Page 61 of Confession
My mind is still stumbling, so I don’t fight or even quite comprehend when he hauls me off the sidewalk and into the shadow of an alley. He releases the straps of my chest holster but pins me to the brick wall with a hand on my sternum between the guns.
He whips his phone from his pocket, working it one handed, then sets the phone to his ear. The call must be answered immediately because Vitali says, “I’ve got him, stay back.”
My heart starts hammering under his hand. It feels strange to have the blood suddenly rushing through my body like I’m coming back to life.
As Vitali stows his phone, I reach up with both my hands to cover his where it’s locked against my sternum. He switches the hold, bringing his other hand up, gripping my hands with his and pressing them against my chest. The guns, in the way, jam into me.
“What are you doing?” Vitali demands, his voice shaking. “What the hell are you doing?”
I can’t answer him. I’m shaking too, my whole body, even my mind. Why is he here?
“Quinn,” he breathes, leaning into me, pressing his forehead to mine. “No.”
He stays there until I stop shaking, until my breathing evens out. He stays there to ask me quietly, “Why would you do this?”
Notwhatare you doing, not this time, because he knows, because it’s obvious—butwhy.
“I wanted … I had to …” I have to think. Having to use words, everything that felt so simple and obvious is suddenly difficult. “It seemed like … the only thing I could do.” His breath hisses in. His anger comes back. Before I lose my chance, I say, “It makes things right.”
“It doesn’t fucking make anything right!” Vitali rips backward away from me. “All it does is make youdead!”
“And them.”
“Jesus fucking Christ, Quinn, you think I fucking care about that? Like I give a fucking flying shit about that?” He crowds into me and starts grabbing at my chest harness again. “Get this goddamn shit off!” He fumbles around. “Jesus fuck, where’s the goddamn buckle?”
He finds it and pops it open, but there are two more on the chest harness. He hunts them down, releasing all of them. He yanks me away from the wall to rip the harness off me and drop it on the ground.
I fall back against the wall because I’m shaking again and can’t think. I don’t understand what’s happening.
Vitali unclips the buckles at my thighs, then he releases the belt and pulls the whole rig away from me, dropping it with the rest. I feel strange without the weight. I feel like he’s stripped me of more than weapons. I have nothing now, no protection.
He grips my jaw. “You are never, ever,everto do anything like this. I do not care how angry you are with me or how angry I am with you. This is the one thing I could never, ever forgive. Do you understand me?”
The thing is, Idon’t. I don’t understand at all.
“You know what I did,” I say. I gave him the flash drive. I know what he saw.
Me and Alesso in bed, touching, fucking, talking. He heard the information I extracted, the rival Alesso told me about, the petty murder he had planned.
Another recording captured that murder. The evidence was undeniable, utterly damning—but not just damning of Alesso. Of me too. I cut the man’s hamstring so he couldn’t run. I made the murder easy. And I hauled the body away after.
I recorded too, audio only but still clear, Gavino DiMaggio’s offer to me. Not just money in exchange for Vitali’s death, but a place in the DiMaggio organization.
“Yes, I know what you did,” Vitali confirms, causing me to close my eyes at the thought of him watching all that. I didn’t want him to see any of that until I was dead. I kept it in an obvious place where it was sure to be found if my room was being cleared out.
I wanted Vitali to have something he could use against the DiMaggios, something I wasn’t willing to give him while I was alive because it would destroy me too. That nasty little flash drive has kept me safe from DiMaggio retaliation for two years. But it’s always hung over me, ready to drop like a bomb, readyto destroy something I was clinging to more desperately than my chance to breathe: the chance to do it near Vitali.
Now, he’s near me but I can hardly breathe anyway. There’s an iron grip on my lungs.
“I know what you did,” Vitali repeats, “but it took me a good goddamn minute to sort through my own shit enough to see it clearly. And what I saw was that you chose me instead. What I don’t know, Quinn, is why.”
“Because …” I swallow hard on a truth I’ve kept silent for so long that I hardly know how to let the words take shape in my mouth.
“I love you,” I finally confess. When I do, other words spill out in a rush. “I have for years. I have ever since I laid eyes on you. I fell in love with you the first goddamn second, and I’ve only fallen more in love with you every second since.”
“Quinn—”
“And I saved my own miserable fucking life with that flash drive. I kept it from you when you could’ve used it. And I stayed in your house under false pretenses—”
