Twisted Cravings (The Camorra Chronicles, #6)(54)

I jumped off the stool and hurried over to her. I touched her shoulder, drawing her gaze to mine. “Are you all right?”

Dinara nodded distractedly. “Yeah.” She laughed hoarsely. “Or maybe not.”

“What did Remo say?”

Dinara held up a piece of paper with a handwritten note. “He gave me the address of the bar where my mother works.”

“Dinara,” I said slowly. Remo had always wanted to kill our mother for what she’d done to him and my brothers. Revenge had been his driving force.

For him it was impossible to comprehend that not everyone followed the same logic as him.

“Take me there,” Dinara said, not allowing me to voice my worries. I could feel Nino’s gaze on us, probably analyzing our body language to assess our level of emotional connection.

I sighed and resisted the urge to walk into Remo’s office to confront him.

It would have been hypocritical anyway because avenging Dinara had been on my mind since I’d found out about her past. But I wanted to protect her from it. Nino gave us a curt nod as we walked past him and to my car. Dinara was tense beside me as I headed toward the address. I’d been to the bar only once before. It was one of our shabbier whorehouses, not a place I enjoyed spending time in.

“What will you do when you see your mother?” I asked. I remembered seeing my mother for the first time in years when I was a teen. She was in an asylum, a seemingly broken woman who wanted peace. Back then I’d wanted to move beyond my brothers’ constant need for blood and death. I wanted to be better. Instead my desperate attempt to change fate had only thrust me deeper into my predetermined path.

Dinara turned to me, her teal eyes wide. “I don’t know.”

“I assume Remo gave you permission to kill her.”

“He did. He gave me permission to do to her whatever I want. He called it my privilege.”

That sounded like my brother. “You don’t have to do it. You have options.”

“What options?” Dinara whispered harshly. “It’s not that I haven’t considered killing her. Every night since I found out that she’s alive, I’ve been dreaming about how I’d see her die. Your brother didn’t put the idea in my head. It’s been there all along.” She tipped against her temple.

I took her hand, linking our fingers.

“Did you imagine killing your mother before the day you stabbed her?”

she asked.

“For a long time, I believed killing my mother wouldn’t change anything.

Part of me even hoped we could make peace with her, and become at least a dysfunctional family. I wasn’t born when she hurt my brothers. I’d always only heard the stories, and even those were sparse. Remo tried to keep the horrors of the day that my mother tried to kill them away from me. But I needed to realize the horrible impact she had on our family for myself.” Nino had once recounted how our mother had cut his wrists, drugged baby Savio and tried to cut Remo as well before she set the room on fire. Remo saved Nino and Savio from a cruel fate. Our mother had still been pregnant with me then, and if she’d succeeded with her devious plan, I would have never even been born. I realized I’d been silent for too long, lost in my thoughts, and so I continued with my story:

“When I saw her that day, trying to kill everyone I cared about and smiling while she did it, I realized what she was. That she was the root of my brothers’ problems, of all of our struggles. Our father hadn’t been better than her, but he at least was dead and couldn’t cast his dark shadow over us anymore. In that moment I wanted to kill her and I never regretted it. I’m glad my brothers did it though. It was their privilege.”

“Did it help your brothers to see her dead? To kill her themselves?” I considered that. I had never really talked about it with my brothers. The topic of our mother’s death had been buried with her corpse. She was gone. Maybe my brothers talked about it with their wives but definitely not with me, and I’d never dared to talk about it. Putting the past to rest had been a huge step in finding happiness for me.

“I’m not sure it helped them. It didn’t change them. By then we all were already too messed up to find our way back onto a different path, but maybe it gave them peace of mind for a while.”

Dinara swallowed. “Peace of mind was what I wanted when I sought you and the truth. I wanted to uncover the ghosts of my past that kept haunting me, wanted to confront them and put them to rest, but I didn’t know so many of them were still around.”

“You mean your mother and your abusers?”

She nodded. I pulled the car into the half-empty parking lot of the whorehouse and killed the engine but made no move to get out because neither did Dinara. She slanted a cautious look toward the front door of the establishment. It was a simple steel door in a brick building without any windows at the front.

I squeezed her hand. “I’m here.”

Dinara gave a more resolute nod and shoved open the door. I released her and got out of the car, following her toward the entrance of the whorehouse.

She froze in front of it and turned to me, her eyes frantic. She reached for my gun holster but I stopped her with a gentle touch. “You can’t shoot her in the middle of a bar. If you want to kill her, you need to do it somewhere private.”

Dinara pulled her hand away, looking lost for a moment. “Will you give me your gun when I need it? I don’t have any weapons on me.”