by Sienna Blake
I had just finished giving my statement inside the station. They’d sent me some jerk-off kid who still had his training wheels on to question me. I had seen a cop shoot Roman. No one would listen to me. I needed proof. I needed to know who shot him. Then I could get a confession.
“Pierce,” I called to the young officer standing out back of the police station sneaking a quick cigarette.
He flinched, coughing out a cloud of smoke. “Hey, Capulet.” He waved the smoke aside as I strode up to him.
“I know you were at the Tyrell takedown earlier today.”
He blinked slowly at me. “Right. Yeah, a few of us were there.”
“Were you stationed on the north or the south of the barn?”
I saw him pause. “Aren’t you off duty at the moment?”
“Were you on the north or south?” I repeated.
“Why does it matter?” He stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette and turned to go back inside.
I grabbed his arm. “Just answer the question, Pierce. Please.”
He glanced over my shoulder to the doorway leading into the station. “I was…on the south.”
He would have been standing on the same side as the shooter. “Who was stationed on the western-most window on that side?”
He shuffled his feet, his eyes darting about him. “Why are you asking all these questions?”
“Who stood at that window? Tell me now or I’ll go to my father.”
Pierce scoffed. “He’d be the last person to tell you who stood there.”
I froze, my blood turning to sharp icicles in my veins. I grabbed Pierce’s shirtfront, not caring that I was assaulting a police officer right outside the police station. “Was it you? Was it you who stood at the that window?”
“No.”
“Then who, dammit?” I leaned in. “Who? If you’ve ever thought of me as a friend…”
He shushed me. “Jules, keep it down.”
“Tell me, Pierce, tell—”
“Okay,” he relented, “but this never came from me.”
Triumph flooded through my veins. “I promise.”
Pierce glanced around before locking eyes with me. “Your father took that position.”
My fingers sprang open. I stumbled back. Dread rattled down my bones. Betrayal shot like a bitter poison through my veins, withering my insides.
“Jules…are you okay?” Pierce’s voice sounded so far away.
No. I was not okay. I wasn’t sure I’d ever be okay again.
My father had shot Roman. He killed him on purpose.
30
____________
Roman
“You can stop pretending to be dead now,” a familiar voice said.
Light hit the backs of my lids. A wave of fresh air rolled over me and I sucked it in greedily.
I remembered Julianna’s face just before I “died”, her eyes glassy with tears, pain ripping across her beautiful features. The image was burned into my retinas. It would haunt me forever. A rush of anger flooded through me as I sat up, blinking as I tried to adjust to the light.
“Easy, tiger,” Chief Capulet said. “You’ll get fake blood everywhere. Let them take the bag out.” He stood by the metal table that I was sitting on, watching as an older man in a white coat unzipped the rest of the body bag I’d been transported here in. Wherever here was.
I sat still as the man in a white coat cut away at my suit and removed the blood bag that had been strapped to my stomach. The plan had been executed to perfection. Almost. Julianna’s screaming echoed in my head. She was the one flaw.
I was in what looked like a curtained-off section of a morgue, heavy metal tabletops and square metal drawers along one wall. The air smelled sharply of antiseptic, but underneath it was the thick odor of stale decay. I guessed the man in the white coat must be a medical examiner—the one who had been roped into faking my death certificate.
They hadn’t closed the curtain enough, because just past it, on the tabletop next to me, I spotted a familiar figure. My father, his eyes still open, a look of shock on his face. As if the great Giovanni Tyrell himself couldn’t believe he was actually dead.
Turns out you aren’t immortal.
Under the numbness that coated my body, a rumbling of something dark and painful rippled. I tore my eyes away from my father’s face. I was not ready to deal with this now. Not right now.
The examiner finished wiping my torso of the sticky fake blood. Julianna had almost touched the bag under my suit. I remembered grabbing her hands, gripping them, brushing them across my lips. If only I could touch her hands once more.
You did what you had to. You made the deal for her.
The important thing was she was safe and alive.
The chief’s voice broke through my thoughts. “Your immunity comes into full effect as of now. The paperwork is almost done for your transfer into our witness protection program. We’ll have a car take you to the airport for a flight tomorrow morning.”
Tomorrow? Please, not yet. I wasn’t done here. I needed some reason, some excuse, to stay in Verona. Near her. Just for a few more days…
“I want to attend my father’s funeral,” I said as my eyes came to rest upon his body. “It’ll be in a few days, I’m sure. You wouldn’t deny me that, would you?”
Chief Capulet gave me a suspicious look as he considered my request, his stare edged in hatred. Even with how he felt about me, he wouldn’t deny a son his right to attend his father’s funeral, would he?
“Fine,” he said finally. “But you’ll stay hidden. I’ll escort you myself to make sure there is no…funny business.”
“Of course.”
Julianna’s stricken face came to mind. Her screams echoed in my brain. I had promised I wouldn’t see her or speak to her again—conditions of the deal to get her back—but I couldn’t leave without seeing her one more time.
