AllFreeNovel
Share Us
-Lilah-
I wear red to the funeral.
Dante told me I couldn’t wear sparkles, that we shouldn’t celebrate Carmine’s death in the public eye.
It still felt like a celebration to me.
I figured a dark, bloodred was as close as I’d get to giving one last fuck you to this horrible, horrible man.
I hope he’s looking up at us from Hell.
I hope he’s screaming into the void, trying to curse us.
I hope every last person he fucked over is torturing him slowly.
* * *
The funeral is four days after Carmine is found unresponsive in his bed the morning after he cornered me.
For four days, Dante and I didn’t speak about what happened, other than for him to talk through the emotions behind finding out about the truth of his mother’s death.
For four days, I never asked him what happened after I left that room.
And I never will.
I’ve seen the shadows, the moments where he remembers, the flashes that will forever haunt him.
If he needs me, he knows I’ll be there, but I will never push him.
Ever.
It’s as I’m thinking this, the clouds blocking the sun as we stand in the graveyard, Carmine having been lowered into the ground less than an hour before, when I feel a presence behind me.
“What on earth are you wearing, Delilah?” The words are spoken in angry, hushed breaths.
I don’t have to turn to know who it is.
I don’t answer.
Instead, my eyes scan the graveyard of black outfits until I find Dante shaking hands with some man in a dark suit, not a hint of grief on either of their faces.
He, too, is fighting the celebration, despite him having to wrestle with the fact that it’s his father who passed—and how it happened.
This morning, as I got dressed alone, I wondered if anyone would grieve Carmine Carluccio.
But that’s not where my mind is right now.
It’s on the hand that just grabbed my elbow.
On the cold, familiar fingers.
“Delilah, I’m speaking to you,” the voice says, and he tugs until I face him.
Shane Turner.
The man who raised me.
The man who wanted me tied to the Carluccio family for his own benefit.
