"Why," he asked, sorrow filling his gentle cerulean eyes, and overlaying the pained wheezing of his gravelly bass voice.
"My debts are due, and they'll kill me if I can't pay them- I'll barely have enough time to collect your life insurance payment and the payment for the insurance on this house before they come for me," his wife said coldly, her eyes unemotional except for traces of greed and disdain, as she lowered the old .44 Magnum she'd just shot him in the back with.
She'd meant to shoot him cleanly through the heart, but the weight of the revolver had thrown her aim off. Instead, the heavy slug had shattered one of his ribs, about three inches below his heart, and exited just below the ribcage under his left pectoral. The result was bone fragments tearing through his lung and a gory chunk being blown out of his side, almost like a shotgun wound. He would bleed out soon, but until then he would be drowning on his own blood and in a great deal of pain- most people would be unconscious from the pain; her husband was abnormal though. He had nerve damage from a young age that dulled his pain sensors considerably.
He opened his mouth to speak, but hacked up blood and lung chunks instead. He tried again, confused about what debt she was talking about. "Why would *cough!* people kill you over *erugh!* student loans?" He wanted to know; that's the only debt his wife had, which he'd been helping her pay off for the last fifteen years of their twenty year long marriage.
"I never even had any student loan debt, Phineas," she spat his name like it was a piece of dung that she had somehow gotten in her mouth. "And I never went to college- I just told you I was studying at a university so you wouldn't ruin the relationship with my other husband." She was sneering now, and it was like a mask had fallen from her face, revealing the ugly thing that had been hidden behind it all along. "No- this debt was left by my fool of a father who borrowed money from the Mexican Mafia and some other gang that's just as big. That old scumbag got himself killed because he wouldn't pay up. I refuse to die over this."
"You *cough*… could have told *argh!*… me, Beth." Phineas said. "I *urk*… would have *COUGH!*… taken, *pant* the debt *argh* on myself *cough!*." There was no hatred in him towards Annabeth, his wife; even after she betrayed him, his love was did not falter. After all, real love "does not keep a record of wrongs" and "bears all things". He could not help but hate what she was doing to him, and what he was discovering that she had been doing to him- but he did not hate the woman herself.
*Phaugh!* "You could never have done anything about it- you would have just gone into that stupid little closet of yours and prayed to your so-called god who doesn't even exist! So I'm just going to kill you and destroy this house, collect the money and go back to London and my REAL husband. You can just rot in your grave, pathetic weak-willed excuse for a fool of a man that you were," Beth's face distorted in sheer disgust, and she spat on him before turning to walk away.
"*COUGH! COUGH!* Well *pant*… I forgive *argh!*… you for *pant, pant* everything…," Phineas told her, a gentle and honest smile coming to his lips in spite of the pain of his wound. He was mostly numb now from blood loss, and so very cold- yet he kept hanging on. He refused to die before he finished telling her what he wanted to say. "And- *pant, pant*- I wish you *cough!*… happiness with him. *Cough! Argh!* And I hope *pant, pant* that you *cough*… find… God… some...…."
Annabeth froze, so infuriated that she couldn't move. Then she turned violently and viciously kicked him. But he was already dead by the time she moved. When she saw that he died with peaceful smile and beatific expression, her vision became midnight red and when she came back to herself, his mangled and broken corpse was strewn across the house while she was thoroughly drenched in what blood had been left in his body.