Sempre (Forever Series #1)(141)

His father glanced in that direction. “Johnny.”

“Johnny? Who the f**k is Johnny?”

“Nobody important. I’m not even certain that’s his name. He’s part of Giovanni’s street crew.”

“One of your own?”

“He has a gunshot wound to the abdomen, but it’s not necessarily fatal,” Vincent said. “Missed his major organs, but I’m venturing a guess it hit his spinal cord.”

“A gut shot? I thought you shot to kill?”

“I didn’t shoot him,” he said, shaking his head. “I hoped you could tell me who did.”

“You found him there?” Carmine stared at his father, bewildered, before turning to the car. The passenger side door was open and the seatbelt was unlatched, so he didn’t think Haven could have been too hurt in the accident. There wasn’t any blood on her side.

“Maybe she went for help,” he said, tossing things around. “Where’s my gun?”

The moment he said it, he spotted the single .45-caliber cartridge on the passenger side floorboard. He picked it up and got back out of the car, eyeing it as his father sighed. “I had a feeling something like this would happen—even before I knew she was related to Sal. After everything I lost, I knew saving her wouldn’t be easy. They all knew how important it was to me. I was afraid someone would take her for leverage. I should’ve known it would be him.”

Carmine’s legs wobbled. “Nunzio?”

Vincent nodded. “No one has heard from him in days. He was called in for a sit-down and didn’t show. It was the reason I was going to Chicago this weekend.”

Carmine felt the bile rising up. The thought of her being somewhere with Nunzio sickened him. He couldn’t begin to imagine what she was going through.

“I’ll kill him,” Carmine said. “He’ll pay for this.”

“He will,” Vincent said. “But right now, we need to be more concerned with finding her.”

* * *

It turned out to be a brisk night, a storm rolling in from the west making the waters of Aurora Lake more turbulent than usual. Vincent stood at the end of a long pier a few miles from the Barlow residence, huddled up in his coat as he tried to shield himself from the harsh winds.

Vincent could easily recall the first time he met Nicholas, a warm fall day at the local elementary school. Carmine had just turned ten, and it was the first time Vincent had made it to one of his football games. Between juggling his job at the hospital and managing his work with la famiglia, he had little time left over for his children.

But that day, he had snuck out of work early to watch. Toward the middle of the game, a scrawny boy with tanned skin took a nasty spill, and someone’s cleat gashed his cheek. It was a superficial wound, so Vincent grabbed a first-aid kit from the car, sparing the boy a trip to the emergency room. “Thanks, Doc,” he’d said. “Oh, what did the doctor say when the invisible man asked for an appointment?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Sorry, but I can’t see you today.” He laughed hysterically at his joke. “Get it? Can’t see you? You know, because he’s invisible!”

Vincent smiled. “I get it.”

Halftime began as he finished fixing the boy’s wound, and Carmine ran over. “Dad! You came!”

Intense guilt hit him. “I did.”

Carmine threw his arm around the boy’s shoulder. “This is my best friend, Nicholas.”

Those words caught Vincent off guard. Carmine’s teachers all reported the same thing—he was closed off and shut down, so much so that it was as if he weren’t there.

Vincent’s pager went off as he stood there, the moment lost in that split second as the beeps rang out. The sparkle in Carmine’s eye dissipated, the child Vincent had grown accustomed to returning without a single word spoken.

But all hope was not lost, Vincent realized, because Carmine had someone. Someone he could be Carmine around—the young, innocent boy, haunted by demons others couldn’t see.

After their fallout, he watched his son spiral out of control. He was walking down the one path Vincent wanted him to stay far away from—the path leading straight to Chicago. But then she happened. The girl who had never been able to call her life her own taught a boy who had the world at his fingertips exactly what it meant to live. He wasn’t alone anymore.

Nicholas, however, was.

Vincent never forgot the joke he had told him that first day, because Nicholas was a lot like the invisible man. Drifting his way through life, unnoticed by most. Vincent saw him, though, even if he couldn’t fix him. And as he stood on that pier under the cloak of darkness, he wished he would have done something more to help.

He gazed down at the water, fixated on the spot where Nicholas’s body had disappeared moments before, and felt nothing but disgust. He had watched the boy grow up and had now sent him to a watery tomb like many of his adversaries.

“Oggi uccidiamo, domani moriremo,” he said, his gloved hand making the sign of the cross. Today we kill, tomorrow we die.

Vincent headed to his car hidden in the trees, and he drove away from Aurora Lake without looking back. He had already cleaned up the house, having hosed down the driveway and redistributed the gravel to hide all signs of the incident, but he had bigger issues he needed to deal with.