Chapter 134

Chapter 134

Gabriela held the gun with both hands, aiming at Dante’s chest. He sat against the wall, blood from his shoulder soaking through his sweatshirt. The cabin smelled of gunpowder, fear, and something metallic that clung to the back of her throat.
Dante touched his shoulder with his right hand, looked at the blood on his fingers—and smiled.
That smile. The same one he used when she resisted in the Hamptons and he knew he would win anyway. The smile of a man who doesn’t accept defeat, even while bleeding on the floor of a cabin with a gun pointed at his chest.
—Nice shot —he said, his voice rough—. But you aimed at my shoulder. If you really wanted to kill me, you would’ve aimed for center mass.
—Next time I won’t miss.
—There won’t be a next time, Gabriela. Because we both know you can’t do it.
He lunged.
No warning, no buildup, none of that split second of preparation normal bodies need before an explosive move. One second he was sitting against the wall, the next he was on top of her with the speed of an animal acting on instinct, not calculation.
The impact knocked her to the ground. The gun jerked in her hands as Dante grabbed her wrists with brutal force that contradicted the wound in his shoulder—an injury that should have weakened him but that adrenaline was temporarily overriding. They rolled across the concrete, her wedding dress tangling around their legs like a silk trap, the gun caught between their bodies, the barrel pointing nowhere and everywhere at once.
Gabriela fought. Not the way she used to—curled in on herself, defensive, trying to minimize damage. She fought the way Aurora had taught her, with elbows and knees and the cold desperation of someone who knows this is the last time. She drove her elbow into his wounded shoulder and Dante howled, but he didn’t let go. She bit the hand gripping her left wrist and tasted his blood in her mouth, but he only tightened his hold.
He was bigger. Heavier. Stronger—even injured. And the advantage Gabriela had with distance and the gun evaporated with every second they struggled on the floor.
Dante twisted her right wrist, trying to make her drop the weapon. The pain was electric, shooting up her arm into her shoulder, loosening her grip just enough for the gun to slip free, spinning across the concrete like a roulette wheel where the prize was one of their lives.
They both lunged for it at the same time.
Dante’s fingers got there first. He closed his hand around the grip with a triumphant growl and swung the barrel toward Gabriela with the speed of someone who had held a weapon often enough for the motion to be instinct.
Then the world exploded from outside.
Gunshots. Several. Fast and precise—not the chaotic noise of a struggle, but the controlled rhythm of trained men who knew exactly where to aim. Shouted commands muffled by wooden walls. The sound of a door being kicked in somewhere nearby.
And then a voice Gabriela recognized before anything else—because it was carved into the deepest part of her mind as the definition of safety.
—GABRIELA!
Alejandro.
The cabin door burst open with a kick that ripped the lock from the frame, the rotten wood giving way as if it were made of cardboard. Alejandro stormed in, a gun in his hands, the eyes of a man who had gone twelve hours without sleep searching for the woman he loved—and now found her on the floor of a cabin, her wedding dress torn and covered in blood.
What he saw shattered his judgment instantly.
Gabriela on the ground. Blood on her dress, her hands, her face. And Dante over her, a gun pointed at her.
He didn’t think. Didn’t assess. Didn’t calculate distance, angles, or legal consequences—nothing resembling reason. Rage consumed him with the speed of a wildfire, and what remained was pure protective instinct distilled into a single act.
He fired.
Once.
To the head.
The sound was sharp and final, like the period at the end of a sentence that had been writing itself for months. Dante froze mid-motion, the gun still in his hand, his eyes open with an expression that was no longer anything—because behind them there was no one left.
His body fell forward with the weight of something that had lost life, collapsing onto Gabriela. She shoved him off with a scream that had no words—only raw, ancient terror and the desperate need to get the man who had tormented her off her for the last time.
Alejandro crossed the cabin in two strides, grabbed Dante’s body by the sweatshirt, and yanked him aside with a force his still-healing side paid for with a brutal stab of pain he completely ignored. The body rolled across the concrete and landed on its back, eyes open, staring at the ceiling beams and the bare bulb that still lit the scene with its indifferent yellow glow.
