Julia
….but they don’t.
I stand there, eyes still squeezed shut, the sound of the gunshot ricocheting off every wall in this tiny room. My hands still clenched, I wait for the shock of the pain to hit me—to feel the sudden bloom of blood breaking through my body and leaving me with no choice but to accept my fate.
And it doesn’t come. I hear a thud beside me, and in shock, whip my head around to see what it is.
And I realize that it’s Andreo.
Andreo’s dead.
Antonio is standing there, the gun still smoking in his hand, gaze fixed on his son as he hits the floor in a heap.
My eyes widen, brain still rushing to catch up with what the hell has just happened.
Because there is no way—there is no fucking way that it can really have gone down like this, can it?
I must be misunderstanding. I can’t—no, I can’t be seeing this right. I…
But as I look between Andreo and Antonio, the situation starts to make sense to me, some of the smoke clearing from my mind.
I can’t believe it. It feels almost surreal, looking at the body on the floor next to me, the spatter of blood across the side of my body where the bullet entered his stomach.
I stoop down at Andreo’s side, staring at him, reaching out to hold my hand over his mouth, trying to figure out if there is any life left in him at all, but as far as I can tell, he’s gone.
“He’s dead,” I whisper, and I look up to Antonio, who has a grim expression on his face, his eyes fixed on the scene before him. I can’t tell if he’s regretful, wishing he had made another choice entirely.
I don’t understand. One moment, Andreo was telling him to kill me, to wipe me off the face of the earth, and he seemed like he was going to go along with it, and the next—
The next, his son was dead.
“Come on,” Antonio tells me, holding out a hand for me. I stare at it for a moment, feeling as though I’ve been rooted to the ground.
“Julia. Please.”
Antonio’s voice has an edge to it now, and I can’t tell if he’s angry or pained or something else entirely.
I figure that I shouldn’t try to parse it, at least for now, not when I’ve been offered the chance to get out of here once and for all, and before I can stop myself, I take his hand and he leads me from the room.
The apartment is quiet, almost eerily so, now that Andreo is dead. I look around, half expecting him to spring out from behind a corner, laughing at me for thinking for a second that he would ever have made things so easy for me. But he doesn’t. This is real.
This is real.
Antonio leads me through the apartment and out to the top of the stairwell, where his men have gathered. They straighten up as soon as he appears, paying respect to their leader, and one steps forward as though the nominated speaker of the group.
“Don,” he greets Antonio. “We heard a gunshot—”
“I’m fine,” he replies bluntly. “So is Julia. We need to go. Is the rest of the building secured?”
The man nods, and I can see a flash of curiosity pass through his eyes, no doubt wondering if Antonio truly executed his own son in there.
Even to me, it seems impossible, like a fiction I’ve invented to deal with my own demise.
I keep expecting the moment to shatter and break around me and to be pulled sharply back into the reality of what’s going on, to find myself bleeding out on the floor while Antonio and his son leave together.
“Clean the place up,” Antonio tells the man. “I’ll see you at the apartment. We can talk there. Tomorrow.”
The man nods once more, perhaps thinking better of arguing with him when he has clearly already made up his mind. And Antonio guides me down the stairs which curl, almost labyrinthine, down to the street outside.
I gulp down a lungful of air as soon as I step out, grateful for the relief of the outside world once more. Being up there with Andreo, it’s almost like I forgot what it was like, to taste freedom like this.
I lean against Antonio heavily, my knees still shaky, ears still ringing with the sound of the gunshot. I’m not sure if it’s truly stuck in my head, or if I just can’t stop replaying it over and over again in my mind, trying my best to make sense of it in any way I can.
He pulls open the car door for me and I climb in, and I watch as he does the same, slipping the gun from his belt and into the small compartment under the dashboard of the car.
I notice the way his gaze lingers on it for a moment, as if he’s still trying to contend with the enormity of what he has just done.
I don’t blame him. Killing your own child? No matter what the circumstances, it must feel utterly twisted, like something fit for a biblical epic rather than the real world.
He takes the wheel and begins the journey to take us back to the—no, not to the mansion, it seems like we’re going somewhere else entirely.
