been exposed to.
The evils he’d done. So I followed you, and through that soundless window, I understood, too, why my brother left—because it meant another way.
A better way. A life in the light. In seeing it, understanding it, I thought maybe it could be my and Ignacio’s way out.
Maybe the beautiful man I saw walking out of that jewelry store with his face so full of hope, so obviously in love,” I barely manage, “could help us, show us the way.”
As a barrage of panicked voices grow closer, I keep going, breaking with every word even as they ring clear and true.
“If I were normal, maybe my infatuation would have ended there. Died over time. But it didn’t.
Instead, I only became more fascinated as I learned everything about him from afar.
Witnessed every milestone, the birth of every scar.
Watched him grieve for the love he lost as he continually sacrificed his life for his country.
Protecting those he loved, all the while raising his newly adopted son.
I admired him so much that for long years, it kept my own darkness away. ”
Tyler’s demeanor shifts, but I ignore whatever the movement might mean as I force myself to continue.
“Over time, maybe I would train to become worthy of the attention of a man like him. Fierce. Protective. Skilled, loyal, and patient. Until the right opportunity presented itself to finally meet him face-to-face. And if, by chance, I was dragged back into the darkness—and he was in danger of being taken with me—I’d protect him too, no matter what cost to myself.
And if fate saw fit to grant that chance, then, and only then, would I allow that enamored seventeen-year-old girl to peek her heart out and entertain that she’d grown into and shaped herself into that woman just for him. ”
I allow the twin tears spilling down my cheeks to be his last as he stands stock-still opposite me.
“Hypothetically, see, if you saw her as that woman, maybe she could reveal that she saved her heart and offer it without reservation because she knows the man he is, and it’s something to behold.”
Shock ripples across his expression as his calculating eyes blindly search for treachery that never existed. It’s then that I rip my eyes from him, focusing on the monster who fathered me and slowly kneeling before him.
“But you never wanted to, and never did, and it’s all hypothetical, right? We played a good game, don’t you think? Shall we end it, Marine?”
Seizing Tyler’s test as my gift, I power on the screen for whoever remains in Ciro’s captains’ houses as my father begins frantically fighting his restraints and uttering undecipherable nonsense.
“Why so upset, Papa? I thought you’d be proud, and maybe a little impressed, that I used your enemy to bring you down.”
Seeing him now—a frail old man who amassed too much power by dealing in evil—I shake my head at my own idiocy.
“I see you, Ciro,” I sigh, decades of fear sliding off me. “Not a monster at all, just a pathetic, sick, ego-crazed, weak old fucking man.”
He glares at me, grunting useless slurs through his broken jaw.
Glaring back at the bastard who stole my childhood and the first half of my adult life, I cock the gun as I play the only card I have left. Tyler flinches at the sound in my peripheral, but I keep my focus as black wrath starts to consume me.