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I glared up at him, ignoring the sharp pain in my hip where I’d landed.
“Give up yet,passerotta?” he cajoled.
“I’m not your ‘little sparrow’ or any other freaking kind of bird,” I spat.
And then as fast as a… okay, fine, as fast a bird, I shot my leg out, connecting with his ankle and knocking him off his feet. He landed with a hard thud that shook the ground beneath me.
“Ha!” I shot to my feet and turned around in a victory dance. “You’re getting old,caro zietto.”
“I’m not your ‘dear uncle’ or any other freaking kind of uncle,” he said, mocking me with a sour look on his face as he climbed to his feet. But he couldn’t fool me. He’d been training me for more than a decade, and all that training was finally starting to pay off. That wasprideshining in his dark brown eyes.
“Face it, pretty soon you’re not going to be able to keep up with me.” I preened, tipping my nose in the air as I wiped the sweat from my brow.
“I hate to burst your bubble,passerotta, but I was going easy on you,” he said, and I had to look closely to see whether he was telling the truth. After living with Vito Rossi for years, I knew when to question the straight face he wore too often.
It looked like he might have been telling the truth—a little bit. But in my defense, I was half his size and still managed to put him on the ground. Not bad, if I did say so myself—even if he had been going easy on me.
In all reality, what were the chances I’d ever need to know all the crap he’d taught me? I was in my third year of nursing college and had no intention of dropping out to join the military anytime soon.
I sighed, staring longingly at the door to the women’s changeroom. All I wanted was a shower and some clean clothes, but we’d only been at it for an hour. It wasn’t likely Vito would let me off the hook that easy.
“So, what do you say we ditch this joint and go find ourselves some pizza?”
He stared at me with his arms still crossed. I hadn’t gotten quite good enough at reading him to know what was going on behind his eyes. So, when he dropped his arms and nodded, it caught me by surprise.
“Really?”
“Go,” he said, pointing to the door of the changeroom, “before I change my mind.”
I didn’t need to be told twice. I hurried out of the room, grabbed a towel from the glass shelf, and stripped my way to the shower.
We had the place to ourselves—Vito paid handsomely, I bet, for his ongoing reservation; three times a week for the past decade—so I didn’t have to worry about sharing the space.
Beneath the showerhead, the hot water sluiced away the sweat I’d worked up, soothing my aching muscles at the same time. I sighed in satisfaction.
If I took too long, Vito would be banging on the door and threatening to tear it down. He was a stickler for time—a real stickler. The only thing I could figure was he’d either been a soldier or an alarm clock in another life.
Regretfully, I shut off the taps, wrapped the towel around me, and padded over to the bench where I’d left my clothes. I kept my eyes on the news that was playing on the television on the changeroom wall. A dip in the Nasdaq today—not that it meant anything to me. A string of burglaries on the other side of town—not something I had to worry about with Vito around. No one would be stupid enough to break into the home of a guy who looked like he could bench-press a car.
The pretty reporter rattled off more headlines: a tsunami that had left hundreds of people homeless, a missing kid found safe after a weeks’ long search, the death of the matriarch of a suspected New York crime boss, Maria Luca.
Maria Luca.
My mind spun the name around and around as the reporter’s voice faded into the background. The lockers in front of me blurred. A numbness had crept its way up my fingertips.
Maria Luca wasdead.
The words made no sense. Yet no matter how many times I tried to rearrange them and put them back together, they came out the same way.
Maria Luca, mymother, was dead.
I sat down hard on the wooden bench behind me. It should have been hard and cold beneath my skin.
It felt like nothing.
The numbness had crawled its way through my body.
“Raven,” Vito’s voice called from the changeroom door. It was muffled, just like the reporter’s.
