Chapter 40
40
SAMANTHA
N othing makes sense.
One moment, Russo has me on my knees. His gun is in my mouth, stinking like acid rain on a field of nuclear waste. I can’t sob, can’t pray, can’t breathe, because I know what he did to Eliza. One twitch of his finger, and my brains will spray onto the wall. I picture him fucking my corpse with his pistol.
There’s a sound outside—the short sharp pop of a firecracker. But that’s not right; Independence Day was almost a month ago. It must be a car back-firing. That’s why I hear an engine racing.
Russo hears it too. His hand jerks at the sound, banging the pistol against my teeth. Terror squeezes bile onto the back of my throat, and I start to gag.
I don’t want Russo to be the last thing I see before I die—his cobra stare, his greasy lips, the knife-sharp edge of his jaw. I close my eyes and try to picture something else, anything else.
Braiden. If I have to die, he’s the one I want to see.
Braiden’s cobalt eyes, challenging me to stand tall. The quirk of his lips, like he’s holding back a smile. The stubble on his cheeks after a long day’s work, when his lips finds the tender spot beneath my ear, along my jaw, at the hollow of my throat.
There’s another blast, much closer than the first, and another. Russo yanks me by the hair, dragging me to my feet. His arm is tight, pulling my body close to his, and that gun—that stinking, freezing gun—is pressed against my temple. He jams the barrel into the spiderweb of scars he gave me when I was ten.
His body feels like stone behind me, like I’m tied to a cement block, sinking to the bottom of the sea. Bitter cold spreads through my segno , icing my entire body. Russo’s clamp on my throat cuts off my breath, and a hive of bees explodes in my brain, frantic, desperate to be free.
The door of the study flies open.
Braiden spins into the room as if I conjured him with my dying wish. His shirt is askew. His jacket flares behind him like a cape. His hair stands on end like coal-black straw, and he’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen.
“Drop it!” Russo barks, and I realize Braiden holds a weapon. It’s a shotgun, or it was, before someone sawed off a foot of the barrel. “Drop it,” Russo says again. “Or I’ll kill her.”
He shoves his pistol against my head, hard enough to bring tears to my eyes, but I can’t gasp, can’t sob, because his grip on my throat is too tight.
Braiden shifts his fingers on the shotgun’s stock. He holds the weapon out to the side, hand clear of the trigger. He kneels slowly, setting the gun on the floor. “Let her go,” he says, once he’s standing.
“ Vaffanculo ,” Russo says. “Kick that over here.”
Braiden keeps his hands high, proving he’s no longer a threat. He kicks the gun hard enough that it comes to rest against my feet. Russo’s grip on my throat eases just enough that I can swallow.
“Let the bitch go,” Braiden says. “This isn’t about her. It’s never been about some slag.”
“Easy for a man to say, when he cannot keep his wife in his bed.” But the pistol eases away from my head. Russo no longer needs me as a shield, not with Braiden disarmed.
“You and me,” Braiden says. “We don’t need New York or Boston to tell us how to divide Philly. We’ll work out our territory, once and for all. Just send the cunt away so we can talk like men.”
“You hear that, cara ?” Russo says. “This is what he thinks of you, the man you chose to marry.”
Of course Braiden calls me that word. I came here in the middle of the night. I’m standing here naked, in the home of his enemy. I know what it looks like. I know what he believes.
There’s no heat in Braiden’s gaze. No anger. Nothing. He’s a soulless computer, ticking through the options, adding up what he can get for his Fishtown Boys. He’s buying and selling. Nothing more. Nothing less.
“Put the gun down,” Braiden says.
“Easy for you to say.” Russo shifts his weight behind me. “When I have a weapon, and you have none. In fact, I have a family, and you have none. I have a kingdom, and you?—”
“Samantha,” Braiden says, and his voice is different now. It’s loud and it’s sharp, and it rings with absolute authority. “Beg!”
I drop to my knees by reflex. That’s the lesson Braiden taught me, the first night he spent in my home, when he ordered me to eat even though I couldn’t stand the thought of food. It’s the lesson I learned in the office he gave me, on the second floor of his home. It’s the lesson I mastered in the greenhouse, in our bedroom, in the pool house I thought was my refuge.
He orders.
I obey.
And this time, I hit the floor so suddenly that Russo is taken by surprise. He’s lost his shield, squandered his bargaining chip, the one thing he was so confident he owned that he dropped his guard.
