Chapter 41
ALLEGRA
Malek bleeds out while I watch.
While I kneel at his side, my bare knees soaked in his blood and watch. His eyes never leave mine. I hope it’s not comfort I’m offering him.
Cassian drapes his ruined shirt over my shoulders and stands at my back ready to pounce. Ready to protect.
Malek opens his mouth to say something, but when he does, I pick up his gun discarded nearby and push the barrel into it.
I don’t want to hear him. I don’t want to hear what he has to say.
He doesn’t deserve a single one of the breaths he’s taken since he orchestrated the brutal murder of my mother and yet he’s been allowed to take them.
For years he’s been allowed to take them.
There are two reasons I won’t pull the trigger and blow his brains out. Amal and Daniel. I won’t have them know that I was the one who killed their father because no matter what, he was their father.
How simple it is to speak of someone hated in the past tense. How comforting.
Cassian crouches behind me, his big body solid and warm at my back, his arms a band of safety around me. He looks down at Malek.
“It’s a slow death,” I say, my eyes on Malek’s, the picture of him like this, dying in agony, burned onto my brain.
The feeling is dark inside my chest. I don’t know if I thought I’d feel satisfaction.
A righting of so many wrongs. I don’t. I feel nothing.
Maybe that makes me a monster like my father. Maybe.
“We need to get your arm looked at,” Cassian says.
“Just a few more minutes.” I cock my head, knowing the end is near. Hearing it in his breaths. Seeing it in his eyes.
Cassian will keep a promise today. He will make a widow out of me.
But I won’t ask him to keep the other. I don’t want any pieces of Malek Lombardi.
And when he takes his final breath, when his eyes go flat, I don’t close them like Cassian did Enzo’s.
I stand, Cassian with me. He watches me closely and I feel his hand slip around mine.
Feel him take the gun from me without once breaking eye contact.
His eyebrows furrow, but he nods. “Your arm, Allegra. We need to get it looked at and set now,” he repeats.
I look at it, remembering how it broke when Enzo cut me down and I landed on it.
I feel the pain of it now. I nod and Cassian leads me down the stairs and out the door.
It’s full day now and all over the field are strewn the bodies of fallen soldiers on both sides.
Those who remain alive are walking like the dead.
Even men used to such violence aren’t immune to it.
Jet meets us at the door. I smile to see him.
“Hey.”
He’s unhurt, but not unaffected. There’s a patch of gray hair at his temple that wasn’t there before.
“You all right?” he asks me.
I nod. “Thank you,” I say.
“It’s what friends do for each other.”
A sound from the field distracts me and I turn to look. I can pick out Cassian’s men. They’re in fatigues with bulletproof vests. They’re herding those who came to battle Cassian, those on Malek’s side, into an area nearest the woods.
“Come, Allegra,” Cassian says, opening the door of an SUV riddled with bullets.
“What happens to them?” I ask.
“They’ll have the opportunity to accept that Trevino and Moretti families are now united with one king and one queen. If they do, nothing happens.”
“If they don’t?”
He studies me in silence. That’s my answer. I glance once more at them, recognizing many faces. Does it make me a monster if I don’t care?
“I need to ask you one thing,” Cassian says. “What do you want me to do with Malek’s body?”
I don’t hesitate. “Burn it.”