Page 29 of Unholy Night
Leo watches this, and something dies in his eyes. The last hope, maybe. The final thread of brotherhood severed. He takes one painful step through the door. "Tell your wife she did what the Santoses couldn't. She destroyed Tomas Rosetti."
The door closes behind him with a finality that echoes through the cabin. Through the window, I watch him limp to his car, every movement broadcasting the pain from his shoulder and leg wounds. He doesn't look back. Doesn't wave. Just gets in with obvious difficulty and drives away, leaving tire tracks in the blood-stained snow beside the frozen bodies we still haven't dealt with.
The silence that follows is deafening.
My hands shake as I set down the gun. Not from fear. From loss. From the grief of watching my cousin walk away forever. My chest aches like someone reached in and tore something vital out.
Natalie's fingers are still laced with mine. I can feel her pulse through our joined hands, rapid but steady. When I finally look at her, she's studying the bruises on her wrist. Leo's fingerprintsmarked in purple and blue, already darkening to black at the edges.
"I should put ice on this," she says quietly.
"Natalie…"
"You called me your wife." She looks up at me, eyes unreadable. "Did you mean it?"
The question hangs between us. I could take it back. Could call it a heat-of-the-moment thing, a tactical choice to protect her. Could minimize what just happened, what I just destroyed.
"Yes," I say instead. "I meant it."
"You broke everything for me. Your family, your cousin, your code."
"I'd break it again."
"Why?"
I pull her against me, careful of her bruised wrist. My gun is still warm in my other hand, always between us and whatever's coming. But when I set it on the table, the grief hits full force. Leonardo is gone. My cousin, my brother in everything but blood, gone because I chose her.
"Because you are my all, even if it costs everything."
"That's not love," she says. "That's obsession."
"Same thing."
She studies my face like she's looking for something. Whatever she finds makes her shoulders straighten, chin lift. She reaches up, thumbs brushing over my cheeks, and I realize I'm crying. Silent tears for the brother I just lost.
"Then I choose you too," she says. "Whatever comes. Whoever comes. I choose you."
The words should make me feel victorious. Instead, they terrify me. Because Leo was right about one thing. I've just signed her death warrant. And mine.
But when she stretches up to kiss me, tasting like salt, I know I'd sign it again. A thousand times. In blood if necessary.
10 - Natalie
I’m wearing a clean shirt of Tomas’s when the black SUVs arrive, but I can still feel the blood on my hands. Six kills yesterday. Six men whose blood I can still taste despite the coffee burning my throat.
My fingers tighten on the cool mug. The cabin reeks of bleach and burnt flesh despite the pine branches I scattered this morning, trying to mask what we did in the dark. Twenty bodies burned before dawn, and now our judge arrives.
Three vehicles move in perfect formation up the mountain road. Through the broken windows from yesterday's battle, I can hear their engines purring smoothly.
"He's here," Tomas says from behind me, voice flat with resignation.
I don't need to ask who. Leonardo warned us Domenico was coming, bringing his solutions. We've been waiting, knowing this moment would arrive with the same inevitability as winter dawn.
The bodies are gone, every trace erased as Tomas promised. But I know where to look, can still see the faint impressions in the snow where we dragged them after Leonardo left, the places where heat from the pyre melted then refroze the ground. Tomas and I worked through the night, making evidence of my transformation disappear into ash. My shoulders still scream from the weight of dead men, blisters on my palms beneath the bandages from gripping the shovel too hard.
"You could still run," Tomas says, but we both know it's not really an option. Not anymore. His hand finds my shoulder, and I feel him wince. His own wound from yesterday still angry beneath fresh bandages.
I set down the mug and straighten my spine, feeling steel replace the fear trying to creep in. The fabric of his shirt hangs loose on me, smelling like him. Beneath it, my body aches in places that have nothing to do with hauling bodies. Phantom sensations from how desperately we came together after the killing, like we could fuck the death away.
