“Why are you here?”
The next few moments were over before I realized they happened at all.
Stella took another step toward me.
Leo Signorelli’s arm moved. At first, just a twitch. I wasn’t sure I saw it at all, it was so damn dark. But then there was the glint of metal, and he had a gun in his hand.
The gun came up, pointing at Stella’s back.
She started to turn, heard something.
I dove past her.
I dove between her and the barrel.
My knee came down first, cracking against the point of a stone jutting out from the ground. My shoulder hit the car door, and the rest of me landed on Leo. My switchblade was out again. I had released the blade somewhere between my last two heartbeats, and I brought the knife down into the side of his neck. The tip punctured the skin with little effort. Then there was an audible pop as I punctured something deeper. One of his eyes was milky white, blind with cataracts, but the other saw me. The other went wide and fixed on me as warm blood sprayed my face and clothes, and soaked the earth.
It was all over in a moment.
Leo Signorelli stopped moving and would move no more.
“Oh my God, you killed him!” Stella shouted, falling beside the body. She tore off one of her gloves and pressed her palm against his forehead, then his good cheek, then gripped his arm. Desperately moving from one portion of exposed flesh to another.
“I…I had to. He would have shot you.”
Her voice dropped to a desperate whisper. “But I…I hadn’t finished yet. I…wasn’t done.”
“What does that mean?”
Stella didn’t answer me. She only sat there, her entire body trembling. Each breath caught in her throat, and her eyes glistened with tears.
She began to cry, and there was no consoling her. I reached for her shoulder and squeezed, the warmth of her seeping through the thin cloth of her shirt, and she shook me off. I tried to lean into her, and she pulled away, the word “don’t” barely audible through her sobs. A fleck of Leo’s blood was on her cheek, and when I reached to brush it away, she shot up and pulled away from me before I could.
Stella stood and began to pace, her cries lessening.
I stood too, and not knowing what else to do, I went to the water’s edge and washed Leo’s blood from my arms and hands and the knife.
“You need to throw that into the water,” I heard her say behind me. So I did. The knife slipped through the surface about a hundred feet from shore and disappeared beneath.
When I turned back to Stella, her arms were tight at her sides, her fists were clenched. “Oh God, Jack. Why are you here?” A desperation filled her voice. She was still shaking, her eyes red.
I reached into my back pocket and took out her note. I had folded and unfolded the note so many times over the years, holes had worn through the paper at the creases. She recognized it, though.
Stella closed her eyes and shook her head, the tears coming again. “That was years ago. I got out. I got away. I’m okay now.”
“I don’t think you are,” I said softly.
She pressed her hands to the sides of her temples, blood smeared beneath her touch. “He was a bad man.”
“I know.”
“I needed him.”
I went to her again, I gripped her arms. “He would have killed you.”
She pulled away and started pacing again from Leo’s body to the trees and back again, over and over. “You don’t understand.”
“I do.”
