Chapter 50
Aftermath
THE MAESTRO | Present
The second I step into the corridor, all hell breaks loose.
Gunfire erupts from the west wing. Glass explodes somewhere overhead. Smoke pours through the marble hallway while men scream orders in Italian and Russian over one another.
“Vitale!” Kyle’s voice snaps in my earpiece.
“Status.” I slam my shoulder into the first man charging the stairwell and drive my knife straight through his throat, his blood coating my hand.
Hot blood sprays across my face. He collapses, choking. I am loving it.
“Where is she?” I ask.
Kyle breathes hard on the other end as his bullet cracks through the air. “I lost visual.”
“What?”
“The tracker glitched when the blast went off—”
I yank my phone from inside my jacket while sprinting through the smoke. My hands are slick with blood as the tracker flashes a red dot.
It is moving.
It’s not here. It’s a few blocks away.
My pulse turns savage.
No.
Did she run while we blasted the building? Or did someone take her? Whatever it is, she can’t be far.
“Kyle.”
“Yeah.”
“Corner Vane and Hannah.”
“They’re trying to break south.”
“Trap them.”
“What about you?”
I shove another man into the wall hard enough to crack marble and put two bullets in his chest, and he drops.
My eyes stay on the red dot as I rush down the stairs. “I’m getting my wife.”
I cut the line and run. Everything around me blurs into bodies, smoke, and blood. My lungs burn, but there’s only one thing going through my head. I can’t lose her again. Not after years of surviving without her, of not being able to breathe the way I did with her.
I reach the entrance, and a foolish man lunges from a doorway with a blade. Well, they never learn.
I catch his wrist before he can raise it and snap it backward as the knife falls, and I drive it up under his ribs with his own hand. Warm blood floods over my hand as he collapses.
The tracker turns left. Twenty meters. Ten.
I hit the alley, and rain slams into my face, washing away the blood, but the crimson has already soaked through my shirt. Do I care? No. The only thing I care about in this godforsaken world is my wife.
The lightning splits the sky overhead, thunder shakes the buildings, and the red dot stops moving. My chest pounds so hard that it hurts.
I am about to take a left when a sharp pain explodes through my shoulder. I never anticipate the bullet that tears through me from behind as I stagger forward. My vision flashes white as my knees slam hard into wet pavement. I catch myself on one hand, blood spilling fast down my arm.
I inhale sharply and look down at the bullet wound blooming through my shirt as a laugh bubbles up my throat.
Of course, somebody thinks a bullet is enough to stop me. How fucking adorable.
My shoulder burns as my vision blurs for one ugly second before I taste copper.
And all I can think, all I can fucking think, is that Selene is somewhere close enough for me to feel it.
A few blocks. One red dot.
One heartbeat. Mine.
My wife.
A shadow moves in my peripheral. The first thing I see is the raised gun, followed by the face of the woman, making my stomach churn.
Hannah hovers over me as rain drenches her red dress. Hair plastered to her face. Gun steady in her hand. Raised straight at me.
A coward.
Her expression is unreadable, almost calm like all those times when I found her in my Father’s study, when I kidnapped Selene, when we lost our child, when I lost everything.
It’s that infuriatingly calm expression that always irked me. She knew her games before; she knows them now too. I bare my teeth. Her eyes travel down my red-stained shirt to the phone. “Where is she?”
Hannah’s eyes flick to the tracker in my hand. Then back to me.
“Still worried about her. After everything she did?”
I push myself upright despite the burn in my shoulder.
“Where?”
Hannah takes a step back. Despite the fierceness in her eyes, her hand shakes. “She saw an opening, and she ran.”
Lightning flashes, and I see Hannah’s dark eyes. It always annoyed me how much Selene resembled her Mother. But that’s what it all is, the superficial resemblance, because my Selene will never hurt a fly. “Funny thing.” Her voice shakes in a whisper. “She never ran from me before.”
I step toward her, though blood drips down my fingers. “Tell me where she is.”
“She doesn’t want to see you.” My blood boils at her words. “She thinks you are a monster.”
“We both know she’s wrong and who the real monster is.”
“She doesn’t care.” Hannah lifts the gun higher to my head as I take a step toward her.
“Don’t.” She shakes but hides her fear behind that face. I step forward again until the gun presses against my forehead.
“Shoot me.”
“I’m not kidding.”
