The fury coursing through my body is bone deep. It’s buried so inextricably in my marrow that I’ll carry traces of that anger with me for the rest of my life. Betraying me carries its own death sentence, but going after my wife? Death is a mercy Marco will be begging me for before I’m done with him.
The violence that thrums through my arms makes me feel invincible as I stalk down the halls of the bomb shelter in search of the man I’m going to eviscerate. I follow the trail of blood he left behind. There is no rational thought, no care for my own safety, just single-minded focus on hunting down the animal who hurt my sister and tried to assault Tess.
Rounding a corner, I see Julio. He was born into the cartel, both his parents have been a part of the family since my father was in his twenties. His death will hurt them, but his betrayal will destroy them. I’m behind him, forearm locked around his throat, before he’s even aware that I’m there.
“Dile a tu dios que el diablo dice hola, hijueputa.”
He has a split second to stiffen before I slit his throat, the viciousness of my stroke nearly decapitating him in the process. I release him and his body falls to the ground just as someone rounds the corner at the opposite end of the hallway.
Fredo. Julio’s brother.
My knife whips through the air and buries itself eight inches deep into his eye from across the hall. He dies with a pathetic whimper, no more a man in death than he was in life.
I stalk up to his body, pulling the knife from his head and slotting it away in the band of my trousers. His other eye is frozen in disbelief, staring sightlessly back up at me. With a roar, I reach into his eye socket and grab that useless eyeball, ripping it out of his head with ease. It’s clutched tightly in my fist as I follow the trail of blood to a closed door.
I should have known the night of Augusto Leone’s death that Marco was the mole, or at least suspected. I’d been so consumed by Tess that I hadn’t seen anything else. And that motherfucker had used that weakness against me, just like I’d predicted.
The door shatters open when I kick it in, the top hinges prying completely loose. Marco is sitting on the same chair on which Leone died. There’s a certain poetic justice in knowing that he’ll die there as well.
“Your little mutiny failed,” I drawl, tossing the eyeball at him. It hits the ground and rolls to his feet.
Tess did a number on him. His face is a bloodied mess. He’s pale, his skin white as a sheet, and he’s clutching his abdomen. There’s a thick pool of blood beneath his chair; it leaks out of him and drips slowly onto the floor. Tess unknowingly gave him a kill shot. He’s bleeding out and judging by the quantity surrounding him, he doesn’t have long to live.
His mouth is open, lips parted around his ragged breaths as he watches me with crazed but quickly fading eyes.
“Don’t you die on me, Marco,” I seethe. “I still need to fucking kill you.”
“It wasn’t supposed to end this way,” he mutters.
“How did you think it would end? You betrayed the family, you were never going to get away with it.”
“I did for over a fucking year!” he says, finding enough strength to spit the words at me. “You never suspected me, never thought I could have been involved in Adriana’s death. I could have continued for years if it wasn’t for your stupid cunt of a wife.”
“I’m going to rip your lungs out and feed them to you, Marco. I’m going to shove them so far down your windpipe you’ll choke, you piece of shit.”
He rasps out a painful-sounding laugh. “It’s unlike you to be so obvious in exposing your weaknesses, Thiago. Tess blinds you, she makes you make mistakes, you know she does. And I got greedy because of it. I saw the way she distracted you and I wanted more, so I took it. If I’d just stuck to my plan and continued slowly turning your men against you, I would have won. You would be sitting here dying, and I would be taking your place as jefe. I underestimated you and her together.”
“You lost, Marco. And now you’ll pay.”
I stalk towards him. His right arm, which had been hanging limply by his side, raises and he points a gun at me.
A demented smile pulls at my lips. I keep advancing on him. He can shoot me all he wants, nothing is going to stop me from getting to him and disemboweling him with my bare hands.
He keeps lifting the gun until he’s pointing it up at the ceiling and then he fires.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Four shots.
