Chapter 27 - Marco
She stands there with Liam’s gun still warm in her hand, looking like death’s own bride.
The green dress drips blood across white marble, each drop a small rebellion against the sanctity of this chapel.
Behind her, candles flicker in their sconces, throwing shadows that dance across the altar like restless spirits.
The chapel air tastes like flavored smoke. Each breath coats my tongue with death.
Christopher scrambles for his weapon, hand reaching beneath his jacket with the desperate speed of a man who knows he's already dead.
My bullet finds him first, a clean shot through the temple that drops him before his fingers can close around the grip.
He falls sideways into a pew, eyes still open, still surprised.
In the candlelight, his blood looks black.
"Clear the room," I say loudly, commanding these Irish soldiers who are suddenly leaderless.
After one long, held breath, they obey, scattering to the exits rather than taking me on. Their boots scuffle over the stone floors, one man trips over, and still his eyes never leave me.
I must look like the devil himself.
The priest cowers behind the altar, muttering prayers in Latin that won't save any of us. Not after what we've done here tonight. The cold of the chapel seeps through my blood-soaked clothes.
Valentina hasn't moved. She stands over Liam's corpse like she's grown roots, like she's become part of this scene of destruction. The gun dangles from her fingers, forgotten. Blood soaks through the ridiculous green dress, turning emerald to rust.
I stride to reach her, glass from shattered windows crunching under my shoes. The metallic scent of blood mixes with incense, sacred and profane. The closer I get, the more I see: the tremor in her hands, the glassy distance in her eyes, the way she's holding herself together through pure will.
"Valentina."
She doesn't respond. Just stares down at what she's done, at the man she killed rather than marry. I've seen that look before, in soldiers after their first kill. The moment when you realize you've crossed a line you can never uncross.
"I didn't know." The words rip from my throat like shrapnel, each one drawing blood. "About your mother. I swear on my mother's grave, I didn't know my father ordered it."
Now she looks at me, and the deadness in her eyes is worse than any fury. "Would it have mattered? If you'd known?"
The question cuts deep. Would I have taken her anyway, knowing my family destroyed hers? Would I have pressed that gun to her temple, forced those vows, claimed her body knowing it was built on her mother's bones?
"I tortured your father," I say, needing her to understand. "After you left. Found him trying to run, and I made him talk. He told me everything. How my father ordered the hit, how Alonzo refused to do it because he didn't want to get his hands dirty, but he was glad it got done."
Her laugh is bitter. "So my mother's death was just another lie in a world built on them."
"I never lied to you about this."
"You lied about everything else." Her voice hardens. "About trusting me. About valuing my opinion. The moment the restaurant went wrong, the moment I failed, I became nothing to you. Locked away like another disappointing possession."
"The restaurant…"
"The restaurant showed me exactly what I am to you." She drops the gun, and it clatters across marble with a sound like breaking bones. "A liability. A weakness. Something to protect but never trust."
The truth of it burns. She's right. The moment my brother got shot, I shut her out completely. Became like her father, cold and controlling and cruel.
"Say it," she demands, stepping closer, close enough that I can smell gunpowder on her skin. "Say you were wrong to lock me out. Say you became my father."
"I became him." The admission tastes like mud. "I became everything I swore I'd never be. You were never nothing," I add, but the words sound hollow even to me.
Something cracks in my chest, violent and irreversible.
The last piece of my father's legacy shattering like bone.
Her father is awful, but mine wasn't much better.
We glorify him now he's dead, but he was a brutal man in life.
Every instinct screams against this. My father's voice in my head: 'Never show weakness.
Never kneel. Never beg.' But she's worth more than pride. Worth more than the legacy of dead men.
I drop to my knees in Liam's blood, feeling it soak through my expensive pants, still warm and thick. The specific sound of fabric meeting blood, a wet surrender. The position puts me below her, looking up at this woman who's destroyed me and remade me and destroyed me again.
My brothers finally pour through the church entrance behind me, the backup I ordered but didn't wait for.
As as soon as they lay eyes on me, they stop moving.
In ten years of leading this family, I've never knelt for anyone.
Never shown submission, never showed weakness.
But here I am, kneeling in an Irish chapel in my enemy's blood, about to beg.
"You brought me back," I tell her, the words scraping like glass. "Made me feel something beyond violence and control. Made me want more than just empire and blood."
