He looks like a man stripped bare.
“It wasn’t me,” he rages softly, breath shuddering. “They were using me, Estella. Going behind my back while I was with you.”
I want to believe him.
But I can’t.
“You’re a fucking liar,” I hiss, gripping the gun tighter until my knuckles scream. “A fucking snake that slithered into my life and drained every piece of me for your own benefit.”
He keeps shaking his head, eyes full of desperation, and the words die in my throat. I want to keep tearing into him. I want to peel his lies apart and shove them back down his throat. But bile surges upward, hot and bitter, and I can’t get another insult past it.
My chest squeezes so tight it feels like something sharp is lodged between my ribs. And everything—every twitch of his mouth, every shake of his head, every pleading note in his voice—twists the knife deeper.
“I’ll admit it,” he begins, stumbling over the words like they cut him on the way out. “I got involved because I was trying to find the person who killed my parents. Yes, I wanted to use you. I wanted to use Cane. But that changed, Estella. It changed right after our first mission together?—”
“Changed?!” My loud voice slices through the air. “Look around you! Look what you did! They’re after me now because of you!”
His wet eyes break something inside me. He used to feel like the rarest thing I’d ever found. A jewel carved out of darkness. I fell for every illusion like the naive idiot I swore I’d never be. Now I’m choking on the price of it.
“Estella, baby, please. Please listen to me,” he begs, hands clasped together as he kneels on the floor. He looks like a mortal man praying for divine mercy—shaking, broken, offering himself up to a goddess he’s never believed in.
And I’m the goddess. I’m the one who gets to decide whether he lives or dies, whether I put a bullet in his chest or grant him the mercy he never gave me.
“I was obsessed with you from the very beginning,” he says, words trembling with a truth that’s too ugly, too raw. “Yes, I tried to fight it. Yes, I tried to bury it. But I couldn’t. Every dark, twisted, sick feeling I had—it was the truest version of me. Before you, I lived in this pathetic illusion, thinking my life was fine. Thinking I was fine. But you… You pulled me out of it.”
His smile is pleading and pained, a confession carved into the ruin of his face. “And since that moment, I didn’t want us to stop.”
A sob tears up his throat, a raw echo of my own. I’m losing control, but my grip on the gun only tightens. It’s the last anchor I have, the only thing keeping me tethered while he’s stripped every other piece of power from me.
What does he see when he looks at me? A psychotic killing machine who stupidly carved out a soft spot for him? A joke? A tool to patch up the gaping wounds he’s dragged behind him his whole life?
“I thought I was a completely different fucking person, Estella. But now I see it. They all think you peeled me open and exposed every raw nerve, leaving me bleeding, but I don’t give a single fuck what they think when I know it’s not true.”
Slowly, he rises from the floor, inching toward me. I keep the gun steady, the barrel lined up with his blackened heart.
“I’m not a good person, Estella. I never was. But you make me feel alive, and I want to bring color into your life the same way you brought it into mine. I’m?—”
“Dante,” I whisper, his name rolling off my tongue with pure disgust. “Is that even your real name? What am I supposed to call you?”
“You can call me Dante,” he says, adding a hollow lightness to the name. It lands wrong, and my lips twitch, the fury inside me igniting again. “Call me that fucking liar, that piece of shit, that motherfucker.”
Through the blur burning in my eyes, I see him close the last of the distance between us.
“I can be whatever you want me to be,” he breathes, tears carving down his face. His hands tremble as he reaches for the cold barrel, wrapping his fingers around it and pressing it against his chest. “All you ask, I will give. I am yours, Estella—yours to carve, to break, to scatter into whatever ruin you choose. My heart belongs to you, the way yours has rooted itself in me. So go on. Pull the trigger. I don’t need a future where you are absent. Silence what remains of me if I am not the reason your heart still stirs.”
A cold shiver slices down my spine, raising goosebumps in its wake. The power vibrating through my fingers is so blinding it scrambles my thoughts. My gaze drops to the barrel, to how tightly I’m pressing it against him, to the wild pounding of his heart thrumming through the metal like a warning.
My lungs ache, starved of air, as the rest of the world dissolves. It shrinks until it’s only him and me, hanging from a thread so thin it’s already fraying.
He isn’t the reason I breathe anymore. He’s the poison choking the last of my oxygen, a venomous spider crawling through my nerves and slicing them apart one by one.
Outside, thunder rolls across the empty street—seconds before the soft drum of rain begins to tap against the roof. The ringing in my ears swells, drowning everything out as I push the barrel harder into his chest.
And then, I pull the trigger.
The last time my life flashed before my eyes this fast and this violently was in the asylum, during those godforsaken days when the doctors loved to start the machines on full volume. They’d ramp up the pressure, crank the voltage, and wait for the exact moment my screams turned into nothing but a high, distant ringing. My memories would flicker, stuttering across my vision like some broken, miserable slideshow.
But this—this is ten times sharper. Ten times more merciless.
