Spin (Songs of Corruption #1)(63)

“This is not what I want. I’m in the life. I’m damned, I know this. I cannot come home to a woman I’ll share hell with.” He slapped the car in park and turned away from me again, as if seeking answers in the half distance.

“You would have done the same to protect someone you cared about,” I said.

“I would have beaten him to death with the empty gun. That’s the point, isn’t it?”

“I’m not understanding the point.”

“Please just go. I don’t want to see you again.”

His words tightened in my gut, twisting my insides to jelly. “Antonio, please. Let’s talk—”

He sped the car forward and around a turn, barely stopping to drop me in front of my house. “Get out.”

I waited for him to change his mind. Maybe if I reached out to touch him, he would relent, but he seemed so radioactive that I couldn’t. I took the phone he’d given me from my bag and handed it to him.

“I don’t want it,” he said, still not looking at me. “Give it to the poor. Just go.”

I was a coward. I couldn’t fight for him. I didn’t know how. I got out, and though I didn’t look back, I didn’t hear him pull away until I was safely inside.

***

My house was empty. Every surface gleamed. The dishes were put away. The broken swans were gone.

I stepped out of my shoes and looked around for any sign of Katrina. She’d left a few old-style bobby pins, but everything else was gone. She’d always kept most of her stuff at her parents’, I reminded myself. I had a family. I could call any of them. And what would I say? They’d walked me through Daniel. Would they walk me through another man? One I couldn’t talk about?

I put the phone he’d given me by the charger, and it blooped with an auto update to the music library. Tapping and scrolling, I found he’d left me music ages ago, before I’d squeezed a trigger. Puccini, Verdi, Rossini. Antonio liked opera, and it didn’t matter that I liked it too.

I put on Ave Maria and shuffled the rest. Went to the refrigerator, didn’t open it. The sink, empty. Back around the kitchen.

I made a third and fourth circuit around the island, as if spooling my pain around it. Antonio, my beautiful, brutal capo. He wanted me to be clean, and I’d sullied myself, debased myself, not with sex but violence. I was supposed to be his escape, and I’d walked into a trap where I was empowered to commit murder. For all intents and purposes, I had.

And there were witnesses. People who didn’t like or trust me. They’d pat him on the back and tell him to move on to a woman who knew her place. To get cunning and hard and live, or stay gentle and die. A woman who knew the rules. A woman from his world. He’d whisper mi amore in her cheek while he held her. He’d make her eggs and protect her innocence with his life.

All of his sweetness would go to her. All of his brutality would stay at the job.

thirty-seven.

y face hurt. I remembered the feeling from when I found Daniel’s texts. I iced my face, broke out a new toothbrush, and went the f**k to work. Shit, I’d done this before. I was an old hand. I wasn’t going to shake off Antonio that day, and maybe not that week. But I had to, didn’t I?

Despite my game face and strong words of self-reliance, Pam saw right through me.

“What happened?” she asked.

“Nothing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Can you get me a meeting with Arnie?” I asked. “Fifteen minutes. Tell him it’s urgent.”

“Don’t forget your eleven thirty with Daniel Brower.”

I noticed she didn’t call him a dickhead, and I raised an eyebrow. Pam stared at me, and I looked over her shoulder. I recognized the faces on her computer screen.

Two mug shots. Bruno Uvoli and Vito from the valet service. I leaned in. Vito’s mug shot was for an arrest for the sexual assault of an eleven-year-old girl. Bruno’s DNA had been found at the scene of his cousin’s death, ten years earlier. No charges.

They’d been shot down assassination style in an abandoned suburban house in Palmdale. They’d just been found, but it was assumed they’d been killed the previous afternoon.

Antonio. All I could think about was Antonio assassinating two men and finding out I’d almost done the same.

“Miss Drazen?” Pam sounded concerned.

“Did you get me Arnie?”

“Ten fifteen. Are you all right? You turned white as a sheet.”

“I’m going to go catch up on my email. Hold my calls.”

I didn’t check my emails at all. I wrote Arnie a short, concise letter of resignation. I was done wasting my life with anything I didn’t love.

***

Arnie kept me far longer than fifteen minutes, trying to work out consultancies and flexible hours, more pay, a promotion, a new title. He asked me where I was going. When I said, “Nowhere,” he believed me and wished me luck in the most sincere voice I’d ever heard him use.

I saw Daniel’s team before I saw him: a handful of men in suits huddled by the window and a woman I recognized. Short, slim, with a professional dark bob, and sensible shoes. Clarice. From her outfit, no one would ever guess she liked being called a filthy whore while sucking a taken man’s cock.

I felt absolutely nothing about her presence, and that was a relief in itself.