“I’ve got you,” he murmured, low and steady, holding me together by sheer force.“I’ve got you, sis.”
A broken sound slipped out of me.It was too small to be called a sob, and it shattered the air around me.My breath came in jagged fragments, each inhale dragging over the raw and ruined pain inside my chest.I felt like I was breathing through glass.
“They’ll take him to the hospital,” Gianni went on, voice tight but controlled.“I’ll drive you.Come on?—”
Hospital.
The word drifted somewhere just out of reach, meaningless.Useless.
Because I knew.God, I knew.
There had been a moment—one single, devastating moment—where everything inside me had gone still.Where something deep in my bones had whispered the truth before my mind could catch up.
He wasn’t coming back.Not this time.Not for me.
My stomach twisted violently, the thought slicing too deep, too final to even finish.It lodged there, sharp and unmovable, stealing the air from my lungs.
Gianni shifted, trying to turn me, to guide me away from the place where Archie had been—where he hadfallen—but my body resisted in the smallest, most broken way.
I couldn’t leave him.Even if he was already gone.Because that was what this was, wasn’t it?
Gone.
The word settled over me, suffocating me.Oppressive.It pressed down on my chest until breathing felt like a task I was failing.
Gone.Archie was gone.
And something inside me went with him—something I knew, with a quiet, terrifying certainty, I was never getting back.
“I can’t—” My voice cracked, barely there.“I can’t?—”
But the words didn’t matter.Nothing did.Because my world was ending.
Gianni shifted slightly, guiding me to turn, to move—and that’s when I saw the stranger.
Standing apart from the others.Just beyond the chaos.
Dark hair.Longer around the neck.Rough.Untamed.It fell around his face in uneven strands, shadowing eyes that were fixed on the ground where Archie had fallen.
He didn’t move.He didn’t speak.He just stood there, gun still hanging loose in his hand like he’d forgotten it was even there.
His face—it wasn’t hard or cold.It was… broken.Carrying the kind of grief that men didn’t show in public.It was a sad, lingering kind of grief.
I stilled.
Something in my chest tightened, sharp and instinctive.
“Wait,” I murmured, my hand coming up to grip Gianni’s arm, stopping him mid-step.
He paused immediately.
“What is it?”
I nodded toward the man, my voice quieter now.“Who’s that?”
Gianni followed my gaze.And for a second—just one second—something flickered across his face.Recognition.Respect.I couldn’t be too sure.This was the man who had shot Machado, but I’m sure he wasn’t one of ours.
“That’s…” he exhaled slowly and shot me a confused frown.“I don’t know who that is.”
