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We all have our regrets and reservations about Sal. Mine is that I stopped Nico from drowning him in the bathtub when he was a baby.”
She lifts her espresso in a mock toast.
I lower my eyes.
I suddenly don’t want to be here, talking about him like this. It doesn’t make me feel any better.
Even if I am angry with him, hearing about how viciously Vera wants Sal dead doesn’t do anything for my broken heart.
“Oh, come on now,” she mutters. My expression must have given me away. “I don’t mean it. The story’s true, but that I regret it is…well, that’s mostly a joke.”
I try to veer away from talking about him.
“Salvatore said Nico is crazy. Well, crazier than him, I guess…”
“Oh, he is. But that wasn’t Nico being crazy. Not yet. That was just a child being a child.
Nico was just old enough to understand that our mother left one day, and that a baby who cried all the time came back instead. Of course Nico hated him.”
“Did you…? Even back then?”
She shrugs.
“I wouldn’t say I hated him. Not then. But in dad’s eyes, Sal was never innocent. He treated him like a killer from day one, and he sure as hell never forgave him. Kids pick up on things like that. You don’t stand with the black sheep.”
It’s hard to imagine Sal as the black sheep of the family, when I have only ever seen him as its leader. I wonder if that’s why he tries so hard, why he won’t compromise even for me. Because he was never really made for it.
I feign an interest in the movie that I don’t really feel and let the conversation die. I don’t hear anything about Salvatore all day. The exhaustion finally catches up with me, and I go to bed early, hoping to sleep through the hours until Salvatore is back.
Footsteps snap me out of sleep. I sit up, phantom gunshots ringing in my ears from some half-forgotten dream. My heart flies to my throat, eyes searching the dark. A shadow steps into the doorway.
“Sal?” I call out.
“No,” says a familiar voice. The overhead light turns on. The sudden change blinds me, trading one kind of darkness for another as I squint through the pain. Noctus stands in the doorway, the collar of his shirt stained with blood. “You need to come with me, Contessa. Sal’s orders.”
“What?” I ask, bewildered, still half stunned by sleep. “Why? Where’s Sal?”
“I don’t know, they’re getting him to a hospital.”
A hospital?
“I don’t know how much time we have—”
“Noctus, what happened?” I beg, but he pushes me forward in a panicked rush.
“Come on, move, move,” he urges, pushing me along. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
I scramble to match his frantic pace. Panic numbs me from the inside out, stealing all my body heat as I stumble down the halls in nothing but a lacey nightgown and bare feet.
It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be real. For as much as I argued with Sal and told him it was dangerous, I never really thought he wouldn’t come back.
I never wanted to be right this way.
Oh God, I would be wrong a thousand times over—
My heart beats against the back of my teeth, my stomach suspended in fear.
“Noctus, what’s—”
