I glance up.
His men have all the guns drawn.
“You will stay down,” she says. “I am taking over, as he has intended.”
I look at…the girl.
Walking over to us in her floral dress and heels with a gun in her hand.
My gun.
I want to murder her. Crush her into pieces. So much that my body feels like it’s about to rip apart. It is screaming the words I cannot voice. Giuseppe was mine to kill. Thirty-four years.
Finally, I find my voice.
I scream in rage and try to free myself from the fixation.
The men look at each other.
“You heard him,” she says and leans down to Giuseppe, taking a ring from his finger. The family ring.
“That was for touching me,” she whispers at him.
Murderous rage consumes my chest. I need to rip her limbs off. How dare she take what was mine? How dare she take my final act? How dare she take control?
“He was dying anyway,” she says as she comes up.
He was dying anyway,I repeat in my mind. So he was sick. And she was in. They worked together to get to me.Betrayal!shouts the voice in me.
“You see that?” she asks the men around her. “You will follow my orders from now on, and anyone who doesn’t will end like him, do you understand?”
It takes a moment, but one of the men nods and lowers the gun. So does a second. And the others follow. I can’t believe my eyes.
“Good,” she says arrogantly. Her entire demeanour is so different. “You will go clean up the mess upstairs and wait for furtherorders. No one acts without or speaks about this without my authorisation. Now, leave.”
What an actress she is, to make Kat and me believe she was an innocent bystander. Nothing about her is innocent.
“Now, you two,” she says dangerously, and turns to Kat and me as the men leave grudgingly.
She does not speak again until they are all gone. I am sure she will kill me just like she killed Giuseppe. Cold bitch.
She tilts her head as she takes a step closer to me.
“Interesting how things can change, isn't it?” she asks gleefully.
I spit at her in disgust.
She doesn’t react.
Instead, she turns and cranes her neck to look through the door.
“Everyone’s gone,” she says, and when she turns, a huge grin appears on her face as she bites her lips with all her front teeth.
I don’t quite understand?—
“How was I?” she asks Kat, and Kat grins. “I guess this was the moment?”
“Pretty convincing, yes,” says Kat, and they both laugh.
