“I don’t want to see you again,” her voice cracked as she stepped through the door from whence she’d entered. “You’re dead to me.”
She left.
Tristan stood there.
Alone.
Without his baby sister.
Without his father.
Without his mother.
Only with men who looked at him like they would eat him alive.
And a baby who had stopped crying.
A baby who, a few minutes ago, had been nothing to him. A baby for whom he’d murdered the father he’d loved so much.
Tristan looked at her – her eyes swollen from crying, the colors in them shining and twinkling; her little mouth rosy and soft; her chubby face smeared with his and his father’s blood.
The flutter he had felt in his chest minutes ago was gone. In its place was something else instead. Something he’d never felt before. Something he didn’t understand. Something twisted and ugly and alive, taking root inside his chest as he watched her breathe, because of him. Something poisonous bleeding its way into his heart, paralyzing it, deadening it, until he couldn’t feel it anymore.
Until he could feel nothing but the poison. Until he could see nothing but her face with his blood.
He had spilled his father’s blood to protect her.
His mother had called him a monster. She'd been right. He’d become a monster, more evil than all the men in the room, in one second.
All because of her.
Because she’d made him choose.
And he had nothing.
No one.
Nothing.
Nothing except this feeling in his chest. He latched on to it, looking at her face, etching it to memory. He looked at her eyes, seeing her soul forever tainted with his blood.
As of tonight, her life was his. He’d given up everything so she could live.
Her life was his.
He didn't know what he would do with it. But it was his.
“Come with me, boy.”
The Boss’s voice reached him. No. Not the Boss. He’d been the Boss to his father. And his father was dead.
Tristan Caine was dead too. In his place, someone else was born. Someone who looked up at Lorenzo Maroni and the gleam in his dark eyes dispassionately.
He kept quiet, everything inside him detached except for the strange, bitter sensation he felt when he looked at the girl. The men around him were considering him, all bigger than he was, with heavy weapons and the power to scare him.
He wasn’t scared anymore.
This was the last time, he vowed to himself, that he'd be scared.