“Do it.” I spit the blood at her feet. The rain feels fantastic against my face, but it’s doing a piss-poor job of washing the blood off beneath me. My blood. Messy, messy. “Because if my wife is hurt, I’ll hunt and haunt you for life, Hannah.”
“Your wife?!”
Her calm, icy facade shatters, and the bitch laughs. It’s a spectacular, screeching sound of someone who I can kill anytime, but what’s the fun in that? I wanna see her lose everything I did, and watch it burn, turn to ashes and wash away with this fucking rain.
“She was never supposed to be your wife, Zagreus! You ruined it. You ruined everything!”
A dark smile pulls at my mouth. There it is. That crack in the porcelain. I’ve been waiting years to hear it split.
“Everything?” I ask softly, feigning calm. “What exactly did I ruin, Hannah?”
Her chest rises sharply. “What did you not ruin, boy? Don’t fucking push it.”
“No?” I take another step. The barrel presses harder against my forehead. My fucking blood pools under my shoes. But all I can feel is rage.
Taciturnly and beautifully entangled with hers. But our rages are different, so fucking worlds apart, but only because of one person.
“Tell me, Hannah. You have the upper hand here; you can shoot me straight in the head whenever you feel like. So, isn’t it better if you give me what I want to hear?
” Her eyes flash. “Or are you terrified that if you finally say it out loud, you’ll have to admit every ruin in our lives started with you? ”
The gun shakes in Hannah’s hand. I love when her face twists into something uglier, mimicking a rabid dog. Like she can feel everything slipping through her fingers all over again. “Terrified of what?!” she screams into the storm. “Whatever I’ve done, I did it for love!”
Thunder cracks overhead, and her eyes resemble lightning.
“She was mine before she was ever yours!”
Her finger tightens on the trigger. “She needed me—she loved me—she would have stayed if you had never touched her! I did everything so that I could take her away from you!” Hannah laughs, a broken, ugly sound swallowed by thunder.
Rain pours down her face.
“You planned your daughter’s death, staged it so carefully I believed the woman I buried was my wife and not someone else.”
“Yes,” she spits. “Yes, I did it.”
Four years.
Four fucking years of waking up choking on the smell of burning rubber and ash.
Four years of staring at a marble headstone, breaking my knuckles against it until the stone was stained red, begging a dead girl to forgive me for letting her burn.
I turned myself into a ghost, tore my own empire apart looking for the shadow of whoever put her in that car, drinking myself into blackouts just to see her face in the dark for a fraction of a second.
The only thing that kept me alive was revenge.
I wanted to avenge her for something that didn’t even exist.
And the monster who built my hell is standing right in front of me, holding a gun to my skull.
“Say it,” I rasp as I take a half-step forward, forcing the cold iron of the barrel to bruise the skin of my forehead. “Say how you did it, Hannah. Look at me and tell me how you put another woman’s corpse in her place. Tell me how you fooled the world into believing you were dead.”
Hannah’s face twists. She’s unraveling. It’s in the way her chest heaves, the way the revolver trembles against my brow.
It took me a whole year to piece her plan together, and I still don’t understand why a Mother would do that to her child.
“It was easy,” her voice cracks over the wind.
“You think you’re the only one with power in this city?
What do they say? Enemy of your enemy is your friend.
And Vane Davenport was mine. We planned it.
A few signatures. A switch of the dental records under the Novak payroll.
It took five minutes to put a dead pregnant woman resembling my daughter in that car, and fewer connections to have Selene transferred. ”
“And Adrian was your perfect fucking shadow.”
“He did what he was told!” she screams back, blinking away the water in her eyes.
“He loved her. He was willing to be whoever she needed him to be to keep her safe from you. When she woke up fractured, when her mind was nothing but broken glass and fear, Adrian was there. He held her hand. He fed her the stories. He told her, her Mother was dead—we had to make it real, we had to make her believe there was nothing left of her old life to look back for! He played the doting fiancé, hiding her away in the territory where your spies wouldn’t dare look. ”
A laugh rattles in my throat. “But you couldn’t erase me, could you? You did everything, Hannah. But you couldn’t wipe me from her life. You wanna know how I found her?”
Hannah’s eyes widen as I step closer. “I recognized one of the paintings she made. I recognized the eyes she paints. Adrian Davenport might have erased her memories, but he couldn’t stop her, could he?”
She shoves the gun harder against my head, her heels sliding in the mud. She wants me to beg.
“Your plan backfired.” I almost laugh. “Why go to such lengths? All because I caught you having an affair with my Father?”