Page 24 of Confession (Constantine Brothers #2)

NINETEEN

Quinn

As I drive the familiar route into the city, my plan makes more and more sense to me. It feels right.

More than right. It feels inevitable.

The movement of the car and the shine of the headlights over road signs helps me calm down. My hands stop shaking. I stop seeing his eyes looking at me with all that rage and hurt and betrayal.

I don’t want to see that again.

So it’s just road signs and headlights cutting through the night and the cold, silent company of six guns in the passenger seat.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt so sure of what I’m doing. I am, if anything, relieved.

It’s 2 a.m. and Boston is closing down for the night. It’s a weekday, so there isn’t too much traffic. It’s easy to get where I’m going.

I drive by the DiMaggio’s brick-faced club casually, looking for the vehicles I need to see. One. Two. A whole lot of others.

I thought so. Closing time is only enforced for some. It’s relative to position and wealth. What isn’t?

I loop back around to park on a dark street a few blocks from my destination. There’s a hidden entrance to the club, courtesy of the prohibition era. Someone will open it if I knock. I just have to be ready to kill them quietly. I’m not worried about it. That’s something I’ve done plenty of times.

Agent Cohen wasn’t wrong about me. There was never any chance I was going to become a good citizen.

I take my time double checking my guns before sliding them into their various holsters. Two on the chest, one on each hip, one on each thigh. Knives at my back.

I get out. Out of habit, I lock the door and pocket the keys. Habit is funny like that. You do what you always do.

Lock a door.

Lie.

Kill people.

Bury your love deep inside yourself so you can survive the pain of it.

Pretend you don’t need anything until you believe it.

All my habits are pulled together tonight, drawn tight around me like a shroud.

I’m getting morose here on this dark, solitary walk. And why not? One thing I trust in myself is that, at the first flash of pain, at the first lash of violence, a switch will flip inside me.

And Vitali won’t be there to transmute it into pleasure and the relief of submission. Not tonight.

I suddenly get shaky. I have to stop and lean against a building for a minute. More than a minute. I don’t know how long.

Beyond the shadows that hide me, a few cars pass by in the patches of streetlight. I don’t really see them. I just know they’re there beyond the walled-in space of my thoughts. Ahead, somewhere, a car door opens and closes like a door opens and closes in my mind, letting something through.

Vitali, of course.

It’s a memory I didn’t expect to look at tonight.

Him, drunk and leaning into me while we sat on the front steps of the house the night of Nonna Maria’s funeral.

My arm going ever so hesitantly around him, stealing a touch that didn’t belong to me.

Him saying, Thank you for letting her love you.

She needed it. Then I got drunk too and lost the rest of the memory.

When I get to that blank place, I’m able to push away from the wall and walk on.

There’s someone ahead of me now, a block or so away, and my mind fits Vitali over the image. His body language, his intensity. The way he would look around when hunting for something.

That mental overlay is so distracting that I forget to get out of sight with all my very obvious guns.

He turns my way and says in Vitali’s voice, “Jesus fucking Christ.”

I freeze.

He starts toward me, moving fast, clearly angry. My brain is malfunctioning, processing too slow, unable to sort out this tangle of imagining and reality. That is, until he grabs me.

I gasp at the contact as he grips the straps of my chest holster. He shakes me. “What the fuck, Quinn, what the fuck ?”

The streetlight painting his face renders it severe in its beauty. It sharpens his cheekbones and the line of his nose. It leaves shallow pools in his cheeks and darker, deeper ones in his eyes.

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?”

Not what are you doing, not this time, because he knows, because it’s obvious—but why .

“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 you dead !”

“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, ever to 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, I don’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, ready to 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—”

“What false pretenses?”

“A lie! What do you mean what false pretenses?”

“Did you have an ulterior motive for entering my household?”

“Just … to be there.” I’m confused. What is he saying?

“That’s not an ulterior motive, Quinn, and it’s only false pretenses if you had some plan still to kill me, which you obviously had plenty of opportunities to do. Instead you saved my life more times than I can remember. That’s not false pretenses.”

My confusion blows up into frustration. “I’m not good with words like you! I don’t fucking know how to explain!”

“Then let me explain it, and you correct me if I’m wrong.

You planned to kill me before you ever knew me.

And when you changed your mind and the DiMaggios sent in your replacement, you saw it and you stopped him—and that was the first time you saved my life, when you were still a bouncer at Eclipse and that guy came after me in the parking lot. Is that right so far?”

I speak around the tightness in my throat, “Yes.”

“Then I offered you a job in my household and you took it and you spent the next two years protecting me. And whatever you felt, you kept to yourself. Because you didn’t think I would be receptive.”

He studies me there in the dark alley, sees somehow through the darkness, through my silence. He says quietly, “And because you didn’t think you deserved to be loved in return.”

It’s a battering ram on the already crumbling wall that surrounds me. I gasp. I half fall. Vitali presses close, pins me to the wall, holds me up.

“But you’re wrong,” he tells me. “You’re so goddamn fucking wrong because I do love you and I really always have and I don’t know why it took me so long to understand it and I’m sorry .

I’m sorry that I was stupidly slow. I’m sorry that I’ve been so fucking impatient with you.

I’m sorry that I hurt you and I am so fucking sorry that you got this far ahead of me tonight.

And don’t you ever do any shit like this again because you would fucking kill me. ”

I gasp, “Vitali—”

“And that’s a lot of words, so let me boil it back down, Quinn. I fucking love you. ”

The last of my defenses shatter. I fall into him, shaking so hard I can’t hold myself up. I can’t breathe either. I can’t think and I can’t hear.

The things he’s said hurt because I want them so fucking bad, but they don’t fit anywhere inside me, and I don’t know what to do. Left to my own devices, I think I would just crumple onto the ground and never get up.

But Vitali takes control. He leans down to snatch up all my weapons. He pulls me away from the wall with his other hand, gripping my elbow, drawing me out of the alley and down the sidewalk to where Sasha is waiting by the car.

I look away, only half seeing Vitali handing her my weapons. She hands him the keys.

Vitali says, “Quinn, your keys.”

Numbly, I dig them from my pocket. Sasha takes them from me, fingers squeezing mine as she does it. Then she walks off, heading toward my car a few blocks back.

Vitali walks me over to the passenger side and opens the door. I should be getting him in the car, protecting him, watching for trouble. But I let him do it for me, just this once.

He gets in the driver’s seat and starts the car. He pulls away from the curb. As he starts driving us home, he reaches over, finds my hand in my lap, and threads his fingers together with mine.