She stares down at me, and I see something flicker in her eyes. Not forgiveness, but maybe recognition.
"After you left, I became everything you feared." My hands clench in the blood beneath me, feeling it squeeze between my fingers. "Burned Irish bars without strategy. Tortured men without purpose. I became your father, my father, became the monster he always wanted me to be."
"We're all monsters here." She gestures at the carnage surrounding us. "Look what I did. Look what I became without you."
"No, principessa. You're an angel who learned to use a gun. I'm the demon who taught you."
I reach into my jacket, pull out the ring she threw at me at the cemetery. My mother's ring. The diamonds catch the candlelight, throwing fractals across blood-stained marble. The metal is cold against my bloody fingers.
"I should have trusted you," I say, holding up the ring like an offering. "Should have been your partner, not your captor. Should have been the man you deserved instead of one like your father."
The ring trembles in my hand. Thirty-five years old, and I'm shaking like a boy with his first kill.
"Marry me." The words come out rough, desperate. "Not for alliance or strategy or tradition. Not because I stole you or trapped you or own you."
Her eyes lock on the ring, on my hands covered in blood that isn't mine, on this killer asking for something he has no right to want.
"Marry me because I love you with whatever diseased thing passes for my soul.
" I stay on my knees, feeling the blood pool around me, letting her see me broken and honest for maybe the first time.
"Marry me because I'd burn Chicago to ash just to see you smile.
Because I'd kill every man who's ever hurt you if I could. "
"Your father's already dead," she says, voice hollow. "If he wasn't, I'd kill him myself. Do you still want to marry me, knowing that?"
"If my father wasn't already dead, I'd kill him for you. I'd dig him up just to kill him again." The confession tastes sweeter then communion wine. "I'd kill God himself if He tried to take you from me."
Something shifts in her face, that dead look cracking like ice in spring. She reaches down, takes the ring from my bloody fingers. The specific sound of the ring sliding over bloody skin, metal against wet flesh, as she slides it onto her finger, right over the stains already there.
"You're insane," she whispers.
"Completely." I stay kneeling, waiting for her judgment. "But I'm yours. If you'll have me."
She looks at the ring on her finger, blood and diamonds in equal measure. When she speaks, her voice is steady as a blade. "Then yes. Yes, I'll marry you again. Properly this time."
The relief nearly drops me. She reaches down, touches my face with fingers still warm from gunfire.
I surge to my feet and kiss her among the corpses, tasting copper and cordite on her lips. She kisses me back with the same desperate hunger, her hands fisting in my blood-soaked shirt. We're both shaking now, clinging to each other in this chapel that's become a charnel house.
Her body presses against mine, and even surrounded by death, she feels like life. This is what she's made me: an animal who wants her even in a massacre. The heat of her through that bloodied dress, the way her hips press forward seeking contact, it all drives me half-mad with need.
"Wife," I growl against her mouth. "Say it."
"Husband," she breathes, nails digging into my shoulders. "My fucking husband."
Through the broken windows, sirens approach in the distance, their wails still faint but growing. My soldiers have already started their cleanup, efficient even in this chaos. Bodies that need disposing, evidence that needs destroying.
"What happens now?" she asks against my mouth, her breath hot.
"Now?" I pull back just enough to see her face, this beautiful, terrible woman who's chosen me despite everything. "Now we build something new from these ashes. Something better than what our fathers gave us."
She laughs, and there's something wild in it. "You really think we can build anything that isn't soaked in blood?"
"No." I kiss her forehead, tasting salt and smoke. "But at least it'll be our blood. Our choices. Our empire built on honest violence instead of pretty lies."
The sirens grow closer, their distant approach marking how little time we have left in this moment.
My brothers have finished their work, standing ready for orders.
The priest has disappeared, probably running to forget what he's witnessed.
And here we stand, two killers making promises over bodies we put there together.
"We should go," I say, though I don't want to move from this moment, this bloody honesty between us.
"Together?" she asks, and there's something fragile in the word.
"Always," I promise, taking her hand, feeling the ring slick with blood beneath my fingers. "No more locks. No more lies. Just us and whatever hell we create."
Whatever comes next, we'll face it together. Covered in blood, marked by each other, united in our beautiful damnation.