I didn’t get much of a look at the place when Andreo broke in to steal me away, but I guess it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Antonio has started over somewhere new.
His son left that place a wreck, from what I could see, and I can only imagine the human cost of that kind of damage too.
There’s so much I want to ask him, a million questions on the tip of my tongue, but I don’t think he’s in any place to answer them, at least right now.
By the time the car pulls up, I can see his body is racked with tension. I reach out gingerly to touch his hand, and he doesn’t pull away, though I can see his shoulders hunching up slightly.
“Are you okay?” I ask softly. It seems a stupid question, even to me, given what has just happened, but he brushes it off anyway, turning the conversation on to me instead.
“Did he hurt you?” he asks gruffly, and he reaches out for me, cupping my face in his hand and looking me up and down intently.
I shake my head. “He didn’t, he just…”
I feel a sudden swell of tears threatening to rise up within me, and I have to bite them back hurriedly before they get the better of me. I gulp down a few deep breaths, and Antonio’s face darkens.
“If he laid a hand on you—”
“He didn’t,” I assure him again. “He was…he found out about the pregnancy, like he told you. And he said to me that he would—that he would keep me there and raise the baby as his.”
I can see the way that shakes him, the way it shook me. Andreo, as a father? It’s enough to turn my stomach, and I rest a hand on my belly without thinking, sending a silent assurance to my little one that I will never let something like that happen to them, not a chance in hell.
“Jesus Christ,” Antonio mutters, and something in him seems to give. His shoulders slump forward, and he puts his head in his hands, the gun just a matter of inches away, a potent reminder of everything that has just happened.
“I’m…I’m sorry, Antonio,” I blurt out, and he turns to me, looking surprised.
“What are you sorry for?”
I stare at him, teeth digging in to my bottom lip. “I—I don’t know. If it hadn’t been for me, none of this would have happened…”
He reaches for me, his eyes blazing with an intensity that silences me in an instant.
“Julia, none of this happened because of you,” he told me hotly.
“All of this—everything—it happened because of Andreo. He made his choice, to align with Salamanca, to abandon the family, to take you away from me because he couldn’t stand the idea of someone else having what he thought was his. That’s on him. Every bit of it.”
I tilt my face into his hand slightly, and I do my best to believe what he’s saying to me. I
want to believe it, of course I do. But for so long, I’ve felt like all these problems in my life have been nothing but my fault.
Every time my parents fought, if I tried to get in the middle of it, they would turn on me like I had been the problem all along.
If I tried to stand up for myself, it would just make the situation worse.
And even now, knowing that I couldn’t have called the shots one way or another, I still feel the need to apologize, to fawn, to plaster a balm over the situation in the hopes that I could fix it.
“Thank you,” I whisper, though I’m not sure that word even comes close to summing up what’s really going through my mind. For a moment, he just looks at me, but when he draws his hand back, I realize I have way more questions.
“Salamanca,” I say, remembering the man’s name again. “Andreo said that he’d gotten him on your side—”
Antonio lets out a mirthless laugh. “That would be an impressive thing to pull off, given that he’s already dead.”
My eyes widen. “Wait, what?”
“He left town just before the attack on the mansion,” he explains.
“We intercepted him on the way back, that’s how we found out where you were being held.
As soon as I got to the apartment building, I gave the order to kill him.
I’m not letting a fucker like that walk free, not knowing he would happily turn my family against me given the chance. ”
I pause for a moment, taking it in. So much destruction, so much death, so much pain, and it feels like I’m right in the middle of it.
If I had never met Andreo all those years ago, if I had never trusted in what he had told me, that he would be able to make things better for me…
God, maybe I would have been able to keep all of this from happening.
And Antonio seems to sense what’s going on inside my head, watching me intently, like he can see right into my mind.
“Hey,” he murmurs, taking my hand. “If it hadn’t been this, it would have been something else with Andreo, you understand?
He was always looking for a way out. He might never have admitted it, but it’s true.
And you were just the lie he could convince himself was true, something that proved I was never going to be on his side. ”