Page 130 of The Mafia Assassin's Redemption-

“I was going to the hospital.” Harry keeps the gun pointed down. “We cut short my other plans. I knew you hadn’t hurt Anthony. I spoke to him just after you left and was on my way when… I went home and… Joan—Siobhan was there.” Then she looks at the gun. “Maybe I should shoot you.”

“Again.”

She doesn’tsmile.

“You’re free now, Harry. You should run. If I were you, I’d get as far away from here as I could.”

Reality slams into me, my heart plummeting, then soaring, and finally crashing again. And through my self-made smoke screen, I finally see her. What she really is.

Everything.

Heart. Love. Life.

Fuck me, I still have an actual heart. It’s not charred and black. And it can love.

I thought I’d loved Shiv. I think I carried her photo, not as a memory of a past love, because I hadn’t looked at it when I remembered it was there with anything but cold heaviness for years.

Cold heaviness because it stood as a memoir to my mistake. My error. Trying to save Shiv instead of people who could live, when really, I don’t think I could have saved anyone.

Except for the important one.

The innocent one.

Harry.

And now look at me.

This time my legs buckle, and I stagger.

Look the fuck at me. I’m in love with her.

I walk toward her and lift the gun, still in her hand, placing it against my heart.

“You’re not going to let me go, are you?” she asks, and I hear it wrong, like she’s pleading.

“No, I won’t. I’m too fucking selfish, too fucking obsessed,” I mutter. “Too weak.”

I’m fucking in love with her. Have been probably since I first saw her as an adult. Definitely when I killed that fuck Bernardo for touching her. I wanted to hate her back, too, but I could never, ever quite manage that.

Maybe I should add deluded to my list of sins.

But I won’t add love to it. I won’t. She doesn’t need that fucked-up burden.

“You really should run, like I said. Cal will help you. We both know you won’t ever forgive me.”

“No,” she says, crushing me, “you asked about that once, and I can’t forgive you. Not ever. So take your fucking gun.”

But I stop her from handing it back. “You should kill me, Harry. Shoot me the fuck dead because me dead is the only real long-term freedom you’ll have. Do it. Pull the trigger. I dare you.”

THIRTY

harry

What the actual fuck?

He wants me to shoot him?

He wants to be rid of me that much he’ll take death over having to deal with me?