Page 131 of Dirty Game
"Children are, or at least they should be." I move closer, and she doesn't back away. She knows there's nowhere to go. "You use him like a bargaining chip. You let Mikhail's men terrify him. You used him as a weapon against me."
"I kept him alive?—"
"You kept him as leverage. There's a difference."
I can feel Rosalynn behind me watching everything, witnessing what will be Sienna’s undoing.
This is for her too—to know that some sins can't be forgiven, that protecting the innocent sometimes means removing the threat permanently.
"He chose," Sienna says, a last attempt at manipulation. "Your virgin payment and you. He chose strangers over his mother."
"He chose safety over fear. Love over the chaos you and Mikhail have surrounded him with." I raise the gun. "He chose to be a child, Sienna."
She closes her eyes. "Make it quick."
"Like you made it quick for him? All those times you hurt him?"
Her eyes snap open, and for a moment I see the woman I once thought I loved—brilliant, vicious, broken beyond repair.
"We're the same, you and I," she says.
"No. I protect what's mine. You destroy what's yours."
The shot is clean, precise.
She falls backward, the surprise still on her face.
No suffering, no drawn-out revenge.
Just an ending.
Because I'm not her. I don't torture for pleasure. I remove threats, and she was the biggest threat to our son's future.
Dante is silent for three days.
The penthouse is a shitty place to raise a kid.
Even with the blinds open, the air is always stale, and we’re always waiting for something bad to happen.
I station security at every entrance, rotate the guards, sweep for bugs twice a day.
None of it makes a dent in the quiet that settles over us.
Rosalynn makes herself small, shrinking into the corners when Dante is in the room.
She lets him come to her, never forcing herself on him.
She reads aloud to herself, soft and steady, letting the words drift over him like background noise.
Sometimes he listens, but most of the time he doesn’t.
He won’t eat unless she sits with him. He won’t sleep unless the hall light is left on, the door cracked just enough to see the hallway.
I try to reach him. I try everything—candy, new toys, a stack of picture books.
He ignores them, more interested in the view out the window, the way the city glows orange at night.
Sometimes he draws on the glass with his finger, shapes that might be words, or maps, or maybe just the fragments of a world he can control.
