Gypsy Brothers: The Complete Series (66 page)

He reaches up to my face with his clean hand, squeezing my jaw hard so I open my mouth. He slides his fingers, soaked with my blood, into my mouth as far as they’ll go. I choke as my own blood drips down the back of my throat, and that makes him laugh.

“What do you think?” he asks. “Should we taste his blood next?” He’s talking about Elliot. “You can get on your knees and lick it up off the fuckin’ floor.”

He’s distracted by the thought of me lapping Elliot’s blood up off the dirty floor? Whatever.
He’s distracted
, and that makes him loosen his grip that’s forcing my jaw open. I bite down on his fingers as hard as I possibly can, my stomach lurching as blood gushes down my throat and I feel hard bone between my teeth.

Dornan roars, pulling his fingers from my mouth as he uses his other hand to smack me a backhander that almost knocks me out. I fly to the side, landing heavily. Thank you. He dives for me, grabbing hold of my ankle as I close my fingers around my gun and spin to face him.

He crash-tackles me at the same time that I blindly pull the trigger, aware only that the gun is pointed in his general direction but nothing more. The gun kicks back in my hands, Dornan jerks back slightly, but gravity ensures that his tackle is completed. His full weight smashes into me, knocking the gun from my hands and me flat on my back, with his weight suffocating me.

He groans. “You shot me. You fuckin’ shot me, you stupid bitch.”

He’s bleeding. I try to shove him off me, but he head-butts me, driving his forehead into my mouth. I see stars, my jaw aching and my teeth loose as Dornan rolls to the side, black-red blood blossoming from a hole in his shirt just below his ribs.

It’s like a target. I ball my hand up into a fist and smash it into where I’ve shot him, as hard as I possibly can. He lets out a guttural howl, snaking his fingers into my hair and yanking my head up before slamming it back down into the ground.

“You.Fucking.Cunt.,” he growls, slamming my head into the ground with each word.

If he keeps smashing my head into the ground I’m going to pass out, and if I pass out, I’m going to die.

And I refuse to die.

I reach for Dornan’s bullet wound and punch my fist into it again. He howls, rolling away, and I take that split second to roll the opposite way, getting to my knees and crawling away towards Elliot. The room spins around me as I reach up to the back of my head and find fresh blood seeping from my scalp.

As I’m reaching Elliot I hear the slow click of a gun being cocked and I turn my attention back to Dornan. He’s in terrible shape. His face is pale and he, too, looks like he’s had the life sucked out of him. He looks as bad as I feel: bleeding, broken, ready to pass out. It’s only now that I realize he’s limping, dragging his left leg. I look closer, seeing the wet patch above his knee, almost impossible to see on the black fabric of his pants.

I smile. “He shot you, didn’t he?” I say.

Dornan grimaces, turning his head to the side as he aims at me.

“Don’t move, bitch,” he says.

I force myself to breathe, tiny, shallow breaths, as I drag myself closer to Elliot. With one hand over my stomach I manage to get to a kneeling position next to him.

“You won’t shoot me,” I say, rolling Elliot over with great difficulty. Oh, Jesus. He’s been shot in the chest. It looks bad. Really bad. His blood is everywhere, making my knees slip as I try to wriggle closer.

“Yes, I fucking will,” he says, shaking the gun.

“You won’t,” I say, looking down at Elliot’s pale face. “You’re not finished with me yet, are you, Dornan? You’re not going to shoot me.”

He makes a choking noise, blood appearing at his lip. I look at him, fascinated. The bullet I fired must have hit his lung if he’s coughing up blood right now.

“Are you sorry?” I ask suddenly. I’m so close to passing out. So close. The room spins for a second. I don’t have long. Jase and Elliot have even less time, if they’re even still alive.

They have to be alive.

“Sorry for what?” Dornan asks, coughing as he spits more blood on the floor beside him. His shirt is a mess. He’s bleeding, and he’s bleeding good.

I level my eyes at him and really look at him. Just me and him. Juliette Portland and Dornan Ross, in one spectacular face-off. Only one of us is going to leave this room alive, I know this now, and I hope to fuck that it’s going to be me that leaves without the aid of a body bag.

“Are you sorry for killing my father?” I ask him. I want to know. I
need
to know.

He sneers. “You think you can trust the man you grew up with. The man who you would bet everything on. Your best friend in the goddamn world. And then he goes and fucks you over. Steals your woman. Steals your money. Steals your
son
.” His hand shakes as he holds his chest, and he makes a choking noise deep in his throat as he glances at Jase. Blood. Dornan’s drowning slowly in his own blood, judging by the way he’s coughing it up and the neat bullet hole in his shirt that’s now soaking red.

I might not even have to kill him. He might just lie down and die.

But I know Dornan Ross. He is not a man who would ever just lie down and die.

