She Pulled Three Puppies and a Drowning Stranger From an Icy River — Then Learned She Had Rescued the Mafia Boss
CHAPTER 6
Casius entered with a stillness that thickened the air, nothing like the men still struggling with Marlo out front. Firelight caught features that echoed Lazar’s own, warped by greed, and his eyes settled on his wounded cousin without a flicker of feeling.
“You really are hard to kill,” Casius said softly. “You should have stayed at the bottom of the lake.”
Lazar forced himself upright, shielding Dileia with his body. “This is between us. She has nothing to do with it.”
Casius’s gaze slid to her, cold and calculating. “This woman has seen too much. No witnesses left behind.” He raised the gun, calm and terrible, toward her.
Lazar moved with everything left in his ruined body — turning, lunging, knocking Dileia down behind the chair and taking the shot meant for her across his own frame. The gunshot cracked through the room. He collapsed over her, a strangled groan catching in his throat.
Marlo’s roar tore through the chaos as he seized Casius before a second shot could fire, wrestling the gun free in a brutal, brief struggle.
Dileia’s whole world narrowed to the man bleeding over her. “Lazar. Look at me. You don’t get to give up.” Her hands worked before her mind caught up, pressing hard over the new wound the way she had the first night by the lake. “Why did you take that shot for me?”
“Because you saved me without needing a reason,” he whispered, fading. “I only wanted, once, to do the right thing without counting the cost. You taught me that.”
“Stop talking. Save your strength. You’re going to live.”
Behind her, Marlo had Casius pinned. The siege was over. The fight to keep Lazar alive had only begun.
Weak but clear, Lazar gave Marlo an order that stopped him cold. “Don’t kill him.”
Marlo looked up, confused — in their world, blood answered blood, and no one would have blamed Lazar for ending it. “He tried to kill you. He deserves to die.”
“Maybe he does,” Lazar said, voice breaking but firm. “But if I kill him, how am I any different? I’ve lived by that law my whole life, and it only brought me to the bottom of a frozen lake. I’m tired of it.” He looked at Dileia. “Someone just showed me there’s another way to live.”
He gestured toward the memory card. “Everything is in there. Call the federal people, not local police — they may be bought. Let the law handle him. And let it handle me too, if it must. I’ve been running too long.”
It wasn’t surrender. It was the bravest choice a man like him had ever made — handing his enemy to justice instead of taking him with his own hands, and standing ready to answer for his own sins in the same breath.
By morning, federal vehicles lined the snowy road. Casius was led away in handcuffs, throwing his cousin a look of pure hatred. Lazar only met it with something close to pity. “I once loved you like my own brother,” he said. “I hope one day you understand what you actually lost wasn’t the ports.”
Casius said nothing. He disappeared from their lives — not by a bullet in the dark, but under the weight of evidence no one could deny.
