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“I’ll ask the questions,” I say, holding her drink toward her. She takes it and drains it in one. I pour out some more, taking a sip of my own. I sink into the armchair and look at her. “Where did you go?” I ask. “On the morning they took you.”
“Home,” she replies bluntly, draining her glass again, coughing loudly, her cheeks turning red.
“Who are you?”
“I told you. I’m no one.”
“That’s bullshit. You got dragged into that van by the same guy who was telling me to give it up tonight. They wouldn’t shoot me while I held you hostage. You must be important. Who are you?”
She looks at me and she speaks softly, like she’s afraid of me. “I’m Aurora Moretti. Don Moretti, the man you just killed, is, I mean was, my father.”
Fifteen
Aurora
* * *
He starts to chuckle to himself. It’s a deep throaty sound that reminds me of a motorcycle roaring past in the distance. The noise is faint and gravelly and it churns my stomach. “Are you laughing at me?” I ask.
He shakes his head, running a hand through his hair. I notice the tattoos on the back of his knuckles. Swirling patterns that remind me of snakes. Poisonous. Deadly. A warning to stay away.
I should have paid attention to those tattoos last time I saw him. “It’s not that I’m laughing at you,” he says at last, stretching his feet out in front of him, looking completely at home. “It’s the jokes the universe plays on us, that’s all.”
“I’m a joke to you?”
“That’s not what I said.”
“So what? My father’s death is a joke? Is that it?”
He frowns before taking a sip from his glass. “You are angry and that is your right but do not forget your place. You will show me respect in my home.”
“Respect? You killed my family, you son of a bitch.”
He raises his eyebrows and I think I can detect a smirk on his face. It makes me want to slap him. “I didn’t kill your family,” he says. “You want to know what happened in there or you want to bitch at me?”
I say nothing, scowling at him as he takes another leisurely sip from his glass.
“They were all in one room,” he says, ignoring my glare. “Limbs bound. Your father, mother, and your brothers. The place was rigged to blow and the charges went off when I got to the room. I was supposed to die in there too. Blast had a dead zone right where I stood. I got lucky. As did you. If you were in the house tonight, you’d have died with the rest of them. What were you doing in the stables?”
They’re all dead.
It hits me with the force of a runaway freight train, knocking the wind out of me. I hear myself answering from far away, “Father put me there to punish me for sneaking out.” The voice is weak, getting weaker. My mind isn’t even in the room.
It’s thinking of my father in his study. My mother with her glass of wine in her hand. Luca taunting me by stealing my dolls. The years flap back and forth like pages in a book left open out in the wind. All those years. All those individual snapshots of my life. Three older brothers. That wilting spider plant in the kitchen. My cookbooks lined up, never used. Mother’s perfume.
My family were not kind to me but they were the pillars of my life, the solid poles that kept my universe set in one place. Now, those poles are gone. I’m a tent without support, wafting in the breeze, drifting off into the air. I feel dizzy, nauseous even.
I don’t feel grief. I’m guessing that will come later. What I do feel is a sense of numbness washing over me.
They’re dead.
A little voice whispers in the back of my mind.That means you’re free.
“You should be grateful,” I hear his voice from far away. “You’d be dead too if you were still there. Your family was set up, same as me.”
I float back down into the room slowly. They can’t be dead. They’re never going to die. He must have made a mistake.
“Your guards didn’t know,” he says, looking at me from under a furrowed brow. “I’m guessing they were paid to take me and my crew out. I’ll get my revenge yet though.” He gets a strange smile on his face, pointing his glass toward me with one finger outstretched. “You’ll help me with that.”
