Chapter 53 Slava
SLAVA
I'm out of the car before the engine dies.
The world is all muzzle flash and screaming tires and the wet crunch of metal where Nico's SUV slammed into the rear quarter panel of Don Leo's car hard enough to spin it sideways across two lanes. Glass spills everywhere. The car’s back end is caved in like a crushed beer can.
Somewhere inside that wreckage is the only person in New York City who matters to me right now.
My gun is already up and my hands are steady. The thing about terror is that when it gets bad enough and crosses the threshold of what a human body was built to process, it stops being fear and becomes something steadying.
Don Leo's driver sees me first, and he reaches for his own gun when I fire two quick rounds at him. The first round cracks the bullet-resistant glass, and the second round shatters it.
His head snaps back and he slumps against the steering wheel. The horn blares in a long, sustained note.
Where are you, you fat bastard.
Gunfire erupts from the other side of the car. Two of Don Leo's men have stepped out of another car and they’re firing from behind their car doors. Another car has come to a stop, and more men are pouring out.
I drop behind the open door of my own vehicle as rounds punch into the metal six inches from my head.
Think. Plan. Act.
My breath comes in measured pulls. In. Out. The way I’d been taught since I was a child.
"Stand down!" Nico has stepped out of his car, gun raised, and he's shouting at his father’s men. "That's an order! Stand the fuck down!"
One of the guards—a thick-necked man with a face like a catcher's mitt—spits on the ground and fires another burst in my direction. "We're the Don's men, and you're not the fucking Don!"
So much for diplomacy.
I lean out and return fire. Two well placed shots and the thick-necked man drops like his strings got cut. The second man scrambles for new cover, and now Nico starts firing as well. The rest of the D’Ambrosio men look on with incredulity as their own prince is shooting at them.
And then, gunfire starts hitting both our positions.
I crouch down again, but not before I see one of the rear doors on Don Leo’s car flying open.
A small body jumps out, low and fast. Dark hair and skinny legs. He hits the pavement in a graceless sprawl before he runs aimlessly with his head down, unsure of just where he can go to be safe.
Anthony.
I lean out of my door again and I feel my heart falling into my stomach. Two people are struggling in the back seat of the car.
He’s going to rape her before he kills her.
My entire body is screaming at me to run to her and save her from Don Leo. Every cell in my body is oriented in her direction like iron is drawn towards a magnet.
But my eyes look towards Anthony, and I know that if I save her at the cost of Anthony being killed, she’ll never forgive either me or herself. And whatever love we've clawed our way toward through betrayal and punishment will turn to ash that she’ll never wash out of her mouth.
I know what I have to do.
"Anthony!" I bellow. "Anthony, come here! Now!"
The boy freezes mid-stride and looks at me with wide eyes. But dammit, he doesn't move. And why would he? I’m just a stranger that he doesn’t know, and I have a gun in my hand. Everything about me probably looks like more of what he's running from.
Fuck.
“Nico! Lydia!” I shout towards their car as bullets ping off the frame and Nico exchanges fire with his father’s men. "Get the boy! Get him to come to you—he doesn't know me. Get him now!"
Lydia doesn't argue. She doesn't freeze. She gives me a nod, drops to one knee behind the front tire of Nico's car, holds out her arms, and her voice cuts through the chaos with a clarity that mine couldn't manage.
"Anthony! Sweetheart, come here! It's Aunt Lydia!"
Anthony's head whips toward her. Recognition blooms across his tear-streaked face like sunrise through storm clouds, and he runs for Lydia with everything his small body has.
One of Don Leo's remaining men suddenly stands and raises his weapon: "Kill the boy!"
Oh no, you fucking don’t!
I rise from cover, fully exposed and standing in the open street with bullets kissing the air around me like angry wasps, and squeeze the trigger twice. Each shot finds a man, who chose the wrong fucking side today—and they collapse in a heap.
Something slams into my left side and the impact spins me half a step before the pain comes—white-hot, blinding, radiating outward from a point just below my ribs that is suddenly very, very wet.
I've been shot.
