AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Looks like you were fucking hiding him,” Gallo says with a snarl.
“What do you want?” I ask, crossing my arms. “You two want to keep pushing this mess and make it worse? We can do that. We can go to war if that’s what you want.”
“Nobody wants war,” Frost says quickly, ever the sensible businessman.
Gallo laughs, hoarse and ugly. “We’ll gut you, Costa, you little shit.”
“Insult me again, old man, and I will kill you. It would make my life easier, stomping your skull until it cracked.”
“Gentlemen,” Frost says as Gallo gets to his feet, looking outraged. “We can be reasonable here. The money from those two forgeries was good. Why don’t you have her paint one more? That’d get us close to breaking even at least, assuming you don’t take a cut.”
“No. Hellie doesn’t work anymore.”
“Give us something, Erick.” Frost spreads his hands. “You did hold Accardi back.”
I take a slow breath and let it out. I was waiting for this, and I knew they’d make these demands. I still don’t like it, but I made some plans at least.
“Here’s what I’m offering,” I say, looking between them. “This happens one time. You turn me down, you complain, you do anything I don’t like, and it’s war. Fuck you both. My offer is simple. I pay half of what’s missing from my own coffers. You two split it. You won’t be perfect, but fuck you, I don’t care. Then you leave Hellie alone, and you stay far away from my businesses, and if I catch either of you sniffing around my turf, I swear there will be bodies. Understand?”
Gallo sneers. “You must really like her, huh, Costa?”
“Shut up,” Frost says. He nods at me. “Alright. That’s reasonable.”
“Fuck, no, it isn’t, he hid that lying, thieving fuck from us! I never got my fucking revenge!”
“Seriously, Gallo, keep bitching and I’ll help Erick burn your organization to the ground.” Frost takes a breath through his nose and shoves a hand at me. “You got a deal. Wire me the money and this is over.”
“Fine.” I shake his hand. “Gallo?”
“Fuck you two.” He gets to his feet. “Fine. Deal.”
I shake the old gangster’s hand and it’s done. I turn away and head back to the funeral. “See yourselves out and don’t ever come around Hellie again,” I say, not bothering to wait for a response.
Once inside, I sit back down next to her. She leans against me, and I put an arm around her shoulders. I hate the deal I cut out there, but feeling Hellie against me now, being there for her, holding onto her, it’s all worth it. The problems with Frost and Gallo are over. Danny Accardi is dead.
Now it’s time to move on with our lives.
Just Hellie and me, nothing else.
Chapter45
Hellie
Months pass by like water down a river canyon rushing past our house in the desert. I mourn my father, and while I never quite get over his horrible, violent ending, I can at least accept that he’s gone.
And it helps that I’m starting a new life. Each day, I wake up in bed with Erick, eat breakfast with him, go for hikes around the desert, spend some time in the kitchen chatting with Marina, and eventually end up in my studio for hours on end. I paint more than I’ve ever painted in my life.
At first, everything’s a portrait of him. Erick in different moods, different colors, but soon the landscape starts to infect my work and the desert itself becomes a character on the canvas. It’s the most productive period of my life—and the sort of gift I never imagined I’d have, the one thing all artists crave more than anything else, time and space to do nothing but create.
Erick watches me when he’s not at work. He spends hours on the weekends with me, sitting back and reading books, watching movies with his headphones on, all while glancing up and tracking my progress. Before him, I never would’ve let someone sit in on a painting session, but it feels natural to have him nearby, and I find my work’s even better when he’s looking, like I’m trying to make him proud with every brushstroke.
We sleep together every night. He’s insatiable, and I find myself waking up in ways I never dreamed about. His hands on my skin, his mouth on my lips. It’s obscene, it’s beautiful, and I’m more physically satisfied than I ever imagined I could be.
I keep in touch with friends and have lunch with Nicky a few times, but I find myself retreating deeper and deeper into that house in the desert, hiking more in the early mornings and around sunset, throwing myself into my relationship with Erick. Telling him stories about my father, stories about me. Listening to his own stories about his hard childhood, about the stress of his work juggling the legitimate and the illegal aspects of his life, and it seems to help. He’s looser, happier than he was when we first met.
Around seven months into my stay at the house in the desert, Marina brings the mail and there’s a letter addressed to me. “Don’t know who sent it,” she says with a shrug as she places it down in front of me during lunch. Erick’s down at the casino for the afternoon. “No return address.”
She says something else, but I can’t hear her. I stare at the envelope, at the handwriting on the front listing my name, Heloise Accardi, and the PO Box Erick uses to gather packages and letters since no delivery driver in their right mind would ever come out here. That handwriting, cramped and intense, more of a scrawl than actual letters. The handwriting I’ve seen a thousand times since I was a little girl, handwriting on notes, on lists, on forged documents.
