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There’s a lock on Deirdre’s door, but I don’t use it for two reasons.
One: she won’t get far even if she opens the door and tries to escape this house.
And two: locking her in there when there’s no other way out of her room is piss-poor fire safety.
Her only exit is through my bedroom. Exactly how I wanted it. I’m in my bedroom now, stalking back and forth, shoulder pinging with pain and the back of my neck prickling with awareness that Deirdre’s in the very next room. The girl I’ve watched for the past year and a half, whose music gets into my bloodstream like a drug, is finally here. I’ve planned for this evening for months.
And despite all that, it actually hasn’t gone much to plan at all. There weren’t supposed to be other soldiers there tonight.
Fucking O’Malley. He was supposed to fully pay off his debt to the Camorra with my money, not leave another eight hundred grand hanging like that. For an accountant, he has the worst money management skills I’ve ever fucking seen. And to top it all off, the original hole he needed to fill – the one that he created by stealing from Darragh’s businesses, the reason he’s in debt to Sev in the first place – has now been discovered. Mad Darragh’s after him. And probably after Deirdre. Not that he’ll fucking get her now.
Sev should be easier to deal with than Darragh. Pay O’Malley’s debts and then add a little extra for the men I’ve killed. Should be enough to avoid a war. And if Sev decides he doesn’t like that, I can always try to broker a deal with one of the other Camorra clans. Unlike La Cosa Nostra, with a strict hierarchy, the Camorra is much more decentralized, with multiple powerful groups all vying for power. While the Titones are the ruling Cosa Nostra family in Toronto, there are three more or less equal Camorra clans active in Ontario. If I need to, I can pit one or both of the others against Sev.
Darragh’s going to be more of a challenge. The man holds grudges like a Sicilian. I won’t be able to hand him a cheque to make him go away.
Severu and Darragh. Two very rich and bloodthirsty men. Two complications I don’t need right now.
I don’t like complications. Typically, I just shoot them in the head. Probably not the best course of action in this case.
But despite it all, despite the problems and the obstacles and the way this night has kind of gone to shit, I have her.
And ultimately, that is all that fucking matters.
My mind is on her again, wondering what she’s doing on the other side of that door. Wondering if she’s still wearing my jacket. Instantly, I’m overcome with the vicious need to get that jacket back when she’s done with it. I don’t care that it’s crusty with my drying blood. I don’t care that there’s a hole blown open in the back of it. That jacket touched her bare skin and I am fucking keeping it. I pull out my phone and use voice-to-text to send a message to Rosa, our head housekeeper, instructing her not to throw it out.
Or wash it. Ever again.
I’m distracted from thoughts of dry cleaning – Cristo santo, fucking dry cleaning, never thought I’d see the day – by Curse’s voice.
“Uncle Vinny’s here.”
I turn to my brother who is standing in the open doorway of my bedroom. We’re alike in some ways. Both over six feet tall – though he’s a little leaner – and same dark hair and eyes. But he got all of our mamma Florencia’s beauty. Now that he’s twenty-eight, the cherubic look his face used to have is gone, replaced with high, hard angles. He’s scarred now, too, just like me. But at least he never burned. I made sure of that.
My fingers stretch and curl inside my gloves as I walk to my closet and grab a black dress shirt. Uncle Vinny may be largely a figurehead these days, with most of the real power resting in my hands, but even so, I know he won’t tolerate me walking into a family meeting half-dressed. He’s probably already going to be up my ass about Sev’s men, and I don’t need the added headache of him harping on about my lack of dress and decorum.
“Where is he?”
“In your office. Aunt Carlotta and Valentina, too.”
“He had to bring the women?” Do Zizi and Valentina, my aunt and cousin, really need to be there while I update Uncle Vinny on how many men we shot tonight?
Curse shrugs.
“You know how Valentina is. Now that she’s eighteen she insists on being part of the family business. And Zizi insists on chaperoning even though she hates this shit.”
That’s an understatement. Zizi tends to wrinkle her nose and ignore the gory details of the family business. Doesn’t have any problem spending the millions of dollars that very same business dumps into her bank account, though.
I start doing up the buttons and swear at the shooting pain down my left arm, the weakness in my fingers. I let my arm fall useless to my side, remembering Morelli’s comment about the sling. I start doing the buttons up with only my right hand, but that shit’s a lot harder one-handed than undoing them.
In an instant, Curse is in the room. For a guy almost as big as me, he doesn’t make a sound. Part of what makes him such a good killer. He moves like a ghost.
He doesn’t say anything, and neither do I, as he starts deftly doing up the buttons. I watch his fingers as they move quickly and precisely up the length of my shirt. Even when I don’t have a bullet wound in my back, his fingers move more easily than mine. The scar tissue on my hands makes some small, repetitive movements, like writing with a pen, a pain in the ass. Luckily, I don’t have any problems firing a gun.
As he does up the last button at the top, my eyes catch on the name tattooed across both sets of his knuckles, one letter per finger and thumb. F L O R E N C I A, followed by a bloom of frangipani, Sicily’s flower, on his pinkie. He pats my cheek firmly as he finishes and nods, and when he turns from me I wonder what he would have been like, what we would have been like, if the beginning of our lives had been different. If we hadn’t lost what we’d lost.
If our piece of shit papà had died that night instead of our mamma.
But they’re both dead now, and there’s nowhere to go but forward. Unless you want the past to rise up and drown you, you have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, over and over again, until you reach the future you want, the future you’ve created with sweat and gunpowder and blood.