But that doesn’t fucking matter, because I’ve bought Anthony enough time to reach Lydia. She pulls him behind the car, wraps her body around his, and he buries his face in her shoulder, sobbing.
That’s one loose end.
Suddenly, the car’s other rear door flies open wider and Bella comes tumbling out, her hair a wild dark tangle around her face. For one bright, involuntary second, pride pushes aside the terror in my chest.
She fought her way out. She got herself free.
Then she falls.
Her knees buckle on the pavement, and before she can push herself up, Don Leo's body flops out of the car after her. He moves like something dredged from the ocean floor as he wraps his fat fingers around her ankle with a grip that looks obscene even from here.
One of his eyes is a ruined, oozing socket and there's a gash across his face that's painting his collar red.
He should be done. He should be down. But fate has a funny way of keeping monsters like him moving long after their bodies have quit.
I aim at him and pull the trigger.
Click.
Empty.
I reach down for a spare magazine but find none. I stare at the gun in my hand for a second and then throw it. It clatters across the pavement, useless, and I do the only thing left to do.
I run.
"Nico! Cover me!"
I don't wait for his answer as I sprint, shoes pounding asphalt while the world narrows to a tunnel with Bella at its end. She’s on the ground, her legs kicking out helplessly around Don Leo while his fat fingers close around her throat as he roars at her face.
Pain spears my side from the bullet wound, but I don't stop.
I can't stop. I will not be too late to save the woman I love again.
When I reach them, I tackle Don Leo at full speed.
The tackle takes us both off Bella and onto the street, and I land on top of him with my knees on either side of his bloated torso.
He's bigger up close, and his remaining eye rolls up at me, piggish and bloodshot and full of hatred so old that it's calcified into something that doesn't even look human anymore.
I hit him.
I hit him with everything I have. My right fist connects with his jaw and I feel his bone cracking under my knuckles. I hit him again, and again, and feel warm blood spraying from his face with each vicious blow while bullets continue to crack in the air.
His nose breaks. His cheekbone caves.
But with each blow, my hands are getting weak. Warm blood trickles down my side, and soon enough, the punches that started like sledgehammers are landing soft now. Strength is draining out of me like someone pulled a plug.
I'm cold. I shouldn’t be cold—it’s summertime in New York. It shouldn’t be cold. But my fingers are going numb and my vision is narrowing at the edges like someone is slowly closing curtains.
Don Leo catches my next punch. His fat, cigar-stained hand wraps around my fist and holds it, and his remaining eye focuses on me with a look of wet slimy triumph that makes my stomach turn.
Then, he punches me.
The blow catches me square in the jaw and the world tilts. I fall backward off him, and the back of my skull connects with pavement, and for a moment there is nothing—no sound, no pain, no Bella, no Don Leo, no long years of grief.
Just a vast and ringing emptiness.
I'm sorry.
The thought surfaces from somewhere deep inside of me. But I don't know who I'm apologizing to. Is it Gia, whom I failed to avenge? Or Bella, whom I'm failing to save?
Both, I decide. It's both.
Don Leo’s suffocating weight is on top of me, and now it’s his fists that are coming down like hail, hammering into my face and chest with the rhythmic, mindless fury of a man who has spent his entire life destroying things smaller than himself.
"DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MADE ME DO, ROMANOV?" He roars. "DO YOU KNOW WHAT YOU MADE ME DO WITH THESE HANDS? TO MY OWN FUCKING DAUGHTER?"
I try to block but I can't. I’ve lost too much blood.
My arms are heavy and they feel like they’re made of something that used to be muscle but are now just meat attached to a body. The blows keep coming and I can feel the world getting muffled and distant, like I'm sinking into deep water and the surface is getting further and further away.
Then the weight lifts.
I don't understand it at first. One moment Don Leo's bulk is crushing me into the asphalt, and the next he's being pulled backward, his remaining eye bulging, his mouth opening in a gargling wheeze that sounds nothing like the words he was just screaming.
I blink. My vision swims. There’s blood blurring my eyes, blood in my mouth, and blood on the street beneath me seeping into the asphalt.