I pause dead in my tracks, confusion knitting my brow.
He had a clear shot at me. He could have buried every single one of those bullets in my chest instead of leaving himself with almost no chance of killing me. With these four bullets now in the ceiling and the two that Tess shot at him, that leaves him with only one shot to finish me.
His gun hand drops into his lap, spent. The energy it took him to raise his arm and hold it as the bullets charged through nearly finished him off.
He stares at me and there’s something in his gaze I can’t quite make out. A calculatedness that doesn’t make sense to me but chills my spine in foreboding nonetheless.
“It’ll take a lot more than one bullet to kill me,” I say coldly.
Marco smiles, an ugly grimace that freezes the blood in my veins. How I once considered this man a trusted advisor, a friend even, is beyond me.
He raises the gun once more, this time aiming it at me. “I learned something these last few months,” he explains. “Something a lot more valuable than money.”
My hand shifts slowly to behind my back, inconspicuously making a move for the blade that I’d hidden back in my trousers.
“What’s that?” I clip.
Marco’s head tilts to the side and he closes his eyes slowly. When they reopen, triumph shines in them.
My stomach twists, like my body understands what’s about to happen before it actually occurs.
“‘You don’t play the board, you play your opponent’,” he parrots. “You taught me that. It doesn’t matter to you whether you live or die, so you make for a difficult opponent to beat. You’re not afraid of death and because of that, killing you holds very little appeal to me,” he explains, his voice devoid of all emotion. “Destroying you on the other hand, does.” A rasping wheeze shakes his lungs until he coughs blood into his hand. “While you may not be afraid of death for yourself, the exact opposite is true when it comes to protecting the one person you care about most in the world. That’s your single biggest fear, a fate that’s worse than a death sentence for you. I realize you’ve shown me exactly how I win.” A slow grin stretches across his face. “And to make that final move, jefe,” he starts, sneering mockingly, “I only need one bullet.”
As if in slow motion, I watch as he glides his arm to the side and aims the gun away from me. His stare remains fixed hatefully on my face as he coldly declares, “Checkmate.”
And then he fires.
The shot whistles loudly past me, making my ears ring. I feel the heat of the bullet as it travels inches from my body, expecting to then catch the telltale sound of plaster exploding as the slug makes contact with the wall.
Instead, I hear the bullet bury itself in a much softer target.
And then a startled, pained whimper comes from behind me, clear as a bell in the thick silence. It’s a sound that’s going to echo in my ears until the day I die.
Ice crawls unnaturally slowly down my spine, the hair raising chillingly on the back of my neck.
Intrinsically, I know.
Marco laughs and drops the gun.
No.
“Thiago…” a soft voice calls out for me.
NO.
Dread reaches out to me with lethally cold fingers and squeezes my heart in its deadly grip. It claws at my organs, cutting me up from the inside and already killing me as slowly as Marco predicted.
When I turn around, a broken moan rattles up my throat as I come face to face with my worst fear come true.
Tess.
Tess, with her cheeks still flushed from having just burst into the room.
Tess, with a surprised look on her face as her wide eyes stare at me in shock.
Tess, as she stumbles back a step, confused, her face slowly tilting down to look at her stomach.
In the flutter of a heartbeat, everything stops.
All the air rushes from the room like it’s been sucked out. Time slows until it comes to a quiet, devastating end.
She’s not supposed to be here. She was supposed to hide, to not come out, to wait for me to come find her.
She promised.
But then her hand comes slowly away from her stomach and it’s covered in blood. Red blooms from her pink top, spreading like a watercolor painting of a gory horror scene. Her eyes widen and lift back up to mine and they’re so white.
So white and scared.
“Thiago,” she murmurs again, reaching out for me.
The spell of horror is broken with one disbelieving word, the air rushing suddenly back in, bringing with it stark reality on its wings.
“Tess!” I roar.
She falters down to her knees, clutching at the rapidly expanding stain of red on her stomach.