* * *
Two days later, my funeral was scheduled right after my father’s in Waverley Cathedral. I was escorted from the safe house I’d been hidden away in by two armed guards and the chief himself. I was allowed to remain only on the mezzanine that ran above the church’s main floor, the shadows hiding my face as I watched the funeral below. The chief and his men stood a few meters back from me at a respectful distance while I leaned against a pillar, the scent of incense and lilies clogging my nose.
They kept the top half of the coffin open. From up here I could see my father lying in his coffin as if he were sleeping. He looked so mortal from up here. So much at peace. No trace of his monstrous nature left.
The first wave crashed through me, causing me to grip at the balustrade, feeling unexpectedly like a release. It took me a second to realize that I was feeling…relief. I’d spent so long fearing him, cowering from him, hiding from his disapproval. Terrified of what his next “lesson” might be. Despite all these things, I’d also been driven by a need to please him, a task I could never win. Even when I won, I failed.
It was all over now.
It was all over.
My father was dead.
The last moments of his life thundered through my mind. “My son!” My father screamed, rising like an avenging demon from behind a crate. “You shot my boy, you fucking bastards.”
He had died avenging me. Despite his brutal lessons, despite his hard, cruel ways, my father loved me.
He loved me.
Twenty-six years of searching for a sign of his love. He handed it to me, right before he was taken from me. His actions, his behaviors, however harsh, were suddenly colored with another light. The light of a father who loved his sons enough to want to make them kings. Who revered them enough to want to build an empire for them, however bloody. He forced men to their knees around him so that his sons would never have to bow down. He inspired a fear that reached out like Zeus’s hands so his sons could be gods on earth.
Something inside me dissolved and blew away. Grief swirled into my body, hitting me like a tsunami. My father was not a monster. He
was just a man. Mortal. As breakable and fragile as all of us. Perhaps even more so.
I never understood his ways. I never would. But he was my father and I loved him.
“I forgive you,” I whispered.
Family is most important, he’d always told me. I never really appreciated that until now. He had been the last link to family that I had left here. Now he was gone.
I was alone.
I sucked in a shaky breath as Father Laurence finished up the ceremony below. There were only a few scattered heads in the pews. Hardly anybody had shown up. All of my father’s family were either dead or exiled. His colleagues either in jail awaiting trial or refusing to show any connection with him. All my father’s wealth, his power, his empire…it all came down to nothing, reduced to rubble upon his death. Oh, Father. If you were alive to see this now, it’d break your heart.
Alberto Veronesi, his enemy and one-time friend, made his way down the aisle, dressed in a long black overcoat, a single white rose on his lapel.
He placed a heavy gloved hand on the coffin. “Goodbye, old friend, dear enemy. You’ll be with Maria now.”
My mother.
My father’s admission crashed into me, knocking into me from the other side.
He’d had my mother killed. He loved her and he still killed her.
“She was going to leave me, leave us. She was going to run off with that bitch prosecutor and leave us all behind. But I fixed it.”
My mother had been about to leave us. Leave me.
Everything I thought about her was wrong. She didn’t love me. She didn’t care. What mother leaves her children behind in the hands of a cruel father? She was selfish and…and…I hated her. Bitterness spread throughout my body, gripping me in its clutches like a poison.
Below, my father’s coffin was carried out towards the burial site. I stood frozen, white knuckles gripping the balcony, as a silent storm tore me apart from the inside.
When the door closed, leaving the church empty, I slumped over myself. I was tired. So damn tired. I felt like I could sleep for an eternity.
The side door of the church opened. It wasn’t so much the sound of the door or the soft foot treads that had me lifting my head, but the sense of who had entered.
“Jules…” I whispered.
She was so beautiful. Even with her face pale, wisps of hair escaping from her ponytail, whiskey eyes rimmed with red. Even with her feminine body cloaked in light-swallowing and shapeless black.
I spotted the stairs leading down and started forward. Everything faded except for her. My promises, my deal, my immunity, all forgotten.
Two firm hands wrapped around my upper arms yanked me back. “Don’t you dare,” the chief hissed in my ear.
“If I could just say goodbye…?” If I could just touch her face one more time. Smell her hair. Feel her heart beating against mine.
“She thinks you’re dead. You need to stay that way. If you don’t, the deal’s off. It’s life in prison and I swear to God I will make it a living hell.”
How do you say goodbye when you are forced into silence?
When I had made the deal with Chief Capulet, I had been desperate and half mad with the knowledge that my father had Jules. I would have said yes to anything to save her. Even if it meant I had to give her up. As long as she was safe. Alive. That’s all that mattered to me.
I gave up my life for hers. I’d do it a hundred times if I had to. It was my sacrifice. It was all I had to give her. Perhaps now I could be…good. Perhaps now I had redeemed myself. I had proven myself worthy of her… I only had to give her up.
They tried to drag me back away from the balcony, away from the edge, away from Julianna.
“Please,” I begged. “Please, just one more minute.”
By the grace of God, they loosened their grip. My heart squeezed tighter and tighter as I watched Julianna walk down the length of the cathedral, her steps hesitant, until she passed into the section in the back where my locked coffin, weighed down with sandbags, sat waiting for my funeral.
