My mother's voice rides shotgun the whole way. You will hurt her. That's what your father did to me.
Maybe I already have.
But I'm not sitting in a chair telling myself it's mercy not to look. I'm not hunting her down to remind her who she belongs to. I'm going because if I lose her, I lose the only thing in twenty-four years of this life that ever made me want to be better than the man who raised me.
Prove Giorgia wrong. Prove my mother wrong. Prove myself wrong, most of all, the version of me that stood outside a door all night and called it love.
The highway blurs into surface streets and the surface streets blur into each other. Somewhere in the middle of it I catch myself praying, actually praying, to whatever's left listening after everything I've done, that she's just sitting in her mother's kitchen with a cup of tea she isn't drinking, safe and furious and done with me. That's the whole disaster, just her being done with me and nothing worse.
I don't believe it. Some animal part of me has known since the kitchen that worse is already moving.
Gravesend comes up fast, row houses and chain-link and a gray sky pressing low over streets I've never driven and somehow already hate. Anastasio texts the address and I don't need the GPS voice to tell me I'm close. My whole body knows it, some old instinct for danger waking up in my blood again after years of pretending it had gone to sleep.
I turn onto her street going too fast and my stomach drops clean through the floor of the car.
A black sedan sits idling in the driveway of a narrow, gray-sided house, exhaust curling white into the cold, back door hanging open like a mouth. And there, halfway across the cracked concrete path, Frank has one hand fisted in Lydia's coat and the other braced against her back, shoving her toward the open door while she twists against him with everything she's got.
Her hair's come loose from its knot. Her mouth is open, shouting something I can't hear yet over my own engine.
I put my foot down.
36
NICO
The concrete is crackedand old ice sits in the seams, the same house I've seen in her nightmares finally standing in front of me, sagging porch, dead hedges, a car idling with its exhaust curling white into the cold. The car door is open and Frank's got a fist in her hair. I stop breathing for a second, just one, before I make myself move slow.
Slow is the hardest thing I've ever done.
Every instinct I own says close the distance now, take the gun before he can think, and every one of those instincts is how I get her killed. So I plant my boots on the concrete instead and I make my hands into something other than weapons.
"Let her go, Frank."
He laughs. Wet, ugly, delighted with himself even now.
"Look who finally showed up." He drags her back a step, gun jammed under her jaw.
Her eyes find mine over his shoulder. Green and scared, but steady. "Another step, I paint the driveway with her brains."
I stop. Every muscle in my body screaming to close the gap and I stop.
"Okay." My voice comes out flat. Calm. Nothing like what's happening under my ribs. "Okay, Frank. You've got the gun. You've got her. What do you want?"
"I want you to stand there and watch me drive off with what's mine."
"She was never yours."
"Her mother was mine. Her whole life was mine to shape, I just did it from a little further back than you'd like." He grins, teeth red at the edge. "You want to know something funny? I liked doing it. Every part."
I don't answer that. I can't, not and stay standing here.
Lydia's jaw is tight, her eyes cutting to the gun then back to me, and I understand what she's telling me without a word of it spoken. She's not going to fold. She never folds.
"You're not going anywhere."
"No?"
"No." I take one step. Just one. My hands open at my sides, empty, harmless, everything about me built to say I'm no threat, come on, keep talking. "Because you want an audience for this. You've wanted one your whole life. Every part of what you did to Bianca, to Harry, you wanted someone to know how clever you were. That's why you told her everything back at the house instead of just killing her. You couldn't help yourself."
