Page 115
Sylvia’s laugh was soft and genuine this time. “Loved you? Salvatore loved secrets more. He had a wife and an infant son waiting in Montana, yet he crossed oceans chasing strangers’ children. He knew death had found him and still chose the investigation over you.”
The words struck old wounds. For years, I had asked the dead why we had not been enough to make him stop. I had hated Salvatore for leaving me with questions and loved him so completely that even anger kept him near.
Sylvia saw the pain and smiled.
“And Henry,” she continued. “Your great sacrifice. You abandoned him to another woman and called it motherhood because the truth is less flattering. He calls Illyria Mom. He reaches for her when he is frightened. She knows which stories make him sleep and how he takes his breakfast. When you die, he will mourn an idea. In time, even that will fade.”
Something inside me became very still.
Until then, some instinct had kept asking life for one more second. Sylvia spoke my son’s name, and fear burned away. She expected to find a wound she could press until I surrendered. Instead, she touched the reason surrender had never been possible.
I straightened.
“You will never get my son, and when I die, I will know I was loved. Unlike you, who will die alone as a bitter old bitch with nothing to show for it.”
The grandmother vanished.
Hatred moved through Sylvia’s face with such purity that every gentle line became a lie exposed. Her lips curved into a smirk, but her eyes had gone flat. I knew before her hand entered her coat. I knew before black metal cleared the pale wool.
This was it.
I didn’t run. There was nowhere I needed to go. Henry was safe. My parents were coming for the truth. Salvatore’s work would outlive the woman who killed him. Death possessed nothing I had not already given freely.
Sylvia raised the gun and, without blinking, shot me in the chest.
The sound filled the empty brownstone. The impact threw me backward before pain arrived, and then fire opened beneath my ribs. My knees struck the floor. I tried to breathe, but my body had forgotten how. The room tilted as I fell onto my side, one hand closing over the warmth spreading through my sweater.
Sylvia’s sensible shoes stopped beside my face.
She leaned over me, silver hair framing that sweet, grandmotherly face, and grinned. “Pity no one is here for you now.”
Then she straightened and walked away.
Her footsteps crossed the foyer. The front door opened and closed, leaving me with the echo of the gunshot and the wet, failing sound of my own breath. Blood warmed the floor beneath me. Each heartbeat pushed more of my life into the grain, and I understood with terrible clarity that no amount of will could call it back.
Tears slipped across my temples. They were for the little boy who would someday be told his mother had loved him enough to become a story. They were for Rurik waking beside an empty place and for my parents arriving to find nothing left of their daughter but absence.
I had refused to think of them so I could do what needed to be done. Dying took that discipline from me.
“Salvatore,” I whispered.
He walked toward me from the far side of the room.
There was no blood on him, no evidence of what men had done after dragging him from our life. He wore a crisp white shirt I remembered from Montana, and his smile held every morning we should have been given. He looked whole. He looked like the answer to a prayer I had stopped allowing myself to pray.
“I’m here, baby,” he said. His voice reached me through the roar gathering inside my ears. “It won’t be long now.”
I wanted to lift my hand to him, but my arm would not move. Salvatore kept coming, unhurried because eternity had no reason to rush.
The front door slammed open hard enough to strike the wall.
“MADIGAN!”
Rurik’s voice thundered through the empty brownstone. Footsteps pounded across the foyer, then stopped so abruptly the silence felt like another impact. I couldn’t turn my head, but I heard the breath tear from him.
He dropped beside me. His hands covered the wound, pressing hard enough to send fresh agony through my chest. “SHE’S IN THE LIVING ROOM!” he roared. Then his face bent over mine, white with terror. “Stay with me. Madigan, look at me. You stay.”
I tried. God, I tried to give him that much. But Salvatore stood beyond his shoulder, smiling with tears in his eyes, and love had always taught my gaze where to go.