And then she falls forward, her body hitting the ground.
“NO!”
A cacophony of tortured, anguished screams hit my ears. I realize with detached incredulity that they’re coming from me. That I’m howling my terror with full-throated wails.
Raw, unadulterated pain unlike anything I’ve ever felt punches through me. I lunge for her but my legs give out and I stumble to the ground.
Distantly, I hear another gunshot. Arturo finally appears and rushes past me, likely to make sure Marco is dead.
But all I can see is Tess’s face pressed against the floor, her scared eyes brimming with tears and searching desperately for mine.
And red.
Red everywhere.
Red where there should be pink.
Red matting the blonde hair I love so much.
Red on my hands as I crawl to her, dragging my body on my forearms, my defective legs unable to take me the distance.
I didn’t keep my promise, that’s what the accusatory voice in my head screams at me. I didn’t keep my promise.
When my hands find her, a bubble of emotions rips from my lips. “No, no, no, no,” I yell frantically, grabbing her shoulders and turning her over.
An agonized scream that sounds unrecognizable even to my own ears slams against the walls.
“Tess,” I bellow, my frantic hands covering her bloodied ones as I try to staunch the bleeding. “Tess,” I repeat, softer this time, the one syllable garbled by the gigantic mass in my throat. “Tess, what did you do? What did you fucking do? Oh, god,” I shout, feeling the warm blood bubbling against my hand.
As real as any truth has ever been, I know in my heart that she came for me. That the gunshots Marco fired into the ceiling were meant to draw her out of hiding. That she fell for it, more worried about my safety than she could ever be about her own. That those shots made her run blindly through the maze of halls to find me. That she came to save me and ended up sacrificing herself instead.
I chant her name as I scoop her into my arms, chant it like it can rewind time and I can step in front of her and take that bullet. My voice is hoarse and unrecognizable, the tears crawling up my throat like jagged knives stabbing at my flesh.
“I thought…I thought you were hurt,” she explains. Her lips are so dry, her eyes so wide and blue, but that usually bright color now bleeds in fear. “I couldn’t stay hidden not knowing what happened, wondering if you were alive and terrified that you might not be.” She smiles, she fucking smiles even as she lays bleeding all over me. “I’m so happy you’re okay.”
“Amor,” I cry brokenly, gathering her closer in my arms. I stroke her hair back from her face, accidentally smearing blood on her cheek and forehead in the process. “You were supposed to hide even if he killed me. It wasn’t your place to get hurt for me.”
“Yes, it was. Don’t you know…” she rasps with difficulty. “The queen always protects the king.”
“No,” I cry ferociously. “Not like this. Never like this.”
I’m covered in her blood. It’s everywhere and it grabs me violently about the throat, making me so nauseous I can’t breathe.
I’ve never minded blood before, I’ve reveled in it in fact.
But not hers.
Not hers.
I remove my hand from her stomach to peer at the gunshot and I feel the fabric of my world rip out from under me. The wound is gaping, the flesh torn. The second I remove the pressure of my hand, blood pours out of it in waves. The need to vomit, not in disgust but in abject fear, seizes me again.
“It’s going to be okay, I promise,” The words tumble in a rush reassuringly from my lips as I staunch the bleeding once more. “Arturo!” I roar, looking around for him. “Turo, call an ambulance, please call an ambulance,” I implore frantically.
He’s already on his phone, pacing and throwing anxious looks at us. I can’t handle seeing his face, I can’t look at it because everything about his expression tells me he thinks she’s going to die.
I shake my head continuously, over and over, so violently I hear my neck snap.
“Don’t make a promise you can’t keep,” she rasps, ghostly pale.
I didn’t keep my promise. I didn’t keep her safe.
“Don’t say that,” I say. I’m trying to not completely lose it, to hold myself together somewhat so as not to scare her, but I’m failing. I’m failing miserably. “You’re going to make it out of here.”