Dante Harrington was dead.
Gabriela trembled on the floor, her dress soaked in blood that wasn’t all hers, her eyes so wide they seemed to take up half her face. She wasn’t crying. Wasn’t screaming. She was in that place beyond shock, where the body shuts down emotions because processing them all at once would destroy it.
Alejandro dropped to his knees beside her and gathered her into his arms with the care of someone holding something that could shatter with a breath. He pulled her against his chest, rocking her gently as the smell of gunpowder mixed with the perfume she had worn for her wedding only hours before—a scent that now belonged to another life.
—It’s over —he whispered against her hair, his voice broken—. It’s over, Gabriela. You’re safe. I’m here. He’ll never touch you again. No one will ever touch you again.
Gabriela buried her face in his chest, and the sound that came out of her wasn’t quite a sob or a scream but something in between—the sound of someone releasing a weight they had carried for so long they no longer remembered what it felt like to be without it.
—You came —she managed between spasms that shook her entire body.
—I will always come. Always.
Gabriel entered the cabin thirty seconds later, gun in hand, Rick Donovan right behind him. He took in the scene in a single glance: Dante on the floor, eyes empty; his sister in Alejandro’s arms, covered in blood; the gun Gabriela had used lying on the concrete beside a broken champagne glass and a bouquet of peonies someone had brought from the mansion like a final cruel mockery.
He walked to his sister and knelt beside her, placing a hand on her back with the gentleness of a man who had just found what he loved most in the world and needed to touch it to believe it was real.
—Dante’s men are neutralized —he said, his voice controlled with effort—. There were three outside, armed. Rick and his team handled them. The area is secure.
—The police? —Alejandro asked without letting go of Gabriela.
—On the way. FBI too. They’ll be here in minutes.
Alejandro nodded and kept rocking Gabriela as her sobs gradually weakened, the certainty of safety pushing through layers of terror, adrenaline, and lingering drugs.
Rick Donovan covered Dante’s body with a tarp he found in a corner of the cabin and stepped outside to coordinate with his team, leaving the three of them alone with the corpse and the aftermath of what had just happened.
Gabriel looked at Alejandro over Gabriela’s head. Their eyes met in a silent exchange holding everything they couldn’t say aloud—gratitude, relief, and the shared understanding that what Alejandro had done could not be undone. The legal and moral consequences of shooting a man in the head—unarmed in that final second—would come later, when the sun finished rising and the world demanded answers.
But that was later.
Right now, only this mattered: Gabriela breathing against Alejandro’s chest, each breath deeper and steadier than the last.
—I want to leave —Gabriela whispered.
—We’re leaving —Alejandro said, lifting her into his arms with an effort his injured side barely tolerated—but he did it anyway, because he had carried heavier things than pain for this woman, and he would do it every day for the rest of his life.
They stepped out of the cabin into the cold air of a dawn that was painting the sky above the trees in shades of orange and pink—colors that had no right to be so beautiful after such a dark night. The cabin stood in a wooded area on the outskirts of the city, surrounded by trees, gravel, and silence. Rick’s men secured the perimeter while sirens sounded in the distance, approaching with the late urgency of cavalry arriving after the battle was already over.
Gabriel stepped out behind them and stood beside his sister, watching the sun slowly rise above the tree line.
—Is it over? —Gabriela asked from Alejandro’s arms, her eyes fixed on the dawn, still processing everything.
—It’s over —Gabriel said.
And for the first time in months, the words sounded true.
Because Dante Harrington lay dead on the floor of a cabin with a bullet in his head, the obsession that defined him finally extinguished. Because Gabriela was alive—whole—and held by the man who loved her. Because the sun rose as it always did, indifferent to pain, violence, and endless nights, reminding the world that after every darkness comes light.
The three of them stood there watching the sunrise as sirens drew closer and birds began to sing as if nothing had happened.
And Gabriela, wrapped in Alejandro’s arms, her wedding dress destroyed and her captor’s blood drying on her skin, closed her eyes and breathed.
Deep.
Full.
Without fear.