31. Eva
EVA
“Wolfe. Wolfe!”
He’s not responding. His eyes are closed, and his body is dead weight against me, and there’s so much blood I can’t tell where the wound ends and his shirt begins.
I’ve got one hand pressed hard against his shoulder, and the other cradling his head, and I’m saying his name over and over like that’s going to fix a bullet hole.
It’s not. I know it’s not. But my mouth won’t stop.
“Somebody help me!” I scream it at Lochlan’s guys. At Sal. At the walls. “He’s not waking up!”
One of Lochlan’s men kneels beside me and checks his pulse. “He’s out but he’s breathing. His pulse is strong. He’s not dying.”
He’s not dying.
Those two words are the only thing keeping me from completely losing it on the floor of my brother’s restaurant.
His blood is everywhere. On my hands, my arms, soaked through the front of my shirt. Warm and sticky between my fingers from holding him up before his body went limp against mine.
The medic shows up in under three minutes because of course, the Molloys had one on standby for tonight.
He comes through the back door with a medical bag.
No uniform. No ambulance. No questions. He drops beside Wolfe, checks the wound, and says “exit wound, missed the artery” in a tone that’s way too calm for the amount of blood on this floor.
He packs the shoulder, wraps it tight, and tells Wolfe to stay conscious. Wolfe’s eyes keep drifting shut and snapping back open. Every time they close, my stomach bottoms out.
They’re going to take him to the Molloy house. Not a hospital. Because hospitals mean questions and police reports and paperwork that connects a Molloy to a shooting in the same neighborhood where an Albanian lending operation just got raided.
Of course, not a hospital. Because God forbid anything in this world operates the way normal shit is supposed to operate.
Cillian bursts through the front door about five minutes later, out of breath and wild-eyed. He takes in the scene—the blood on the floor, his brother on a stretcher, me standing in the middle of it soaked in red and shaking so hard I can feel it in my teeth.
“How bad?” His voice is tight and scared. I’ve never heard Cillian sound scared.
“Through and through. Missed everything important,” the medic says.
Cillian lets out a breath and drops his head for a second. When he lifts it, his eyes are wet. He blinks it away fast, but I saw it.
Then he looks at me. “You coming with us?”
“No.”
“Eva—”
“I’m staying with Sal,” I say, my voice raspy.
He looks at Sal. My brother is white as a sheet and holding himself together with both arms, which is probably how I’d look, too, if someone just got shot in my restaurant and I had zero explanation for why.
“Yeah,” Cillian says quietly. “Okay.”
He moves toward the stretcher and squeezes Wolfe’s good shoulder. Wolfe mumbles something I can’t hear and Cillian nods.
Then Cillian turns back to me. He pulls me toward the kitchen, away from Sal and Lochlan’s guys.
“I know what you found,” he says, his voice low. “On the laptop. He told me everything.”
My jaw tightens. I clench and unclench my fingers. “Good for him.”
“I’m not going to stand here and explain any of it because that’s his job, not mine. He fucked up. He knows it.” Cillian’s dark blue eyes hold mine. “But I will say one thing. You’re missing context, Eva. A lot of it. And the context changes everything.”
“Context doesn’t undo what I read.”
“No. It doesn’t. But it changes why those things exist.” He taps his fist against the doorframe the way he always does. “When you’re ready, let him explain. That’s all I’m asking.”
“I’m not ready. And I don’t know if I ever will be.”
“Okay.” He looks at me for a long second. Then he nods once and follows the stretcher out the front door of Rosario’s.
Lochlan’s team clears out. The man on the floor is gone. So is Wolfe.
But the blood is still there.
The reminder of what almost just happened is still there.
Sal hasn’t spoken since Wolfe’s guys carried him out. He’s behind the bar, both hands white knuckling the counter, staring at his streaked floor.
I walk over and sit on the stool across from him. My hands are still caked with blood. I should wash them, but I can’t make myself move toward the sink.
“Sal.”
He doesn’t look up.
“Sal. Look at me.”
He raises his eyes. They’re wet and wide and terrified and angry all at the same time. My big brother, who has never in his life looked at me with anything other than love, is looking at me like he doesn’t know who I am.
That’s the worst thing that’s happened tonight. Worse than the gun. Worse than the blood. Worse than watching Wolfe drop.
“Tell me,” he says in a tight voice. “All of it. Right now.”
So I tell him. Not everything, though. Not about the Molloy operations, or Adriana, or the details that aren’t mine to share.
But I give him enough. I tell him about the debt and how Dmitri used it to get to me.
I explain what I did for Dmitri and why.
How long it’s been going on. Why I lied to him. Why I had to lie to him.
Every word that comes out of my mouth is like a brick being pulled from the wall between us, and by the time I’m done talking, there’s nothing left standing.
“Three months?” he says. “You’ve been doing this for three months and you didn’t tell me?”
“I couldn’t tell you.”
“Couldn’t or wouldn’t?”
“Both. If you knew, you’d have tried to fix it yourself. And Dmitri’s people would have—”
“Don’t.” He slams a hand on the top of the bar. “Don’t tell me you did this to protect me. I’m so sick of people protecting me. You. Wolfe. Whoever the hell those guys were. Everyone running around making decisions about my life, and I’m the last person who gets to know about it.”