There’s so much fucking blood.
It seeps past my fingers and flows in thick rivulets off the side of her body. It doesn’t matter how hard I press, it just keeps coming out and I know what this means, I know it’s not good news, but I can’t accept that. I refuse.
A hand comes to gently palm my cheek. I look up into her eyes and find them shining with tears.
And then her lips part and she whispers the sweetest words I’ve ever heard again.
“I love you,” she says with quiet intensity.
“No,” I respond, categorically. “Fuck no.”
Her eyes flutter shut and an agonized look crosses her face. It’s the first sign of pain she’s shown and it’s in reaction to my words. Her hand pulls slowly back from my face.
“You don’t love me?” she asks softly, her voice breaking on the pain of a thousand sorrows.
And I marvel at what a beautifully complicated thing it is to be human that sometimes we can hurt more with our words than we can with bullets.
She’s cradled in my arms, held tightly against my breast, bleeding all over me while I’m losing my mind and she thinks I don’t love her? Didn’t she hear me when I told her she was my heart walking free from my chest?
And look how I took care of it.
“Of course I love you,” I say heartbrokenly, the first tears falling down my face.
Her eyes flutter open and I watch as her pupils dilate like they have so many times in the past when she’s looked at me, when I’ve kissed her, when I’ve made her laugh.
A thousand tiny, insignificant memories of our life together flashing through my eyes.
Except this time, it’s different.
This isn’t a look of lust or laughter or longing.
Her pupils continue expanding, growing bigger and bigger, until the black of them could house the whole night sky in their depths. And within them shines a bright light that she aims at me. No, this is a look of love and it glows for me.
It’s mine.
My heart fractures and I choke back a pained breath. Why didn’t I tell her before? Why didn’t I tell her the moment I felt it and every single second after that? I don’t want to have loved her too late.
One of my hands presses against her wound, the other holds her against me. But I want to push her hair behind her ear and wipe the tear cresting past her waterline and brush her cheek and cup her face. I need so many more hands to communicate the love I have for her.
“I love you so much that I can’t breathe. I think I’ve loved you from the first moment I saw you. You…” I can’t speak around the sudden obstruction that closes my throat. There’s a swell of emotion that jams the passage. If I jimmy it loose, everything will come with it, including the raw pain and anguish splintering me to my very core. “You came into my life and turned it upside down. You changed everything.”
The word rips from my throat on a jagged sob. Tears pour from my eyes. They roll down my face, over the curve of my jaw and fall onto her cheek. Her pale, almost translucent cheek, devoid of its usual pink color that makes her look alive.
“I love you,” she repeats, and there’s a serene smile on her lips.
Another grief-stricken howl tears from me.
I bring my forehead down on hers, washing her face with my sorrow as my body racks with tortured sobs.
She’s so cold, so unbelievably cold.
Where the fuck is the ambulance?
“You’re not allowed to say those words to me as a goodbye. So you wait, okay amor?” I say, kissing her forehead. “Tell me you love me when we’re at the hospital, when you’re better.”
“I think… I think I have to tell you now,” she murmurs, face fracturing as tears slip down her own cheeks. “I don’t want to die without having told you how much you mean to me.”
“No,” I say, shaking my head again, refusing to listen to this. “You’re not going anywhere. You wait. You live and you tell me then, amor. Please.”
“I’m dying, Thiago,” she whispers, voice breaking.
“No you’re not! You’re not. You’re not.” My mouth comes down on her face, covering her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids, her nose, every available inch of her skin in kisses. “The love of my life doesn’t bleed out in my arms, Tess. That’s not something I survive. You have to live for me.”
I whip around to look at Arturo. He stands mutely off to the side, surrounded by a dozen of my cartel, men and women who rushed to help me, to save Tess. They have stricken expressions on their faces as they look down at her, then at me, ten steps beyond sanity and falling faster and faster into madness.
