I had her by the ankle when she stepped back, but I didn’t have enough strength to keep my grip. My hands weren’t doing what they were supposed to. They were dying, and the life flowing from them did so in waves. I’d caught her on a fisted wave when my hands were grasping and flattening, rigid and slack, completely out of my control. She fell.
My crawl slowed, and my body came closer to the ground. Something scraped.
Donna Maria grumbled and got up on her elbows as if she were lying on the beach, getting the sun. “This is over, my girl. All this foolish nonsense.”
The scraping under me. The knife. She’d left it in me. I swiped at it. Missed. My hand had gone flat.
“You don’t belong here,” she said. “Coulda told you that. Coulda told that stupido downstairs with his face in the mud. You till your own soil. What are you going to do with that knife? Anything?”
She had my gun in her hand. She put it against my head. It didn’t feel cold. I must have been freezing. I got a grip on the knife and jerked it out.
Pain engulfed me for a second. Stuff started swimming, and I stopped having coherent thoughts. I was going to black out.
Get it together, Theresa.
People came onto the veranda. Men. I didn’t know who. I couldn’t look at them and finish this job. My fist clamped around the hilt of the knife.
Donna Maria pulled the trigger.
Click.
There were no bullets left.
With my last breath of life, in the interval between milliseconds, where atoms play and thoughts happen so quickly they’re lost before they’re remembered, I lunged for her throat, knife in front of me. Because I was a killer in my heart, the knife understood what I wanted and lodged itself right below her jaw, where life pulsed.
She didn’t even yell. She just sprang forward, blood spurting, mouth open in a soundless scream. I did the impossible and got on my feet. Zo stood in the doorway, meek and boring. Harmless, except when he wasn’t. He’d shot Antonio, and I couldn’t touch him. His world would continue, and Antonio and I had died together, as promised. I felt a profound loss as my last real emotion, and I understood what drove vengeance all of a sudden.
Envy.
That a wrongdoer would continue with their life while you could not.
That they took something and walked away unscathed.
That they had everything and you had nothing.
Envy. So insidious it could disguise itself as anger or righteousness and travel over seas and mountains to see itself satisfied.
Not having the strength or balance to support myself, I spun around. The edge of the railing bit my side, then nothing nothing nothing as I fell.
The ground.
Hard.
Harder than anything I’d ever felt.
Stuff crunched.
A bag of chips.
The bag was fine.
The chips.
Crushed.
But my name.
Contessa.
The mud hadn’t made the ground any softer.
At the bottom of a ravine, a stupid boy twisted.
I’d felt nothing.
Oh my God, Theresa.
Oddly empty.
I’d killed him.
That hard earth under him.
Broken like a bag of chips.
I will kill them.
What had I done?
Wrong.
I’d done wrong.
And Paulie.
Who loved.
Who hurt.
And I felt.
All of them. I will God oh god oh Regret.
Theresa. Theresatheresatheresa
My family would have to grieve again.
Margie would hate herself for giving me the car.
And Antonio would blame himself forever.
He would kill someone for this.
And that was hell enough.
To be loved so well.
That your death inspires regret.
And envy.
And you die swimming in it.
I opened my eyes. Everything was hard to do. Especially this. Opening my eyes. Breathing. Swallowing blood. But I knew the voice, and I had to see the sweet brown eyes and the lips curved for love one last time.
“Capo,” I said. I think.
He had blood over one side of his face, under a gash where the bullet had swiped the side of his head. His mouth was twisted in a rictus of anger and sadness. I wanted to kiss it happy.
“Contessa.”
“You’re not dead.”
“No, no. A scratch.”
It was still bleeding. I couldn’t see much, but I thought I saw bone.
“Please,” I said, guts twisted so tight I could barely get the word out. “Do something for me.”