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Kat pressed her face to her knees for a minute, and then looked up, staring into the dark as if she was seeing something I couldn’t see.
“My mom died of a stroke, when I was twelve,” she said. “It happened in the night. I found her in the morning. I’d gone into her room to see if she would brush my hair for me, and…found her like that. Gone.”
I squeezed her foot. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
“Yeah. So, my sister, Raffi, was eighteen. She’d just gotten into Columbia. Full-ride scholarship. She was going to study biochemistry. She wanted to be a doctor. But there wasn’t anyone to look after me and Gabri, my little sister. She was five, then. We didn’t have any relatives to go to. My mom’s people were all gone, my dad was out of the picture since Gabri was conceived. Gabri and I would have ended up in the system. Raffi couldn’t let that happen. So she gave up the scholarship.”
I flinched. “Oh, fucking ouch.”
“Yeah, that was how I felt, too,” Kat said. “But she told me it would be okay. That we’d all get through this hard part together, and eventually she’d figure out how to get a medical degree.”
“What happened?”
“Well, she worked like a donkey. She got two jobs. She waitressed at this local Italian restaurant in the evenings, worked as a paralegal at a law firm in the morning, and she tried to take care of us. I helped with Gabri, keeping her clothed and bathed and fed, getting her to school while Raffi worked her butt off. And then…”
Kat’s voice trailed off. I braced myself, my mind whirling with ugly possibilities. I stroked her foot again, a slow, soothing caress.
“Turns out this Italian restaurant was the favorite hangout of a local crime boss and his family,” she went on. “Very powerful, very ruthless. They loved the Signora Sciancalepore’s ragú. They went there all the time for it, and my sister always served them. They asked for her specifically. She was really pretty. I mean, insanely pretty.”
“I believe it, having seen you,” I said.
“She was much prettier than me,” Kat said swiftly. “She was… I don’t know how to describe it. Sparkly, somehow. And she spoke Italian. She’d learned it from my mom and grandma. I don’t remember much anymore, but Raffi was fluent. At least in dialect.”
“Your family was Italian?”
“Mom was. She said our dad was a Swede, but I have no way to corroborate that. Mom was dark, but the three of us were fair, like him. But Raffi was the real beauty. With the long curly blonde hair, and these eyes, and this incredible smile.”
“Oh shit,” I said. “I think I see where this is going.”
“Yeah,” Kat said. “I’ll stop, if you’d rather not hear it. For real. No problem.”
“Fuck, no,” I said. “Please, go on.”
“Okay. So, yeah, it was a train wreck waiting to happen. Raffi never had a chance, once Tony saw her.”
“And Tony was…?”
“The crime boss’s son,” she said. “A real piece of work. A total narcissistic sociopath. He saw this beautiful shiny thing, and he wanted it. And no one was around with the presence of mind to tell her to run like hell. Change her name, find another job, go to another city, do any fucking thing she had to do to get away from him.”
I let out a slow, calming breath, and prepared myself. “What happened?”
Kat buried her face against her knees. “Tony was handsome, in a thick, sleazy sort of way. He was nice at first. He promised to set her up in a luxury apartment, give her a car, an allowance for clothes, jewels, etc. We couldn’t go with her, of course, but the money he was promising was way more than she could earn with the waitressing and the paralegaling. She was just nineteen, with us on her back, so she did it.”
She stopped again, and I sensed she was building up the nerve to push onward another step through this wall of thorns. I squeezed her ankle, patiently waiting.
“She tried to hoard money for us, but Tony got angry,” she went on softly. “She’d try to sneak out to see us when he was gone, but he got angry about that, too. Then she realized that Tony got angry about everything. Because he liked being angry.”
“Did he hit her?”
“Yes. Every time we saw her, she was wearing makeup to hide the bruises. Then that thing with the cat happened.” She stopped, shaking her head.
“Cat?” I prompted gently.
“Penelope. Our calico cat. She adored Raffi, so Raffi took her to the new apartment, with Tony’s permission. But Penelope hated Tony. Took a big dump in his Ferragamo loafers one day.”
“Yay, Penelope,” I said.
“I thought so, too,” Kat said. “But then Tony killed her.”
