"Grew some balls, did you, boy?" His voice is a ruined rasp. "You going to kill your old man?"
Bella yanks his head back.
"Tell them,” she snarls. “Tell them what you did, you fucking monster. Tell them what you did to your own daughter."
Don Leo tries to wrench his head out of Bella’s grip, but she refuses to let him go.
"She wanted to be a whore,” he growls. “So I treated her like a whore. I fucked her like a whore, and then I killed her like a?—"
The gunshot splits the night open.
Nico pulls the trigger with his father's half-finished confession still hanging in the air like smoke, and Don Leo's body slumps forward.
Dead.
A pained scream tears out of Nico's chest and it sounds like it’s being dragged out from the deepest pit of his soul. The gun clatters from Nico's hand, and Lydia's hand finds his.
He doesn't look at her. He doesn't look at anything. But his fingers close around hers, and he holds on.
The world spins around me. The blood loss has been patient with me. But now that the adrenaline has crested and receded, it’s coming to collect its due with the impersonal efficiency of biology.
"Slava!"
Bella catches me before I hit the ground. Her hands are on my face, my chest, and pressing against the wound at my side with a pressure that should hurt but doesn't—everything is getting distant now, muffled, like the world is being heard through deep water.
I look up at her. Dark hair in wild tangles. Full lips swollen, dried tears tracking through the blood and grime on her face.
I smile.
"I'm sorry," I say. My voice sounds far away, even to me. "I’m sorry for what I did to you. I’m sorry for trying to push you away because I thought it would save you."
"Shut up." She's crying. Fresh tears now, not the dried ones—these are hot and fast and landing on my face like rain. "Shut up, you don't get to apologize like you won’t ever see me again. Not like this."
"I love you."
She stops. Her hands go still against my side. Her eyes—dark, wet, furious, terrified—meet mine.
"I love you, Bella Farnassi," I say the words that have been sitting behind my teeth for weeks. I'm running out of time to saythem and I will not die with this unsaid. "I love you and I should have told you that tonight and I'm telling you now because I'm not sure I'll get another chance and I need you to know?—"
"I love you too." She says it quick and angry, like she's furious at me for making her say it here, on a blood-soaked street, with my life leaking out between her fingers. "I love you too, youstupid, stubborn, impossible man. I love you. I love you. Do you hear me?"
I hear her.
The darkness is coming, slow and inexorable.
"Good."
One word. Because I have never in my life said anything I didn't mean, and I don't have the blood left for more than that one single word.
Bella's face blurs above me. Her voice is getting far away. Her hands are the only warm thing left as they press against my side like she can hold the life inside me through sheer force of will.
"Slava.” She begs. “SLAVA!"
Then the darkness takes me, and the last thing I hear is my name on her lips.
54
BELLA