A sob rises in my throat, and I feel tears in my eyes. I have to know. If he regrets it.

“How many hours do you think it took?” I ask, tears blurring my vision until I blink them away. “Five? Eight? How many hours did you make them rape me, over and over and over?”

“The tape cuts off at three hours,” he rasps.

“How do you know?” I whisper. “Been watching it lately?”

He flinches. “Maybe.”

“You killed your own grandchild, Dornan,” I say sadly. “Are you sorry for that?”

He doesn’t answer, his nostrils flaring as he breathes heavily.

“Are you sorry,” I whisper, “for what you did to me?”

They say a man is never more honest than in his hour of death, and now I see that this is true. Dornan’s eyes are red and glassy, and suddenly, he doesn’t look like the evil psychopath who killed my father and destroyed my life. The monster who inexplicably caused me to lose my daughter before she’d even taken her first breath. No, for a split second in time, this creature in front of me is a broken man, a dying man, a man who is burdened down with the weight of his own terrible existence.

“Yeah,” he says finally. “I am.”

That acknowledgement, that regret, is something I thought I would never hear. I thought hearing it would make me feel like a weight was lifted from my shoulder somehow. Like a vindication.

You were innocent, and I was wrong.
But it doesn’t make me feel any better. It just makes me feel so fucking
sad
that any of this ever happened.

“Then why?” I whisper. “Why did you do that?”

He’s struggling now. I can almost see the life leaving him, the way his skin has turned the color of ash, gray and sickly.

He coughs again, more blood spat on the floor beside him. I watch him in horror as I realize that this might be it. We could both die here, on the dirty ground, and it will all have been for nothing. What is the use in him dying if I don’t get to live to see a life without the ever-present reality of Dornan Ross forever lurking in the shadows?

“Dornan,” I say, and he looks at me.
Really
looks at me.

“You were his entire universe,” Dornan says, his words rattling in my chest. “You were everything to him. And Mariana, she was everything to me. She was the one thing in this world that I knew I could count on, and it was all a lie.” He laughs bitterly, maybe at the irony, shaking his head. “He took the one single thing in this world that I cared about, and he destroyed it.”

“And so you destroyed me,” I murmur.

He coughs forcefully, a gurgling sound in his chest. As he leans over to spit up fresh blood, I make my move, sliding my hand in front of where Elliot’s face lies, wrapping my hand around the butt of his gun.
Jesus, I hope you still have bullets in this
, I think to myself.

“How does it feel to die?” I ask him. I want to know that he suffers. I want to know that he is afraid of death. “To know that nobody will mourn you. Nobody will miss you. There will only be relief when you are gone.”

He chuckles, the act sending him into a coughing fit that sprays more blood from his mouth and onto his already blood-soaked shirt. “This?” he says. “This isn’t death. This is a paper cut, baby girl.” But his words are hollow, and I can tell he doesn’t mean them. False bravado. I think he knows he’s going to die.

We look at each other for a very long time, my hands clasped around the butt of Elliot’s gun.
Finally
. I pull it out without breaking our stare-off, aiming it at Dornan’s face with one hand while I desperately try to stem the flow of blood from my stomach with the other.

“I loved you once,” I say softly. “You were like a father to me. I would have done anything for you.”

He coughs again. “Ditto, baby girl.”

I’m crying. Why am I crying? Why do I care?

“You
killed
my daughter,” I say, my voice wavering.

He gnashes his teeth, his dark eyes blazing. “You.Killed.My.Sons.,” he grinds out.

“They deserved it,” I whisper. “How does it feel, knowing they died because of something you made them do to me?”

He doesn’t respond. Perhaps he’s never thought of it like that before. Either way, it’s time.

“You’re going to die now, Dornan.”

I’m stalling. Why am I stalling? The feeling of Elliot’s blood on my fingers, thick and syrupy, jolts me back to the present.

“We all die,” Dornan says, speaking with difficulty.

I see movement in the corner of my eye and follow it. My heart sinks as I see Tommy standing in the doorway, his gun drawn, wearing a DEA bulletproof vest. He looks at the gun in my hand, and follows its aim to Dornan, who can barely hold his gun, he’s so completely fucked.

Dornan smirks, coughing. “Well, look what the fuckin’ cat dragged in. My rat.”

Tommy looks from Dornan to me.
He’s going to jail for the rest of his life
, I hear in my head, and I beg Tommy silently. Just go, just go.

He stares at me for a long moment, something passing between us. “You got about fifteen seconds. Make it count,” he hisses under his breath.

“Clear!” he yells, closing the door and leaving us to finish what we started.
Thank Christ for small favors
. He’ll probably lose his job for that stunt, but I can’t worry about that now. I’ve got a mission to complete.

