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That sounded ominous, but I couldn’t imagine my mother hurting a fly.
“What did you do,Mamma?”
She sighed again, placed the folder down on my lap, and released my hand. I opened it up.
Dark eyes that paralleled dark hair looked back at me. I used to think that the glint in her eyes was just innocent mischief. I’d grown enough now to know that it was malice after all.
I squinted my eyes at the mug shot on my lap. I’d distorted Rosalie’s face in my head so much that it was a shock to see how pretty she’d been.
“I could have had her killed for what she tried to do to my family, to my son,” my mother said in a voice so hard I barely recognized it. “I could have forced her to work in the whorehouses until it killed her. But none of that seemed right. I didn’t want her dead. I wanted her to live a long life, remembering every day the consequences of what she did to you.”
I flipped over the old photo and looked at the next page and then the next. “What is all this?”
“It’s the case I had fabricated againstSignorinaSanto. The case that has kept her in prison, and will continue to keep her there for the rest of her natural life.” My mother didn’t flinch, her green eyes unwavering, not an ounce of remorse.
I stared at the pages, not quite able to process what she was saying. My mother, the fragile, abused wife of Lorenzo Costa, had wreaked vengeance on her enemy.
“You said ‘twice.’”
“Si, I did.”
I waited for her to continue, but the silence stretched and grew louder until it was ringing in my ears.
“Mamma?”I said when I couldn’t take it any longer.
“Sofia was a good girl, Nico. She was bright and beautiful. She had everything she could have needed to make a glorious future for herself.”
Prickles of apprehension ghosted down my spine. I had no idea where she was going with this, but I had a feeling I wasn’t going to like it.
“And then your father made an agreement with Vincent Luca,” she said.
I almost chuckled at me and Raven falling in line, even unknowingly, with what Vincent and Lorenzo originally wanted. Well, at least until I ruined, shattered, destroyed, and burned my relationship with Raven to the ground until they were just mere ashes, speckles of dust. What did this have to do with…
My stomach bottomed out.
“You and Maria Luca.”
I could almost see the two brunette heads pooled together at the nook in the solarium. Half empty glasses of what I thought was orange juice back then, ash trays, and cigarette sticks with pink lipstick on them. I could easily see the two of them scheming to make sure the marriage never happened.Shewas the one who needed to be safe fromme. And no place was safer than six feet beneath the ground.
Raven had thought her own family didn’t want her, had no use for her, had gotten rid of her. Because of me.
The knife at the back of my mind felt like it was being twisted in place, by my own mother. My own blood and flesh. She had gone to great lengths to keep Sofia Luca away from me. To keep her safe from me. To keep her away from the monster.
The click of a key turning rang in my head, the locks clanking against the steel bars of the cage.Mycage.
“I thought I was doing it for you, and for her. We arranged to send Sofia off with one of the Lucianos’ men. I had to believe that one day, you’d come to see that what your anger and your father were turning you into… It wasn’t… It waswrong.That’s not who you want to be. That’s not who you are. I knowyou.I didn’t…” She paused and turned slightly away as if she was weighing her words in her head very carefully, like there was a balance scale inside her head. “You couldn’t be the man your father wanted you to be and have people close to you, love you, care for you. They…she… wouldn’t have survived it.”
The haunted look in my mother’s emerald orbs reminded me of how close her words were to her reality. She knew what it was like to have to care for a monster. She had to learn how to survive. She almost didn’t.
If I hadn’t done what I’d done, what would have happened toMamma?
IfMammaand Maria hadn’t done what they did, what would have happened to Sofia?
Every part of me rejected the possibility, but for every part of me that did, a tiny twinge of doubt knocked at me, continuously, incessantly until it was difficult to ignore, until I was forced to look up.
I sawMamma’sbruises on Raven’s flushed cheeks, her broken bones protruding through Raven’s skin. I saw the fresh wound bleeding copiously into Raven’s eye from the thin scar above my mother’s eyebrow.
“Do you think…” I had to swallow down the lump in my throat. “Do you think I would have been like him?”
