Emilia doesn’t move. “I’m going to kill you for what you did to me.”
“You don’t have the fucking balls. Literally, you don’t have any.”
Emilia turns and her gaze finds January. “We were nothing to you. Just pets. Dogs you could keep in your kennel.”
Parker laughs. “Dogs are more obedient than you’ll ever be you useless cun—”
She plunges the knife into his neck. January turns her face into my shoulder, but I watch the bright spray of blood. The redhead got him right in the artery. A professional couldn’t have cut him better.
Parker slumps backward, but Emilia isn’t done. She grabs him by the foot and drags him, choking and gurgling across the tiles. She pushes him into the pool, the water around him billowing pink with blood. Then she takes off her shoes and climbs in, delicate as a dancer. She wades toward his gurgling, still-live body and lifts the knife.
“Die,” she hisses. “Die, asshole.”
She plunges it into his stomach, and he lets out a gasp like a punctured balloon. I watch him flounder, arms and legs waving feebly. Emilia raises the knife high, darker blood dripping from the tip. Her face is glowing now, electrified from within. She looks beautiful. Terrifying. When she brings the knife down again, Parker makes no sound at all.
No one is coming to rescue him. Not a single soul.
We watch him die, Emilia, January, and I. He slips under the water, his motions growing slower and smaller until there are none at all. He sinks beneath his own hideous pool, gone forever.
January shifts in my arms, moving away from me.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
She looks at Emilia, still standing, knife-raised in the pool, staring at Parker’s corpse. “I need to go to her.”
“Be careful,” I say, but she ignores me. She slides back into the pool, naked and perfect and wades toward Emilia. When she reaches her, she wraps her arms around the redhead.
“It’s over,” she says over the rush of the waterfall. “You did it.”
Emilia’s face works furiously and she’s no longer the angel of death—just a scared girl who doesn’t know how to take care of herself. “He might come back…”
“No,” January says. “You did it. You killed him. You saved us.”
“I’m so sorry I didn’t do it before…”
“It’s okay.” Slowly, January takes the blade from Emilia and throws it away. It clatters with a clang onto the tiled floor. Such a small thing to end a monster. But then, he was just a man. A human being, killed by a woman he abused.
Emilia begins to sob, and January does too and as they hold each other and wail, I feel like I’m bearing witness to something necessary. A wound bleeding freely before it runs clean.
I cross myself. Not for him, but for Dolce, Alessia, Mrs. Rossi, Mr. Bassilotta, Zia Teresa. All of them. Everyone who ever suffered. A moan draws my attention to Archie, and I go to his side. He’s alive, barely. I drop to my knees and assess his wounds. I’m trying to dress his gunshot with strips off my sweater when Bobby arrives, shoving his way through the plants.
I call out to him, but he’s already caught sight of January and Emilia in the pool. Parker’s dead body floating beside them. He stares, his eyes growing wider and wider, and it seems to me he’s becoming younger, the years falling from his face.
“He’s gone,” he whispers.
“He is.”
Bobby drops to the ground, staring at January. “Did she…?”
“No. The redhead. Emilia.”
“Fuck.”
Bobby begins to sob, and I crawl to him, wrapping an arm around his shoulders. I want to ask about the others, but I know they’re fine. If they weren’t, Bobby wouldn’t be here. As I hold my brother close, all at once, it seems to me that the world has gone slack. That there were so many things to do and now there are none. Everything is okay and if it isn’t, we have all the time in the world to make it so.
Chapter Fifteen
Bobby Bassilotta
