Page 91 of Delusion in Death
“Make it stop,” Mira urged her. “Make it end. Make a choice.”
“Put the kid down, Stella, and walk away. Stay away.”
“You can’t stop me. Put a bullet in me, go ahead. I’ll just come back. And maybe I’ll snap her neck first. It’s easy, all those soft bones. I thought about snapping yours. Whining, crying brat, just like this one.”
“You left me with him instead, so he could beat me, rape me, torment me. But I got through it.”
“By killing. The blood’s still on your hands. Richie’s blood. My blood.”
“I can live with it.” That was the answer, wasn’t it? She could live with it. “Put her down.”
“What do you care?” Stella closed a hand over the soft, tiny neck.
Eve started forward, to end it, and the baby cried out.
“Das!”
Bella. Mavis’s Bella, with tears streaming, her arms held out.
On a hot spurt of fury, Eve pressed the barrel of the gun to Stella’s forehead. “Let her go, you bitch, or I’ll splatter your brains on the sidewalk.”
“She’s nothing to you.”
“They’re all something to me. Mira, take the kid.”
“Of course. There now, sweetheart.” Sliding Bella from Stella’s grip, Mira nuzzled her. “Everything’s all right. Eve won’t let anything happen to you.”
“She’s just another brat. Plenty more where she came from.”
“Not for you. You’re finished.”
Stella’s eyes gleamed. “What? You’re going to shoot me now?” She held up her hands. “You’re going to shoot me when I’m unarmed?”
“No, I don’t have to kill what’s already dead.” Eve holstered her weapon, watched Stella’s smile spread. And rammed her fist, with all her force—her anger, her despair—into that smiling face. “But I think I’ve needed to do that for a long time.”
Stella lay on the sidewalk, as she’d lain on the floor of McQueen’s apartment. The blood pooled around her, a black lake in the shadowed dark.
“You can come back. I’ll just kick your ass again.”
“Well done,” Mira commented.
“Where’s Bella? Where’s the kid?”
“She’s safe. They’re all safe tonight. You just needed to put a face on the innocent. It’s easier for you to stand for them than it is for yourself. Tonight you did both. I’m proud of you.”
“I punched a dead woman. That makes you proud?”
“So literal.”
“She’ll come back.”
“And you’ll beat her back again. You’re stronger than she is. You always were.” Mira took Eve’s hand, looked toward the fire in the sky. “These were terrible times. Out of terrible times, perhaps more than ordinary ones, heroes and villains spring. Sometimes there’s little difference between them but a choice, and the choice made defines them. Look at the choices.”
“Whose?”
“It started here, didn’t it? It’s time to go.”
She woke in the dark, steady and warm. No shakes or unloosed screams in her head. So she lay for a moment, still. She’d dreamed quiet, she decided, as Roarke slept undisturbed beside her. And she felt the considerable weight of the cat, heavy across her feet.