Chapter 23 #2
Ettore straightens slightly, lifting his chin with the particular dignity of a man who has decided he is still in control of this.
“No matter.” His eyes settle on me with something ancient and cold behind them. “I will finish what should have been finished years ago.”
Then he raises his weapon and opens fire.
We hit the floor. Glass detonates above our heads, and wood splinters in every direction, shards raining down across the backs of our hands, our necks, our gear. The room fills with noise and smoke and the smell of gunpowder thick enough to taste.
“Alive!” I shout across the chaos.
“I know, Serenity,” Nico growls.
My husband is pissed.
Through the smoke, I notice Ettore bolt through the side exit. I am right behind him, boots hitting the rooftop before the door has finished swinging.
The heat up here is immediate and suffocating; the summer air sitting heavy and thick even as dawn begins bleeding pale light across the edge of the sky.
Humidity wraps itself around me like a second layer of skin.
The roar hits me before I fully process what I am seeing.
A helicopter sits at the far end of the rooftop, blades already cutting through the morning air, the downdraft flattening everything around it.
He had an exit plan the entire time.
Ettore is running hard toward it, head down, closing the distance fast, moving like a man who actually believes he is going to make it off this roof.
Not today.
Nico fires first. The shot catches Ettore in the shoulder and spins him half a step sideways. He stumbles, loses his rhythm, but finds it again, still driving forward, still reaching for that helicopter like salvation is rotating its blades fifty feet away.
I raise my Glock and fire.
The bullet takes out his knee.
Ettore goes down hard, hitting the rooftop with the full weight of his body, a sound like something finally breaking. The scream that tears out of him splits the early morning open and gets swallowed immediately by the roar of the rotors.
I start walking toward him.
Slow, measured steps across the concrete while he writhes and claws at the surface beneath him, leaving a dark smear of blood behind him with every inch he manages to drag himself backward.
“Stay away from me.” He spits the words up at me, still trying to manufacture authority from the ground.
The sound that comes out of my mouth is not quite a laugh. It is harder than that. Older.
“Afraid?”
I stop in front of him and look down at the man who has lived in my nightmares for fifteen years. The silver at his temples. The expensive fabric of his suit soaked dark at the shoulder and the knees. The way his eyes are still trying to hold on to something that looks like control.
“Your brother planned to rape then kill me.”
His face stays blank. One of my tears slips free. I wipe it away angrily.
Monster.
“You created every nightmare I’ve ever had.”
He gathers whatever is left in his throat and spits blood near my boots. His lip curls.
“Weakness.”
I raise my Glock and shoot out his other knee.
The scream that erupts from him is enormous, ragged and animal, loud enough to swallow the last of the night whole. He rolls onto his side, both hands clawing at his legs, his body curling around the pain like he can hold it together by sheer will.
I watch him without expression.
“That is weakness?” I ask. My voice comes out cold enough to cut glass.
He writhes against the concrete, breath coming in sharp, wet gasps, the composure finally stripped away and something raw and desperate underneath it. I crouch down in front of him so he has nowhere to look but at me.
“I should kill you right now.”
He forces his eyes up to mine. Even now, even broken and bleeding on a rooftop, there is something in his face that refuses to bend completely.
“Then do it.”
I smile at him. Slow and unhurried and completely without warmth.
“No.”
The word lands, and I watch it land. Watch it move through him like something cold, and I see the exact moment genuine fear finds his eyes for the first time. Not fear of the bullet. Fear of what comes instead of it.
There you are.
Nico steps up beside me, looking down at Ettore the way you look at something you are already done with.
“You are coming with us.”
Ettore’s mouth twists. “Go fuck yourself.”
Nico brings his boot down onto the wounded leg with his full weight behind it. The crack of bone is sharp and clean in the morning air.
The sound Ettore makes does not resemble anything human.
Ritchie and Rémy move in fast and efficient, securing his wrists with zip ties, binding his ankles while he thrashes, curses and accomplishes nothing. His struggling is useless, and he knows it and the knowing makes it worse for him, which is exactly the point.
“You cannot do this.” His voice has gone hoarse. “You cannot.”
I straighten up and roll my shoulders back.
I study the ruined, bleeding, screaming man zip tied on the rooftop and consider that.
Catch’s voice comes through the earpiece, clipped and even. “Police chatter picking up. Five minutes, maybe less.”
Perfect timing.
“He will look considerably worse in the torture chamber.”
Even Miff goes quiet for a moment.
Nico’s hand closes around my wrist before I can move away. Not hard. Just enough to stop me. I turn and find him looking at me the way he sometimes does, like he is trying to read something written in a language he is still learning.
“You okay?”
The honest answer rises before I can dress it up.
No. Not even close to okay. Not yet.
But standing here on this rooftop with the sky going gold at the edges and Ettore broken and bound at my feet, something has shifted inside my chest. Something I have been carrying since I was fourteen years old, through every nightmare and every sleepless night and every year I spent running from a ghost, has gone quiet.
Not gone. But quiet.
For the first time, I feel like I can breathe all the way down.
“No,” I tell him, and I mean it completely. “But I will be.”
He pulls me against him, one hard, solid second, his arm around my back like a wall between me and everything, and then releases me.
No drawn-out moment. Just that one second of him making sure I know he is there.
My husband. The man who expressed his love for me in so many different ways on our honeymoon.
I let him. For the moment, I don’t ponder on what rocked our marriage yesterday morning. What put distance between us. Now isn’t the time.
Ritchie hauls Ettore upright and starts dragging him toward the stairwell door. The man who sent soldiers into my childhood home, who stole my mother’s unborn child, who built himself a throne out of other people’s terror, is bleeding and screaming and alive.
Exactly how I needed him.
The bullet would have been too fast. Too clean. Too much of a mercy for a man who has never once extended any.
Now the real pain begins.