The words came in a voice I knew better than any voice in the world, quiet and specific and right at my ear, and I didn't question it. I breathed and steadied and kept my eyes on the door.
It opened inch by painful inch and then I saw him and felt something cold move through me that had nothing to do with fear and everything to do with recognition.
Santino.
Of course it was Santino. It would always be Santino, my brother who had watched me his entire life the way predators watched things they intended to have eventually. He moved into the room with a gun up and his eyes scanning, and I kept still and kept the gun at my side and thought about his weakness, the one I had watched him fail to overcome since we were children. He hesitated before he completed a job. A beat, sometimes two, and he always closed his eyes when he finally committed. Every single time, his whole life, never once different.
Dante let go of my hand and placed it on my shoulder instead. The touch was steadying in a way I hadn't expected, solid and warm and deliberate, and I felt the red at the edges of my vision retreat.
"Nice try hiding in here. Where are you?" His voice dripped with venom, prowling the room with his eyes before they found what he was looking for. "I know you're in here, old man. Cowering in your bedroom."
Taking a deep breath, I shifted and stood.
"How nice of you to find me, Santino."
He went completely still. Then his face moved through several things before settling into the expression I had seen directed at me my entire life, contempt sharpened by something more personal, the particular hatred of someone who had always resented me for surviving.
"Cecilia, you're safe. We've been so worried." The mockery was thin enough to see through from across the room.
He moved further in and saw Dante behind me. "What is this? Are they making you protect this sick old man? That would be like a fucking Venosa. Using you as a shield," he spat.
"I will thank you for not talking about my family in that tone." I kept my voice level and watched his face go through the word family with a satisfying confusion.
"Your what?" The hate seemed to swell.
"I didn't stutter, Santino. You heard exactly what I said."
"You married him?" He used his gun to gesture toward Dante, and there was something almost funny in the misunderstanding if the circumstances hadn't been what they were.
"No, I didn't. I married Constantine." I smiled and watched him take a step back, watched his eyes drop to the rose at my throat and then to the ring on my finger, watched him do the mathematics of what that meant and not like the answer at all.
"Well, then I suppose you're just another name on my list." He raised his gun and I raised mine and the room went very still around us, the lamp throwing both our shadows up the wall behind us, two siblings at the end of something that had been building since long before tonight.
"And you're a name on mine." The hand holding the gun was steady. My free hand shook like a leaf. Dante reached for it and held it tightly, a movement that didn't go unnoticed and sent anger flashing across Santino's face.
"I made a vow to honor this family," I said, "and if I have to die to prove it, then so be it, but I will take you with me." I held his gaze. "Where's father? I want him to know a Venosa has taken me."
Something moved across his face. His eyes went slightly glassy.
"He's dead on the floor in your great room." No emotion in his words, but it showed on his face regardless. He was terrible at hiding his feelings, always had been. He was shit at hiding them.
I let it sit for a moment. "Oh, so you're the head of the family now. Not a good look being gunned down by your sister." I watched his jaw tighten. "When I go home, they will hail me as a king for removing the plague you brought on our house when I show them your dead body."
His gun wavered. Just slightly. Just enough.
His eyes moved to the doorway behind me. Lighter footsteps on the stairs, moving along the wall, barely audible, clothes brushing the plaster the same way his had.
He glanced away from me.
I heard Nicola's voice say focus and I took the shot at the same moment another rang out from the doorway.
The sound of it was enormous in the small room.
Santino looked at me and for one suspended moment his expression was almost surprise, as if after everything he genuinely hadn't believed I would do it, and then he wasn't looking at anything at all. He slumped to the floor, his eyes open and empty, staring up at the ceiling.
The room was absolutely silent.
My weapon was still raised. My whole body was vibrating and I realized it was because I was shaking, had been shaking without noticing, and I stood over my brother's body and waited to feel something definitive and felt too many things at once to separate them.