You will learn to forget me, I told her silently. But every day of my life I will think of you.
I would die a thousand times if it meant your life was saved.
Goodbye, my precious Jules.
Be brave.
Be…happy.
31
____________
Julianna
I sat in the one of the pews and stared up at the man on the cross. He died for me. Just like Roman had died to save me. The ultimate act of love.
Inside me was just…nothing. Empty space between the nothing.
I closed my eyes and pressed my fingers into my face. This is where I stayed. Long after Roman’s funeral ended. Long after everyone had left and the church had grown silent again.
I didn’t move even as I heard the patter of soft footsteps coming up the aisle. He or she stopped beside me.
“Miss?”
A boy. Young. I didn’t lift my head.
“This is for you, miss.”
I said nothing. I didn’t care enough to open my eyes.
“I’ll just leave it here.”
There was a rustle as something was placed beside me. The soft patter of his shoes, slower now, as he left.
I rubbed my eyes, blinking into the dim church. The sun had long since gone down. The candles had dwindled to their last inch. I should…go home.
What is home without Roman?
I glanced down. Beside me was a single red rose.
I started, spun around. But the boy who left this for me was long gone.
A single red rose.
Was this someone’s idea of a sick joke?
Roman was dead.
Anger swelled up, burning away the numbness that had wrapped around me until now. I grabbed the rose by the stem in my fist, ignoring the thorns that cut me open. “Fuck you!” I screamed and flung it. It smacked against the altar, petals flying off in a shower of red.
I was a cliff whose roots had been ripped away. It would not hold. I would not hold.
The earth opened up under my feet and I fell into the abyss, a bottomless pit I could not escape from.
Fuck you, God. Fuck you, heaven. You don’t deserve him. He was supposed to stay with me.
We were supposed to run away to Paris. To live out a long life of love and laughter and glorious heart-stopping sex and…babies. Oh God, our babies. My heart cried for the future we would never have, the home we would never get to make, the children we would never get to know.
I cried because he was stolen from me. He was stolen from this city that would never know him. They deserved to know him like I did. Roman turned on his family, singlehandedly ending the Tyrells’ reign of terror in this city.
My father repaid him by taking his life. My father was a murderer, no better than Giovanni Tyrell. Worse, because he hid behind a badge and a good name. My father—my father—had selfishly stolen Roman away from his world, this city, from me. My own father. The man who gave me life thought he had the right to take it away.
In my darkness, the storm raged around me. I shivered, naked, in the center of it. Anger and grief choked me, crushing my lungs. My insides ripped apart, as if my very soul was trying to tear itself from my body, to follow Roman into the afterlife. It hurt so much I doubled over, heaving in breath.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
I can’t breathe.
“Julianna, my child.” A soft hand slid on my shoulder. Through my universe of pain, I heard Father Laurence’s voice. I reached for it like he was my lifeline. Father Laurence would help me.
I inhaled, loud and hoarse like a drowning woman. I had managed to find a sliver of air. A sliver of hope. I exposed my face to the Father, in all its broken rawness. “Please,” I begged.
He had to help me. He had to.
He gazed at me with such worry. “Please, what?”
“A gun.”
“What?” He drew back, a look of
horror replacing his pity.
“They took mine from me.”
“Julianna—”
“Or a knife. I’m not fussy. A knife would hurt more and it would take longer to die than a bullet but…”
The Father made a wheezing sound and grasped at the pew in front of us. “You can’t be serious…”
I trained my eyes on him, my grief solidifying with purpose. “As serious as death.”
“Don’t be too hasty. You are young—”
“I am young,” I spat out, my words bitter. “Which means I have to spend every minute of every hour of every day for the next sixty or seventy years waiting. Waiting until I can join him.”
“You… You will get over him.”
That was what my father said. He lied. He’d had never gotten over the death of my mother, his love, his soulmate. Look at him now, an old lonely, hateful, bitter shell of the man he used to be.
I would not become him.
I could not live with what he’d become.
I’d rather die.
“You do not know true love if you think I can go on without Roman. I won’t live as a ghost. Let me die like I should. Let me join him.”
Father Laurence shook his head. “I can’t. I w—”
I grabbed the front of his shirt, my fingers twisting into his robes. “If you do not help me,” my voice was as hard as bullets, “I will find someone who will.”
He stared at me as I held his gaze, willing him to comprehend how determined I was.
Slowly, his shaking hands slid over mine, his eyes growing resigned. “Okay, Julianna. Okay.”
* * *
Late that night, I held the tiny vial in my hand. The thick dark liquid inside looked black, but held up to the light, the edges revealed its true nature. Blood red, like wine.
The Father’s words came back to me as if he were standing right next to me.
“Drink the whole bottle on an empty stomach. All of it, don’t miss one drop. You’ll begin to get sleepy in a few minutes. You’ll sink into what feels like a sleep, then you should feel…nothing.”
I had prepared for my death in a steady, logical motion. I’d cancelled my electricity, my home phone and internet account. I donated the groceries left in my pantry and fridge to the local soup kitchen down the street. I wrote out a will, a suicide note, signed them both and left them on my dining room table.