I look back at Tess, at the way her pupils have contracted back down to the size of a pinhole. That light that shined so brightly in them moments ago is quickly dimming. Her eyelids flutter, closing and reopening.
She’s just tired, that’s it. That’s it.
I’m not losing her.
“Stay with me, amor,” I beg, rocking her in my arms back and forth. “If you really love me, you’ll stay with me. Stay with me.”
I don’t know how many times I say it, only that my throat is raw and sandpapery as the words jumble into sounds instead of meaning.
“That’s…not fair.”
My voice cracks. “You promised me you’d never leave me. You promised. Please just don’t go. What am I supposed to do without you?” My voice cracks, every syllable broken. “I can’t do it, I can’t live without you.”
The pain is crushing. It’s stifling. It strangles my lungs until I can’t breathe. The tears continue streaming down my face as I look down at her. I’m crying my entire heart into her. If she dies, it won’t be anything more than an empty shell anyway.
Her skin is ice cold. Beads of moisture dot her brow. Her lips turn blue, the life draining out of her with every passing moment.
“WHERE IS THE FUCKING AMBULANCE?” I roar.
Her eyes flutter shut a couple more times. She has to blink them open as if she’s fighting invisible weights. But there’s a haze over them now; they’ve lost focus and she looks through me, her stare unseeing and haunted.
“Stay with me, amor. Please, please, stay with me,” I cry, torment echoing freely in every word. I find myself praying to Gods I don’t believe in to grant me mercy I don’t deserve. “Stay with me,” I beg. “I love you. I love you.”
“Thank you…”
Her voice is nothing more than a throaty rasp. Every word sounds like it hurts her. She blinks and another tear slips down the side of her face onto my arm.
“For what?”
“For making me your wife. I didn’t need to run away… or see the world to get… the adventure I wanted. Being your wife was…the greatest adventure of them all.”
She tries reaching for my face again, but her arm falls limply back down to her chest. I cup the back of her hand and carry it back up to my wet cheek. The warmth of my skin heats her cold fingers.
“Is, amor. Is the greatest adventure of them all,” I correct, crying inconsolably into her palm.
Tess smiles, shifting her thumb to brush my cheek. “Falling in love with you is… was… the best thing to ever… happen to me. My final… bucket list item.”
“No,” I press my cheek into her hand and shake my head. “No, I know there’s plenty left on your bucket list. You want to skydive. You want to learn BSL. You want to be the very last person to leave a wedding. You have a million other dreams and we’re going to have all the time in the world together to make every single one of them a reality. We can start the second you’re out of the hospital. You have so much more to do and so many more people to impact. You. Are. Not. Done. Don’t give up, amor.”
“I’m so tired…I think I’ll close my eyes.”
“No!” I cry, startling her. “You said you’d fight. Do you remember? You promised me you’d fight until the end, so fight. Please. I won’t ever ask you for anything again.” Placing my forehead back on hers, I plead softly, “Please, amor, stay with me. We’ve… we’ve still got ice cream in the freezer we need to finish.”
Another tear slips down her cheek.
“Te quiero mucho, baby,” she whispers.
Distantly, I hear sirens.
Finally.
I lift my head, about to order Arturo to go meet them and guide them here, but he’s already running out the door.
“Do you hear that, amor? That’s the ambulance coming for you. You’re going to be okay. It’s all going to be okay.”
When I look back down at her, her eyes are closed.
And with a breath, my heart constricts then shatters into a million pieces.
“Tess?” I call. “Tess?” I say again, my tone more frantic. When she doesn’t answer, I pat her cheek gently, then harder, trying to get her to open her eyes. “Tess! Tess, wake up.” The hand I hold pinned against my face goes slack and lifeless. “I need you to wake up and open your eyes. TESS!” I roar.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t get her to wake up. Her head lolls to the side, her body goes limp, and her breathing comes to a painful, jagged end.
