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I want to ask Nash to give me all the information, but I don’t feel like I have a right to any of it. She made her choice.
I turn to face him, unable to resist.
“Tell me.”
“Do you think she wants to be rescued by you?”
“I don’t want to rescue her,” I say honestly. “But I need to speak with her brother.”
Chapter 28
Madelene
I keep catching him glancing at me. I can tell that he wants to have a conversation with me, but I don’t know if he’s avoiding it because he knows I’ll ask as many questions as he will or if he doesn’t really want to know the truth.
The silence over the last fifteen hours has been familiar, but also excruciating.
When I was at the Severino compound, I didn’t speak much. I tried my best to never draw attention to myself. With Hollis, he seemed to like the quiet. I’m certain the noise of the television is what made him spend so much time out on the back porch. He also needed to get away from me since I wouldn’t leave.
I shake my head, staring at a spot on the wall. I refuse to think of the man. He didn’t try to stop me when I left with Elio. He hasn’t barged into this motel room and demanded that I leave with him. Whatever connection I imagined us having was clearly one-sided. He’s probably ecstatic to see me gone. He can go back to his normal life now.
“Is this how it’s going to be?” I ask, speaking for the first time since Elio offered me dinner last night.
His eyes are slow to turn in my direction, as if he’s enthralled by the television show despite the thing being muted. He has had no problem just existing in the same space as me since bringing me here yesterday. Despite me feeling like he has a million things to say, he’s remained aggravatingly silent.
“What’s your plan?” I ask, pretty certain he’ll never answer me.
He insisted that I come along with him, but now he seems as regretful of it as Hollis did after getting me back to that tiny house of his.
He blinks in my direction, as if he can’t believe I’m here, as if I’m the ghost and not him.
“I don’t know,” he finally says. “But whatever it was it’s all fucked up now.”
Elio was always the planner. He’s the one that was able to get Marcello to stop and think every once in a while. Elio was the voice of reason, and sometimes it got him into trouble with the Severino boys. They wanted to be wild and crazy. They wanted to have their fun without thinking of the consequences. Even with their age difference, Alessio fed his little brother’s need for chaos, and reprimanded Elio often for ruining the fun when he’d speak up about the trouble what they were doing would bring.
“What do you know about me?”
“Everything,” he says without hesitation.
This information destroys me, and I have no hope of holding back the tears burning my eyes. They tumble down my cheeks. No matter how many times I swipe at them, they refuse to stop flowing. I never felt a sense of betrayal where the Severinos were concerned. They owed me no loyalty, but the man sitting across from me vowed to keep me safe. He was the one to chase the monsters from the shadows in my room at night. He was the one to sneak around the corner first when we wanted a snack after being refused at bedtime. He was always the one willing to put himself in the line of danger if it meant I would be spared.
I had so many questions. I had figured he had a good reason for being gone. Maybe his absence somehow ensured I was mostly safe. Alessio hasn’t killed me after all. He hasn’t raped me. His confession makes none of it matter.
“Everything?” I repeat, turning the word over and over in my head, really letting it sink inside of me.
I don’t understand the way he’s looking at me. I could be anyone to him right now. I could be a cashier at the store, or the bus driver getting him across town. I’m inconsequential.
“You did nothing,” I whisper, my head shaking as if I still can’t believe he’s sitting on the other bed a mere five feet from me. “The man I knew wouldn’t let me suffer that way.”
He’s calm, eerily so, as he watches my face.
“I haven’t been that man in a very long time,” he says, his voice flat, as if he’s void of emotion completely. “I wasn’t that man long before my car went over the bridge.”
I knew he’d changed. I knew passing the test to become part of the Severino family cost him a lot. I never thought he’d turn against everyone to save himself.
