His father almost smiled proudly. The man was fucking fucked in the head.
“Time’s up, son.”
Closing his eyes for an instant, Dante was tempted to slice him with the knife. But it wouldn’t solve anything – Roni would still die and the underworld would get thrown into chaos he wasn’t ready to handle yet.
Taking the knife, he went back to his kneeling position, and removed the tape from her mouth, wet with her tears.
“There has to be a way, Dante,” Roni’s voice shook, trembling with her body. “Please don’t do this.”
Dante looked her in the eyes, his own burning, throat tight. “Forgive me, Roni,” he could hear his voice roughened with pain.
With that, he thrust the blade right into her heart.
Her scream penetrated the air, her throat gurgling as blood seeped out from the stab wound. Hands shaking, he pulled the blade out and put it on her neck – the same neck he had kissed so many times – slitting her carotid artery, giving her as instant a death as he could. She didn’t deserve this. This, this was on him.
Through it all, he held her eyes, seeing the life slowly seep from her body as his own changed with every passing second, his heart hardening.
“Dan…” she choked on her blood one last time, before going limp.
It was over in seconds.
Dante kept looking at her vacant face, feeling her blood pool around them, something cold, cold settling into his heart. He hadn’t been able to protect her. His first lover, his first kill.
Someone clapped him on the back. His father.
Dante looked at his hands stained with her blood, felt the rage for the man simmer, and took a deep breath.
Now isn’t the time.
One day. He would make him pay, for his mother, for his brother, for Roni. One day. He just had to wait. He just had to wait and patiently dig his grave. He just had to play not in the open like he had been playing, but in the shadows where Bloodhound Maroni wouldn’t scent him.
One day.
“Bury her,” he heard his father order Al.
No.
Dante shook his head, his heart heavy, his body covered in her blood. “I’ll do it.”
After a pause, his father nodded to the men to clean up the shack and left. Dante stood, his arms slightly shaking as he cut through the ropes tying her, and hauled her up. Her body felt heavy, heavier than it had when he’d carried her before.
Without looking at the men, he walked out of the shack and deeper into the woods, the silence, the cold, and her body his only company. He felt the first tear escape his eyes and tightened his jaw, blinking to clear his vision as he edged closer to the lake. No. He wouldn’t cry. His father was right – this was a lesson, a lesson to never, ever expose any weakness, anything that could be used against him, at least not where anyone could see. That was where he’d failed Roni.
He was smart, he was sharp, and he was cunning. And going forward, he was going to use every single one of those things to his favor, while letting his father think he was on a leash. A mask. He would wear a mask.
“Here.”
Dante turned at the voice, to see Tristan standing in a small clearing with a shovel and a pile of clothes beside him, a hole in the ground between them. He looked at the younger boy, surprised, but stayed silent.
Quietly, Tristan took out a cotton sheet and laid it on the ground, indicating for Dante to place Roni’s body on it. Dante did, almost on autopilot, looking one last time at another lifeless body of a woman he had cared for. Tristan wrapped up her corpse, tying the sheets in precise knots that had Dante clenching his jaw.
“Your clothes too,” the younger boy said briskly. Dante realized he was right. The clothes were covered in blood. They needed to go.
Taking off his leather jacket, Dante held it in his hands for a second, realizing he would probably never wear one again, and threw it in the hole. Stripping off the rest of his clothes, standing in the freezing wind naked, he felt the cold seep deep into his bones, to his heart.
“Go clean up,” Tristan nodded to the lake, and Dante, for some reason, listened to the boy. His mind wasn’t working. The water was frigid, but the cold didn’t penetrate this brain. As he took the water and rubbed at his skin, he realized things inside him were shifting. After everything that had happened in the last hour, Dante was not the same. Though he was washing the blood off his skin, it had already seeped into his pores, mixing with his veins, a scar on his heart every time it beat.
Clean as he could be, Dante walked back to the grave, to see Tristan almost finished with covering it up. It was unexpected, this little assistance. Considerate, even. He never would have described the boy like that.
Swooping down to pick up the clothes in a pile beside him, Dante found his own white sweater and jeans and shoes. Frowning, he looked at the seventeen-year-old dedicatedly covering the ground.
“Did you break into my house?” he asked, mildly surprised.
Tristan shrugged, a fine sheen of sweat on his face. “Wasn’t hard to break into.”
Dante shook his head. Quickly dressing, he went to sit down by the lake, and looked up at the mansion on the hill, crowned above the woods, flexing his fingers. Tristan came to sit beside him after a few minutes, throwing the shovel to the side, handing him a bottle of Jack Daniels from Dante’s stash.
Dante almost chuckled at that, before sobering. “Are we friends now?”
“No.”
“So what’s this? You watch my back and I watch yours kinda deal?”
“Fuck off, asshole.”
What he expected.
Taking a swig from the bottle, he passed it to Tristan even though they were underage for it. They were underage for a lot of shit they did. What was the right age to kill someone, after all?
“That shouldn’t have happened,” Tristan spoke after a long beat of silence.
“No,” Dante agreed. “It shouldn’t have.”
“You gonna do something about it?” the other boy asked, the most he had said in a conversation with Dante.
“Yeah,” Dante nodded, his eyes on the mansion lights turning on. “But not today.”
“Good.”
The clouds got darker, the wind chillier as night approached. Minutes went by.
“How do you move past it?” Dante asked him quietly. “How do you forget?”
“You don’t.”
Yeah, he didn’t think they could.
“Thanks,” Dante muttered after taking another swig from the bottle. “I appreciate this.”
He was met with silence, but for once, it was companionable.
And so they sat that night, two young killers, one fresh and one seasoned, swallowing down alcohol to drown the chaos inside them, and knowing that love truly didn’t have a place in their lives.
She never told anyone about the body.
That day, walking deep in the woods, Amara had witnessed the two big boys burying a young girl, the same pink-haired girl she had seen Dante kissing all those years ago. Scared out of her mind, she had run home and stayed in bed for a week after that, worried that someone would come after her for seeing what she had seen.
Nobody had. Her mother had simply thought it had been a bad period, and let her stay indoors. She hadn’t gone to school, hadn’t even met Vin that week, giving him the same excuse. However, after a week of anxiety and a whole lot of nothing, she had finally accepted that nobody had seen her and slowly gone about her life.