“Sal—”
“The investor. Andersen. That was fake?”
“Yeah.”
“The meeting was a setup?”
“Yeah.”
“To get to me?”
“To get to me through you.”
He stares at me. Then he drops his head into his hands and lets out a sound that is somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and it’s the most gutting thing I’ve ever heard come out of my brother’s mouth.
“The debt,” he says into his hand. “The gambling debt. That was part of it, too?”
“Dmitri arranged it.” My shoulders slump forward. “To create leverage.”
“So my whole life for the past year has been a setup. The debt. The pressure. The collection guys coming around. All of it was because of you?”
The words hit me like a fist to the gut because he’s not wrong. All of it was because of me. Every threat to Sal’s livelihood, every sleepless night he spent worrying about losing the restaurant, every dollar he scraped together to pay back a debt that was manufactured to control his sister.
“I’m sorry.” My voice cracks. “I’m so sorry, Sal.”
“And Wolfe?” He lifts his head. “Where does he fit in?”
“He was helping me. Helping us. He’s the one who paid off your debt. He’s the one who figured out Dmitri’s endgame. He planned tonight—the whole thing. Taking down the network and organization so they’d never come after you again.”
“And the part where he took a bullet in my restaurant?”
My eyes drop to my hands. I clasp them together. “That was him saving my life.”
“Jesus, Eva.” Sal lets out a deep sigh and stares at me. “You love him, don’t you.”
But he doesn’t ask it as a question.
And my heart is so shredded right now, it hurts too much to agree.
“I don’t know what I feel right now.”
“Yeah, you do. You love him. And he almost bled out on my floor for you.” He shakes his head. “Whatever happened between you two, whatever fight you had, that man drove to my restaurant and stepped in front of a gun for you. People don’t do that for someone they’re planning to throw away.”
My throat seizes up. This started hours ago when Sal showed me that text. The one Wolfe sent from a spoofed number to keep my brother safe even after I drove away at midnight. The bullet just ripped open the doubt.
“I can’t talk about this right now,” I croak.
“Okay.”
“I need to clean up.”
“Leave it. I’ll deal with it tomorrow.”
“Sal, there’s blood on your—”
“I said leave it.” His voice is firm but gentle. “Go clean yourself up. Use the bathroom in the back. I’ll wait.”
I wash my trembling hands in the bathroom sink. Wolfe’s blood swirls down the drain in pale pink ribbons. As I stand there watching it disappear, my chest cracks wide open and I have to grip the edges of the sink to keep myself upright.
He stepped between me and a gun. He didn’t hesitate. His body moved before his brain could stop it, the same way it moved the night of the Albanian fight, the same way it always moves when I’m in danger.
The man who built a relocation plan with my name on it drove across Boston and put his body in front of a bullet for me.
I don’t know what to do with that. I don’t know where to put it. It doesn’t fit inside the story I’ve been telling myself since the cabin. It defies the math. It wrecks the pattern.
But the case file is still real. Eighteen months ago, he found proof that I was innocent and buried it because I was nobody to him.
Just a case number that connected to his family’s business.
And the relocation plan is still real, too.
My name. A new city. A seventy-two-hour timeline.
Both documents sitting in the same locked folder on his laptop.
I dry my hands and look at myself in the mirror. I look like absolute hell. Mascara streaks my cheeks, my hair hangs in straggly strands, dark circles stain the skin under my eyes.
I pull out my phone. Seventeen missed calls from this morning and nothing since. He’s at the Molloy house getting stitched up right now. He’s probably in pain and exhausted and wondering if I’ll call.
I turn the phone off.
Not as punishment. Not as revenge. Because I can’t think clearly with his name on my screen. I need space and silence and time to figure out what’s real, because right now I have two sets of evidence that don’t match, and my brain is too fried, my heart too wrecked to sort through any of it.
The wall has a crack. But it’s still standing.
And I need it to stand for a little while longer so I can figure out my next move.
I walk back out. To the dining room. Sal waits by the door with his jacket on.
“Let’s go home, E.”
I blow out a shaky breath. “Yeah. Okay.”
We walk the two blocks to his apartment in the dark.
I scan every car, every doorway, every shadow between here and his building.
Lochlan’s probably still got some guys watching this block, but probably isn’t good enough for me right now.
Dmitri’s operation might be burning to the ground tonight, but that doesn’t mean every one of his guys got the memo.
Sal’s hand finds mine halfway there. He doesn’t say a word. He just takes my hand and holds it, and I grip it tight because my brother just found out that his sister has been lying to him for months and he’s still reaching for me.
That’s way more than I deserve.
We get inside and he locks and deadbolts the door. I walk around and check all the windows. He watches me do it and doesn’t ask why.
“Get some sleep, E,” he says from the hallway once I’m settled in his bed.
I won’t. But I nod.
I sit in the dark with the memory of Wolfe stepping between me and that gun like it was the easiest decision he ever made.
And dammit, that just doesn’t fit next to a relocation plan with my name on it. It doesn’t fit next to a closed case file, or three weeks of cold text exchanges with his brother.
Nothing fucking fits.
But for the first time since the cabin, I’m not sure I have the whole story.
And that terrifies me more than anything Dmitri ever did.