And now that I’m on my knees, I can grab the shotgun. I’ve never fired a long gun before, much less an illegal sawed-off weapon that looks like it’ll knock me flat with recoil. But my fingers know how to work a trigger, and I barely need to aim.
I clutch a single steadying breath and sweep up the shortened barrel. I jam it hard into Russo’s crotch, digging deep into the soft pit of his balls. I slip my finger past the trigger guard and pull—slow and steady and absolutely certain.
The report is the loudest sound I’ve ever heard. It fills my head and stops my heart and folds my brain in cotton.
But I can smell—blood and shit and the gunpowder tang of sweet, burned plastic. And when I force my eyes open, I can see—shredded black pants and minced red muscles, streaks of bone and the pink-red-gray sheen of mutilated organs.
Somehow, Russo’s still alive. His hands open and close over his chest like the claws of a blind crab, and I wonder if he dropped his gun before or after I shot him. Dark red bubbles spill over his lips, staining his chin.
I push myself to my feet and dig my bare toes into his side. I don’t know if he squirms by reflex, or if he still has enough control over his body to try to get away. His movements, though, drown his lips in a sticky crimson river.
“That was for Eliza, you motherfucker,” I say.
It was more than that. It was for my father, too, and my mother. And it was for me. But he’s dead before I have time to say all that.
I stare at his mangled body like this is a horror movie. Like he might come back to life. Like he might torture the people I love, all over again.
“Samantha.”
I hear my name from a distance, too far away for me to respond.
“ Mo chailín maith .”
That’s different. That’s better than my name. That’s a promise and a bond.
I look up to find Braiden on the far side of the desk. He has a gun in his hand, a pistol, and it takes me a lifetime to realize that he meant to use it. He ordered me to kneel so he could take out Russo. So he could save me.
A long, rolling shudder starts at the base of my spine, at the heart of my segno . It climbs my body like a time-lapse of ivy, weaving in and out of my ribs, my lungs, my heart. It ripples up my neck and across my head, and then it travels down my arms. My knees break, and I start to drop to the floor.
But Braiden’s there. Braiden has me. His arms are around me and his body braces me and his lips touch the tangled scar above my temple. His hand is firm against the back of my head, and I’m safe and I’m warm and I’m his.
“Let’s go,” he says, when my legs are firm enough for me to stand.
I turn to the desk, to my neatly folded clothes. The thought of working buttons and zippers overwhelms me. I can’t imagine finding my shoes and socks.
Braiden shrugs out of his rumpled jacket and settles it around my shoulders. The heat of his body melts into mine, and I fill my lungs with cedar and spice. He reaches past me and grabs my clothes.
I point to the papers. They’re important. They’re why I came here. They’re what I have to do.
I see the flash of annoyance on his face. He wants to argue, because no documents are worth what we almost paid tonight. But they’re here, and they’re ours now, and he gathers them up with the rest of my things.
“Can you walk?” he asks.
I nod, not certain if I can. But he takes my hand, and he leads me to the study door, and I discover I’m not lying.
“Keys?” he asks. “For the Bentley?”
I had them. They’re in the pocket of my jeans. I point, until he digs for them.
He leads me down the hall then, and through the kitchen, past two blasted bodies. Madden’s car sits just outside the door, glinting in the light from the kitchen like it’s been dipped in toxic waste.
Braiden takes a moment, propping me against the passenger door. He opens the driver’s side, and he reaches into his pocket for a handkerchief.
I remember that night in a snowstorm, the night Russo murdered Eliza. Braiden had a handkerchief then, too. He gave it to me after I was sick in the snow.
Now, he uses the white square to wipe down the car—the steering wheel, the dashboard, the gearshift, the door. He wipes the shotgun as well and tosses it onto the driver’s seat. He pulls a key fob from his pocket, cleans it, and leaves it next to the gun.
Then Braiden helps me around to the front of the house. He opens the Bentley’s passenger door, and he guides me to the seat. He folds his jacket around me and buckles the belt across my lap.
I watch him cross to the driver’s side, quick and confident, a panther returning from his kill. With a push of a button the car hums to life.
“Ardmore?” he asks before he starts down the short driveway to the gate.
I nod once. My voice sounds strange in my blasted ears, small and hollow and very far away. But I don’t hesitate. I don’t question. I only confirm my choice: “Home.”