Chapter 46 #2
Natalie looked at me, and for one split second everything in the room narrowed to her face. There was something there. Something wrong. Something panicked and desperate and not at all what I had expected from a woman delivering news of death.
“I can’t do this. I can’t let you do this,” she shook her head, as though she was torn between doing what was right and what was needed. “Vienna… she’s—”
Nico moved faster than I would have believed for a man his size. He grabbed her by the arm and jerked her into him so violently that she gasped.
“What did you just say?”
She tried to wrench free. “Let go of me.”
“You’re a filthy, lying little bitch,” he said, backhanding her so hard one of her teeth flew out of her mouth.
She whimpered, clutching her cheek, and then looked at me. And I saw something. There was something there. Something she hadn’t meant to let me see. Something frantic and broken.
“She’s—”
The gunshot exploded through the room.
For a second, no one moved.
Natalie made the smallest sound I had ever heard. Not even a scream. More like confusion. Like her body had stopped understanding what had just happened before her mind could catch up. Then her knees buckled, and Nico let her crumble to the floor as though she was nothing.
She hit the concrete hard, blood blooming beneath her with horrifying speed, her eyes still open and fixed somewhere just left of me as though she couldn’t quite understand why the world had ended there.
Anger ripped through me so fast and so hot that for one dizzy, blinding second I thought my body might split open under the force of it.
My hands clenched inside the restraints.
My chest expanded against broken ribs. The room sharpened into brutal, perfect focus.
Nico. The gun in his hand. The men behind him.
Natalie’s blood creeping across the floor.
And the look on her face right before she died.
That look.
That almost-word.
That unfinished fucking sentence.
I didn’t know what she had been trying to say. Didn’t know if it would have changed a single thing. Didn’t know if Gabriella was truly dead or if Natalie had just died trying to tell me something worse.
But I did know I needed to find out.
I lifted my head. Very slowly, I licked the blood from my split lip and tested the restraints at my wrists.
Nico saw it and smiled like he thought he still had control of this. Like he hadn’t just made the single greatest mistake of his life.
I started laughing. It came out rough and wet and wrong enough that a few of the men shifted where they stood.
Nico’s smile faltered. “What the fuck is so funny?”
I looked at him through blood and swelling and something far more dangerous than rage. “You really don’t know, do you?”
My voice scraped the room raw. I laughed again, lower this time, and shook my head.
“All this time… all this fucking time, you’ve all looked at me and seen what you wanted to see.”
Nobody moved. I rolled my shoulders against the restraints, ignoring the fresh burst of pain.
“The drunk. The clown. The one with a bottle in his hand and a joke in his mouth. The one who doesn’t shut up. Doesn’t sit still. Doesn’t look dangerous enough to matter.”
My spit hit the floor, red and bloody.
“Fair enough.” I bared my teeth, not a smile, nothing even close to a smile. “I’ve given people reason. I’ve been the fuck-up. The waster. The idiot brother people laugh at when he stumbles in late and pissed. No use. No discipline. No fucking sense.”
My eyes dropped briefly to Natalie’s body, then lifted back to Nico’s face.
“But I love people.”
That changed the room. I saw it happen. Men like these didn’t know what to do with that kind of honesty. Didn’t know what to do with a man who could admit to love while dripping blood onto their floor.
“I love my brothers. I love my club.” My voice dropped then, and somehow that was worse. “And I loved her enough to walk into this place and let you kill me for it.”
My wrists twisted again, making the hook above me creak. Nico took a step back, eyeing me warily.
“That,” I said softly, “was your mistake.”
The laugh that tore out of me then was all teeth and madness and grief sharpened into something lethal.
“Because the man who came in here with no fight left in him?” I shook my head once. “He was already dead.”
My muscles flexed and the rope bit into my skin. But bit by bit, something was beginning to give.
“You took the only thing in this world that ever made me want to be better than what I am.”
The first strand snapped, making a few of the men jump. I smiled at Nico then, and this time there was nothing human in it.
“Now I get to be exactly what you made me.”
The second restraint tore free.
“You think you know death, but you don’t. Not until it's someone you care about. You kill those you deem beneath you. I’ve experienced loss. The kind that gets under your skin and lives inside you.”
I stepped forward.
Slowly.
Deliberately.
And when I spoke again, my voice was low enough to make the whole room lean in.
“You never, ever should have stopped remembering who I was. What I’m capable of. You may have been her executioner. But I am your judge and jury. Your final maker.”
I looked up at him, blood dripping from my face, my breathing ragged.
“I,” I said, panting through my rage, “am Vienna.”
I grinned my final grin.
“I am fucking Vienna!”
And then I launched—not just at him.
But into death.