I know I’m almost out of time at this point, that Tommy or other agents could reappear at any time and save Dornan’s sorry ass, but I can’t shoot him yet. I’m not finished. I lower the gun momentarily. “You killed Dad because Mariana fell in love with him. Weren’t you the one who told me when I was a little girl, if you love something, set it free? You didn’t have to do that to me. You didn’t have to kill them. You could’ve been a good man, Dornan, if you’d just let them leave.”

Something flashes in his eyes, and he leans forward, opening his mouth as if he’s about to say something.

I don’t give him the chance. I pull the trigger, the gun blast deafening, the kick reverberating painfully up my arm. I might be bleeding and on the verge of passing out, but my aim is true — right between the eyes. Dornan slumps back against the wall, blood streaming from his forehead just above his nose. He slowly sags to the side, until he’s lying on the floor, his dark brown eyes still frozen open.

I can’t move for a second, still looking at his eyes. I wish he’d closed them. I wonder if he’s still dying in there, if he can still see me for a few seconds as his heart and brain fade away to nothing.

I don’t want to take any chances. I aim again, at his chest this time, and fire off four more rounds, pulling the trigger until I’ve emptied the clip into him.

Six and a half years after he betrayed me so viciously, we’ve come full circle.

Dornan Ross is dead.

But I don’t feel relieved, or happy.

I feel …
nothing
.

EIGHTEEN

“Elliot,” I whisper.

He’s cold to the touch, and so pale he looks like a translucent version of himself, superimposed over a background of bright red blood and a dead man who caused us all of this in the first place.

I can’t lose him. I can’t lose Elliot, not after we’ve finally destroyed Dornan and the last of his deadly legacy.

“Elliot,” I say softly, tears pricking at my eyes. One hand on my stab wound, I use the other to shake him. He won’t respond. I crawl over to Jase, horrified when I see the way he’s bleeding from his chest. I need to stop the bleeding. I take my CIA jacket off, wincing at the shooting pain in my side that results from my movement, and press it to Jase’s chest, both hands weighing down on the place where Dornan’s bullet ripped into him. He’s so pale, and I don’t think he’s breathing.

“Jase!” I scream.

The door bursts open, DEA agents and a pair of paramedics with a stretcher streaming in. Tommy’s looking sheepish as some guy in a suit, I presume his boss, glares at him. “I thought you said this room was clear?”

The paramedics move at lightning speed, transferring Elliot onto the stretcher and wheeling him away. I need to go with him. But I need to stay with Jase. I’m so fucking torn right now, I don’t know what I’m doing. And Dornan, fucking Dornan, the source of all this misery, is mocking me from his spot on the ground. He’s dead, but I don’t feel any better off. I just feel cold, and dizzy, and like I need to cry.

“He shot him,” I say to Tommy, who bends down beside me. “Shit,” he says when he sees the blood on Jase. “We need another paramedic in here!” he calls out the door.

“We have to save him,” I say. “We have to fucking do something!”

Tommy’s face falls, and that makes me really fucking angry.

“Tommy!” I yell. “Help me!”

“This is bad,” Tommy says, horrified as he presses his fingers against Jase’s throat, searching for a pulse.

Another male paramedic enters the room with a stretcher and Tommy motions him over. They snap into action, hauling Jase onto the narrow stretcher. Another agent helps the paramedic as they wheel him away. Too fast.

“I have to go with him!” I protest, trying to stand. The paramedic pushing Jase away glances down at my shirt. “We need another stretcher in here,” he says into the small radio attached to his shoulder. “Priority.”

“I can walk,” I protest, taking one step before my knees buckle. Tommy catches my arm, steadying me.

“Let them help you,” he says. “I’ll make sure you ride with Jase, okay?”

“Thanks,” I mutter.

As the third stretcher is brought in for me, I take one last look at Dornan, just to make sure.

Yep. Dead. A small ache of relief throbs inside my chest.

Outside, it’s unbearable. I’d almost convinced myself it was night in the dark confines of the underground tunnels, so being stretchered back out into daylight sucks. I sit up as soon as we’re above surface, much to the annoyance of the paramedic.

Sure enough, I get to ride with Jase. For a moment, I feel conflicted, my heart demanding that Elliot not be alone, either. But then I see Amy and Kayla in his ambulance as the doors are shut, and I feel stark relief.

He’s got his girls. He’s not alone.

I insist on sitting up in the ambulance while the paramedics treat Jase. Luis sits beside me, holding my hand the entire time. We don’t talk. There’s nothing left to say, after he tells me Agent Dunn is alive and her daughter is safe. What else could he say that would make me feel better? I’m watching the man I love die before my eyes. The paramedics want me to lie down so they can treat me, but I push them away. His heart stops beating twice on the way there. I watch on in shock, not willing to entertain the possibility that I might lose the man I love, the man I’ve only just managed to find my way back to after all these years apart. He can’t die.

I won’t survive without him.