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“That’s for Matteo.” Her voice doesn’t waver.
Bruno sinks to his knees. His mouth opens and closes around words that never form. After he falls forward onto the concrete, the room goes still.
I approach Lucia and ease the gun from her fingers. She releases it without resistance, and her hands begin to shake the moment the metal leaves her grip. Fine tremors run through her whole body.
“I killed him.” She hiccups the words, gasping loudly as I gather her into an embrace.
“Just in time.” I bury my face in her hair. “You saved me.”
She releases a broken cry against my neck that might be a laugh or might be a sob. Perhaps both at once. She quakes against me, and as I hold her, the world narrows to her breathing and the beat of her heart against mine.
Nico’s voice crackles in my ear. “Dellinger’s heading for the east stairwell. Move now.”
I squeeze Lucia’s hand once, then pull her up and take off toward Mason. I spot him at the end of the corridor, shoving himself through a fire door. In seconds, I close the distance and drive him into the wall. His ribs crack under my forearm.
“You’re done, Mason.” I haul him up by his collar.
He laughs through bloody teeth. “I was trying to save her from you. Every move I made was to protect her from a man who’ll get her killed.”
“You handed her brother to Bruno. And then you handed her to Bruno.” My voice twists into something barely human. “You call that saving her?”
The defiance in his eyes melts away. “She deserved better than you.”
“Maybe. But she chose me.”
I release his collar and step back. Nico’s men close in, but Mason wrenches free, lunging for the stairwell. Nico’s gun fires once, and Mason tumbles down the stairs, landing at the bottom with empty eyes.
I don’t check if he’s alive or dead. He’ll receive justice in one form or another. My focus is on extracting a teary Lucia.
In the car, she curls against me, her blood on my hands and mine on her skin. But when I stare into her eyes, I discover relief rather than fear or worry.
“Marco.” She sounds dazed and reverent. “’I was pregnant the whole time. The test was wrong. Mason made sure it was wrong.”
The world stops. I stare at her hand against her stomach and then up at the tears streaming down her face. A bottomless fissure opens behind my ribs, radiating into my bones.
“We’re having a baby.” My voice comes out strange, rough, and broken. “We’re…”
“…having a baby.”
I blink back the sting behind my own eyes as I kiss her. We stay like this, pressed together in the back seat until the city lights blur past and the compound gates open and the life we thought we’d lost starts to feel possible again.
As we pull into the compound, Lucia’s hand finds mine. Our fingers twine together over her stomach.
Relief floods her voice. “We’re going to be okay.”
I look at her bloodied, exhausted body, and I believe her. I’m just grateful she’s alive.
For years, I carried Bruno’s voice in my head insisting I was nothing without him. The silence where that voice used to be is the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.
Chapter 37
Lucia
The hours after we return blur into a procession of faces. Enzo grips Marco’s shoulder without a word. Nico arrives with his tablet and a flask. Izzy scans me from head to toe, then gives me a hug for the very first time, fiercely enough to steal my breath.
Sophia arrives with Jenna, baby Valentina tucked against her chest in a cotton wrap and sleeping through the chaos the way only a newborn can. Sophia cups my face with her free hand, whispers a blessing in Italian, and lowers herself into the chair beside my bed, Valentina rising and falling with each breath.
When Jenna sees me, she breaks, tears falling from her eyes in a torrent. I grab her hands, unprepared for how much her crying would undo my own composure. “I’m okay now, Jenna. Stop crying, or else I’ll cry, and then we’ll both be useless.”
