Chapter 33 #2
Billie looks down at the rings in her hands. She barely glances at them— she is looking at Alana, at the realness of her, at the friend she made in the most improbable circumstances a friendship has ever been built on.
I watch this exchange, and I think: Alana always has a plan.
“Billie, don’t—” I start to say, warning her not to take the rings.
But I’m interrupted when the fire door slams open again.
Marco.
He comes through the doorway in a rage. Blood runs from a cut above his eyebrow— Alana’s stiletto left its mark— and his jaw is swollen, but he doesn’t stop moving.
Behind him: three guards, fanning out, weapons drawn.
Marco has a gun. He raises it, and the muzzle finds Billie with the inevitability of a compass finding north. She’s still holding the rings in her hand, shocked and still.
“The rings,” he says. His voice is quiet. It cuts through the night air louder than any shout. “Give me the rings. Now.”
Billie doesn’t move. Her chin is up. Her hands are at her sides. She is standing in the Roman night in her torn red dress, and she does not flinch. Instead… she looks at me, seeking help.
Marco doesn’t miss this. His eyes move to me. He studies the space between Billie and me— seeing something there the two of us haven’t even admitted to ourselves yet.
“Or I kill your boyfriend,” Marco says, and the gun swings to my chest.
Boyfriend. The word lands on me with a weight that is— under the circumstances— inappropriately pleasant. I file this away for later consideration, assuming later exists.
Billie’s face changes. The composure cracks— not into fear, but into calculation. I watch her run the math. The rings or my life. The rings or everything.
She looks at Alana, who’s watching all of this with a deadpan expression. Then, she turns back to Marco and says, simply: “Catch.”
Billie reaches back her hand…
And she throws the rings into the air.
They arc across the rooftop, tumbling through the night sky, catching the ambient light of Rome— two small objects worth more than either of us will ever comprehend— and Marco catches them.
Both hands. His fingers close around them with a hunger that is almost physical, and for one fraction of a second, his face shows something like satisfaction.
Then he raises the gun again. Not at me this time.
At Billie.
Because men like Marco do not lose, and they do not forgive, and the rings were never the point. The point was always this: punishment. Revenge, for his brother. For being outsmarted.
I see the gun move. I see where it’s aimed. I see Billie standing there with her enormous eyes and her honest face and her bare shoulders, and something inside me— something deeper than thought— moves.
I leap.
The gun fires. The sound is enormous— it fills the rooftop, fills the sky, fills every space inside my body where silence used to live.
The bullet finds my arm as I jump in fornt of Billie.
My left arm, just below the shoulder, and the pain is— I will describe it this way— clarifying.
It is the kind of pain that removes all ambiguity from the world.
There is no confusion about what matters.
There is no uncertainty about what I would do again, given the choice.
The answer is: this. Exactly this. Every time.
I hit the ground. My shoulder takes the impact, and the concrete roof is cold against my cheek, and the stars above me blur for a moment before sharpening again.
“Noooo!” Alana screams, and for one wild, absurd, deeply Alana moment, I think she is screaming for me— but then she adds: “The rings! He has the rings! Billie, we could have?—”
“Rodrigo!” Billie shouts, and then she is beside me, on her knees, and my head is in her lap.
Her hands are on my face. Her fingers are warm and shaking and her eyes— those eyes, the ones I first saw at a baby shower in Chicago, the ones with the gold flecks that I have been trying not to drown in since the moment I noticed them— are full of tears.
“Rodrigo,” she says, and her voice breaks on my name like a wave against something solid. “Stay with me. Stay right here.”
“I’m here,” I say. The pain in my arm is a bright, pulsing thing, but her face above me is brighter. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“You got shot,” she says, as if I might not have noticed.
“Sí,” I agree. “In the arm. Not fatal. I have another one.”
She laughs— a wet, desperate, beautiful laugh that has tears in it— and presses her forehead to mine.
Then: the sound.
It arrives from everywhere at once— the rhythmic, mechanical thunder of helicopter rotors cutting through the night sky.
A searchlight sweeps across the rooftop, turning everything white and stark and sudden.
The wind picks up, pressing Billie’s hair against her face, making the sequins on her dress scatter light in every direction.
“This is Interpol.” Agent Rakowski’s voice, amplified through a loudspeaker, fills the rooftop with calm, bureaucratic authority. “Marco Ledger, you are surrounded. Drop your weapon. Get on the ground. Now.”
From my position— which is on the ground with my head in the lap of a woman I’ve taken a bullet for— I watch it happen.
Interpol agents pour through every access point.
The fire door. The service ladder on the east side.
Rappelling lines from the helicopter itself.
They move with coordinated precision, weapons drawn, voices calling commands that Marco’s guards obey because there is, at last, no other option.
Marco stands in the center of it, the two rings clutched in his fist, and for one long moment he looks like what he is: a man holding everything he’s ever wanted and losing it all at the same time.
His gun clatters to the concrete. His hands rise.
The agents close around him like the sea closing over a stone.
It is over.
Billie’s hand is on my chest. Her tears are on my face— hers, not mine, though mine are threatening to arrive as well, which I will deny later.
Her thumb traces a line along my jaw, and she is looking at me with an expression that contains everything I have been hoping, quietly, desperately, to see.
“You took a bullet for me,” she says.
“I did,” I say.
“You jumped in front of a gun.”
“Sí.”
“For me.”
“For you.” I reach up— with my good arm, the one that has not been recently perforated— and I touch her face.
Her skin is warm. Her freckles are there, scattered across her nose, the most specific and perfect details on the most specific and perfect face.
“Billie. Would a man take a bullet for a passing thing?”
She stares at me. The tears come faster, but she is smiling— she is smiling the way people smile when something they were afraid to believe in turns out to be true.
“Only a really dumb one,” she whispers.
“True,” I agree. “But I am very smart,” I pull her closer.
The pain in my arm protests, and I do not care.
“You are not a passing thing. You have never been a passing thing. You are the thing I’ve been waiting for.
The thing I was afraid to believe existed, because every time before, I was wrong. But I am not wrong about you.”
She kisses me. Or I kiss her. Her mouth on mine, gentle and fierce and salt-tasting from tears— is the most important thing that has ever happened to me on a rooftop, or anywhere else.
The helicopter hovers above us, the wind pressing down, and somewhere behind us Benny is shouting something about this being exactly like the end of a movie whose title I cannot hear and do not care about, and Alana is arguing with an Interpol agent about whether her shoes count as weapons and therefore need to be confiscated, and medics are approaching with equipment and concern.
The night sky over Rome is vast and clear and full of stars that have been there for millennia and will be there for millennia more, and beneath them, on the concrete roof of a casino, I lie with my head in Billie Harper’s lap, and I am shot, and I am bleeding, and I am— without question, without ambiguity, without a single reservation— the happiest man alive.