---- He scrambled toward her, grabbing her wrist from behind, his voice begging and broken in a way it had never been before. Tears in her eyes, Claire wrote with a trembling hand in his palm: "Vincent, you killed her! I can't be with a murderer." "No..." he shook his head, rambling like a drowning man. "Don't go. Please... don't leave me." He didn't care what she wrote. He just knew that if she left, the pain tearing him apart would get worse. He needed to hold on to something. Anything.
But in his desperate eyes, Claire didn't see love. She saw the selfish fear of a man terrified of being abandoned by the whole world. With deliberate force, she pried his fingers from her wrist, one by one. ---- She pushed his hand away and disappeared into the dusk. The news of their breakup once again set the underworld on fire. Everyone praised Claire for her clear-headedness. And they condemned Vincent Santoro as a cold- blooded monster who didn't deserve to feel anything atall.