But even through the blood, I swear I can see a seven-pointed star.
A diamond glinting at its center, catching the light and throwing prismatic sparks like a halo.
It's pressed against the rolls of flesh at Don Leo's throat, biting against the fat folds of his neck as the chain attached to it pulls tighter and tighter.
Don Leo's face is red. Then blue. Then the gray-white of something dying.
And then I see Bella.
She has wrapped that chain around Don Leo’s neck, garroting him with the thin chain that threatens to break at any moment.
Her face is arranged in a mask of fury. Tears stream down her face, her lips are peeled back as she whispers curses in Don Leo’s ear, and every tendon in her forearms flexes as she pulls the chain tighter and tighter.
From down here, she looks like an angel of vengeance.
Like the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
I would marry this woman on the spot if I could stand up.
The gunfire has stopped, and footsteps muffle by my ear. From my position, I see Nico and Lydia come rushing over.
Nico’s gun is drawn and Lydia rushes to steady me as I try to push myself off the ground.
"Don't," she says quietly. "You’ve lost too much blood."
The chain snaps, and the seven-pointed star flies across the air before it disappears out of my vision.
Nico walks up to Don Leo, and presses the barrel of his gun into his forehead.
Don Leo's remaining eye finds Nico and he laughs. Even now, on death’s door, the bastard delights in the cruelty he inflicts on the world.
"Grew some balls, did you, boy?" His voice is a ruined rasp. "You going to kill your old man?"
Bella yanks his head back.
"Tell them,” she snarls. “Tell them what you did, you fucking monster. Tell them what you did to your own daughter."
Don Leo tries to wrench his head out of Bella’s grip, but she refuses to let him go.
"She wanted to be a whore,” he growls. “So I treated her like a whore. I fucked her like a whore, and then I killed her like a—"
The gunshot splits the night open.
Nico pulls the trigger with his father's half-finished confession still hanging in the air like smoke, and Don Leo's body slumps forward.
Dead.
A pained scream tears out of Nico's chest and it sounds like it’s being dragged out from the deepest pit of his soul. The gun clatters from Nico's hand, and Lydia's hand finds his.
He doesn't look at her. He doesn't look at anything. But his fingers close around hers, and he holds on.
The world spins around me. The blood loss has been patient with me. But now that the adrenaline has crested and receded, it’s coming to collect its due with the impersonal efficiency of biology.
"Slava!"
Bella catches me before I hit the ground. Her hands are on my face, my chest, and pressing against the wound at my side with a pressure that should hurt but doesn't—everything is getting distant now, muffled, like the world is being heard through deep water.
I look up at her. Dark hair in wild tangles. Full lips swollen, dried tears tracking through the blood and grime on her face.
I smile.
"I'm sorry," I say. My voice sounds far away, even to me. "I’m sorry for what I did to you. I’m sorry for trying to push you away because I thought it would save you."
"Shut up." She's crying. Fresh tears now, not the dried ones—these are hot and fast and landing on my face like rain. "Shut up, you don't get to apologize like you won’t ever see me again. Not like this."
"I love you."
She stops. Her hands go still against my side. Her eyes—dark, wet, furious, terrified—meet mine.
"I love you, Bella Farnassi," I say the words that have been sitting behind my teeth for weeks.
I'm running out of time to say them and I will not die with this unsaid.
"I love you and I should have told you that tonight and I'm telling you now because I'm not sure I'll get another chance and I need you to know—"
"I love you too." She says it quick and angry, like she's furious at me for making her say it here, on a blood-soaked street, with my life leaking out between her fingers. "I love you too, you stupid, stubborn, impossible man. I love you. I love you. Do you hear me?"
I hear her.
The darkness is coming, slow and inexorable.
"Good."
One word. Because I have never in my life said anything I didn't mean, and I don't have the blood left for more than that one single word.
Bella's face blurs above me. Her voice is getting far away. Her hands are the only warm thing left as they press against my side like she can hold the life inside me through sheer force of will.
"Slava.” She begs. “SLAVA!"
Then the darkness takes me, and the last thing I hear is my name on her lips.