“Where I go, Pazito goes!” Gloria shouts, brushing her hair out of her face.

“Over my dead body!” Frankie says.

He takes his first swing.

Valentino

6:41 p.m.

Orion holds his chest and takes a deep breath. “How’s your heart doing because mine—”

The shouting becomes clearer at the top of the sixth floor. It’s Frankie.

“You can get the fuck out of my house, but you’re not leaving with my family!”

A woman says something, maybe about property?

“Then you can both get out of here! But Paz isn’t going anywhere!”

“Where I go, Pazito goes!”

“Over my dead body!”

Then there’s a clap, like flesh on flesh, and a thud.

The woman screams “HELP!” before crying out in pain.

I drop the bedding, shaking in fear.

Everything in my heart tells me this is going to be the moment I’ve been dreading, but nothing stops me from racing up those steps.

“Valentino, no!”

“Stay back, Orion!”

I get to the sixth landing without a sixth kiss.

Frankie’s apartment door is open. He’s on top of a man pummeling him with nothing but his fists and a woman—I’m assuming his wife—is on the floor with her palm pressed against her devastated face. Then a door opens and that little kid, Paz, watches in horror at his father as he beats someone bloody. Is that man a Decker? I’m frozen over how unreal this is.

Paz sees me. “Please help!”

I don’t waste any more time. I run into the apartment and wrap my arms around Frankie and wrestle him off that man. Frankie elbows me in my stomach so hard that I taste acid in my throat, and he backs me up into the wall.

This is how I’m going to die . . . against a man who is fighting for his life.

He’s looking at me like I’m a ghost when I punch him in the face.

I won’t go down without a fight either.

Frankie is massaging his jaw when I see that Paz has vanished from the doorway. I hope he’s hiding somewhere. Maybe I can get Paz out of here, back downstairs where he can be safe with Orion’s guardians, who have kept me alive for as long as they did. Then Frankie is swift with picking up a broken chair leg and swings it into my head over and over . . .

I’m dizzy and stumbling backward and scared and tearing up and being torn up and—

He kicks me square in the stomach and out his apartment and—

Down the stairs, reaching for the banister and—

I miss and grab ahold of Orion instead—

Why is he on these stairs, I told him to stay back—

Am I going to die holding him or—

The memory of our first hug, back before Death-Cast called—

My forehead bangs into a step, and I’m bleeding—