Deadened eyes find mine, and a sickening grin crosses Luca’s face like we share an inside joke. “Cami, would you believe me if I told you their mom was a bigger slut than you?”
Groaning through clenched teeth, Wilder blocks Luca’s view of me. His fingers stretch before closing tightly around the handle of the gun, locking in.
Unbothered, the underboss diverts his attention back to Giovanni. “They’re weak, uncle. This son of a bitch couldn’t even keep an eye on his girl, and you want to let them in the family? After what we did to their parents, do you think we can trust them?”
“Back up,” Nicolai warns, his voice hanging on the line between frantic and terrified.
“Can’t do it, Nico.” Luca shakes his head regretfully. “Not this time.”
“This will be discussed amongst family,” Gio says firmly. “There will be a sit-down and—”
“The opportunity for a sit-down has come and gone,” Luca says. “You’ve lost your edge, and the others have noticed. We’ve been through this with the Ridges before. We look weak. I won’t stand back and let you destroy everything I’ve worked for. Not again.” Cradling his uncle’s face between his hands, Luca kisses Giovanni hard on the mouth.
A collective silence mutes the universe, broken only by a clicking sound when the traffic light turns from red to green. Time stops, and a single second extends for a millennium. There’s a voice in the back of my head that won’t be silenced, screaming into the vast nothingness that used to be minutes and hours.
Pay attention,it says.
But it’s too late.
Luca shoots Giovanni Coppola in the head.
Wilder and Talent are the first to react, each unloading rounds in quick succession. The gum flies out of the lazy gunman’s mouth with the rest of his jaw, and Talent fires into the scarred man’s stomach before discharging a second round between his eyes.
Hesitant to shoot the boss’ son, the third man falters, and Nico blows a hole through his neck before zeroing in on Luca. Blood explodes from the wound like a broken waterline, dark red on olive skin, congealing on the garage floor. It stretches toward me like veins, but I don’t waver as it pools around my feet.
I stare transfixed at Wilder, from the angle of his elbow to his grip on the gun handle. Gray eyes stay pointed and his lips straight. Wilder is poetry in motion, all smooth prose and acoustic grit, a sonnet about revenge and promise. The only indication that he might shoot is the ripple of tendons in his hand.
When Luca shoved the gun under Giovanni’s chin and pulled the trigger, it blew his face off instead of his entire head. He makes the mistake of wiping blood and bone from his face, and it gives Wilder and Nico the edge they need to close in on him.
He’s lost. Luca stands in the wreckage of his uncle’s murder and knows it.
“I’ve already killed one of your men, Nico.” Wilder squeezes his hand impossibly tighter around the gun. Veins roll over bone, and his skin stretches over wounded knuckles. “You got to do what you got to do, but I’m taking him with me.”
“Blood for blood,” Talent says.
Luca holds his hands up in surrender, the gun swinging from the trigger guard on his pointer finger. “If you let him kill me, it goes against everything Borgata stands for. I did this for the family. What are your reasons?”
Nicolai tenses, and his top lip curls back as he bites down, straining his jaw muscles. Eyes like autumn narrow on his cousin, and a guttural roar of frustration rumbles from deep within his chest. But the fight drains from his body once he makes the mistake of looking down, where his father lies motionless at his feet.
If I could slide my hand over Wilder’s and put my finger over his finger to pull the trigger with him, I would. I’d whisper,I love youas gunpowder ignites. When a tiny fire pushes the bullet down the barrel of the gun and out of the muzzle, I’d say,I’ve loved you since the brownie aisle, too. Since the gala, when you looked like you wanted to be anywhere else until you found me. And I knew my life would never be the same on the night you had too much to drink, and I had sleep lines on my face. I’ve loved you all along, and I will love you the whole way through.
I’m a harlot, and he’s a killer.
We’re a match made in heaven.
“I told you this day would come, motherfucker,” Wilder says.
Luca’s head snaps back with the force of a speeding bullet. His eyes are the same dead as they were alive.
And still, the devils in Hell rejoice.
It took a day for the ringing in my ears to go away.
Four days for the cuts on my legs to heal.
Seven days passed before the bruise on my face faded.
But ten days after the shooting, the only part I’ve yet to overcome is the image of Wilder standing before Nicolai, gracefully holding his arms out to his sides, defenseless and unafraid.
