The room is spinning. The desk beneath me feels like it’s dissolving. I grip the edge like they’re the only solid things left in the world.
Slava’s fingers reach out and grip the seven-pointed star, and it feels like the necklace is strangling me.
“And Luca stole this for himself.”
The room is too small. The walls are too close. I am drowning in the wreckage of everything I thought I knew about my brother and about myself.
“So I killed him,” Slava says. “Him and Don Leo’s oldest son Vinny. I wanted Don Leo to know what it felt like to lose something precious.”
“That’s not the story Luca told me.”
“No,” Slava says. “I imagine it isn’t.”
“He gave me the necklace three weeks before he died. Told me he’d bought it himself. That he’d saved up for months because I deserved something beautiful.”
“He lied.” Slava’s hand moves up the gold chain until it closes around my throat. “He was a traitor and a thief who stole a woman’s life for a promotion.”
His fingers tighten ever so slightly, and his thumb presses against the pulse in my throat.
“He sold you a lie and made you believe he was something worth mourning.”
I am crying. I don’t know when I started, but tears are streaming down my face, hot and relentless. The brother I’ve been avenging was never real.
He was the villain all along.
“These clothes,” I manage, my voice breaking. “They belonged to Gia too, didn’t they?”
Slava’s expression shifts. Something softer, something sadder.
“Yes.”
I press a hand to my mouth, trying to contain the sob that wants to escape. I was jealous of her. I resented her presence in them.
I wore a murdered woman’s clothes, and hated her for it.
And before I slipped them on, I completed Luca’s betrayal.
If Luca was the villain, then what does that make me?
“And her family never found out about Alessandro?”
“No.They knew his baptism name, but not his real name.”
“Until now,” I whisper.
Until I told them.
“Until now.” He nods.
My hands move up and unclasp the necklace before I can stop myself. It comes undone easily enough. The chain falls away from my neck, and drapes over Slava’s fingers around my throat.
“Take it,” I whisper.
But Slava doesn’t move.
“It belonged to Gia,” I continue, my voice steady even though nothing else about me is. “Not to me. It was never mine. And it’s clear she still holds your heart.”
“Keep it.”
