Blood is everywhere.
Surrender is the only option.
“Stop!” Del yells. “This has to stop!”
Fred’s bleeding.
Most of the Baratta men here are dead.
And I realize… she’s going to be the new boss.
And we made a promise in blood to marry her to King.
Gunshots stop. People are wounded, crying, yelling, and Fred stares up at her. “You bitch! This is your fault!”
She doesn’t hesitate as she grabs the gun from my hand and points it at his forehead, firing twice. “Go to hell.”
“Nice shot,” King says from his chair.
“I’ve been dreaming about killing him since I was six.” She hands me back my gun and turns to me. “I knew you’d come.”
I frown. I’ve only met her a few times. I have no idea what she’s talking about as she hugs me close, then pulls away and turns to King. “You idiot! All we had to do was stick to the plan!”
I frown even harder. “What fucking plan?”
“The plan!” She spreads her arms wide; we’re all in the clear. “The one you and I talked about yesterday. You were all like, ‘hey things aren’t great acting like a crazy person,’ and then you said something about dying, but you had time left, whatever that means. We met at Starbucks; I texted you? How do you not remember this?” She sighs and then curses. “Whatever, this still worked since you clearly remembered at least where we were hiding out, but you should have never let King come over here. I was this close!” She held up a hand, thumb, and forefinger a centimeter apart.
“Close,” I repeat, completely confused. What fucking plan?
“Close to finding out where he stashed all my Family’s money, remember? You said you’d help us? That the Families would help us.” Her brows drew together as she studied me. “What the hell? Were you high or something?”
Something clicks in my brain.
I feel the pain again in my temples.
What is that?
I’m exhausted.
“Whatever,” Serena interrupts. “I’ll call for cleanup. You need a place to stay?”
“Aren’t I the enemy?” Del suddenly looks uncomfortable.
“No, that dude was,” Serena points at Fred. “Plus, we’re pretty good at boarding people who want to kill us; just take a good look at that one.”
She points at me.
What the hell? “I don’t want to kill you.”
“Mmmm… okay.” Serena starts untying King, and I look at all the blood around me, then think I’m hallucinating when a butterfly flaps its wings in front of me.
I find myself saying, “I love insects.”
I remember things, then forget them.
“It was so easy,” I say to myself. “Falling.”
It would be so easy… dying.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“If he be Mr. Hyde, I shall be Mr. Seek.” —Robert Louis Stevenson
Izzy
It had been a week.
A week where Maksim or Sim went in and out with actual Maksim. It was so hard to notice that anyone who didn’t know the two personalities probably wouldn’t be able to tell.
Where Maksim was fun and flirty, so was Sim. But Sim had this seriousness about him that also made him weirdly direct, like if you looked like shit, he’d be the one to say, “that’s ugly.”
Maksim would try to flirt his way out of answering.
It was weird.
And yet it wasn’t.
Because things were still normal even when they weren’t.
Del was living with King’s family until the wedding. It only took a few minutes for her to admit to everything, getting close to Maksim, not realizing things weren’t totally okay, just thinking he was moody or something, and playing a part for her father and her uncle. They wanted to infiltrate into the Five Families and make it look like the De Langes went crazy again. And at the end of the day needed an alliance and to find all the money one of the cousins had stashed before being offed by Maksim himself.
We had peace, sort of, and because King had already stupidly agreed to it, we had another wedding between two people that may or may not eventually kill one another.
Even though the enemy was dead, King still wanted to go through with it, but whenever any of us asked him about it, he completely shut down and would walk away.
Things were changing.
And I didn’t like it.
I wanted to ask Maksim where we were at, but Nikolai said that his mental state was delicate. Most of the drug that was killing him was out of his system, and Nikolai discovered that when Maksim was poisoned, it made the effects of the drug in his system intensify his drug-induced psychosis, which was why Maksim had been hearing weird voices and talking to himself in the mirror.
Every day Nikolai took more blood samples, and every day one thing was more apparent. It all led back to Maksim’s first kill.
It was killing Claire that really triggered his dissociative identity disorder, what Nikolai called DID, and the drugs just sadly helped it along. Nikolai was ninety percent sure that this would have happened regardless because Maksim had always been trying to ignore a part of himself. After the traumatic events when he was young, his fears were just enough to make him want to go into himself.