Mafiosa (Blood for Blood #3)(100)
If anyone would have told me twelve months ago that I would be in a theatre, watching a giant chandelier swinging towards the ceiling as epic music shook the walls around me and thudded right down inside my heart while sitting shoulder to shoulder with the former boss of the entire Falcone dynasty and actually enjoying myself, I would have called them a dirty liar.
How quickly the world can change.
Months after being shot in the shoulder – after staring death in the face and rolling out from underneath it, after burying my mother and my father, relinquishing every tie to an identity I never wanted and clawing my way out of an underworld that once threatened to consume me, Luca had ignited something I thought I’d lost for ever. The soaring music, the drama, the passion, the sense of being elsewhere and other, of feeling safe and happy and thoroughly content. I felt joy, sitting in that dark room, my arm laid on top of his, our fingers grazing, our heads bent together. When the last song hit its crescendo, my eyes filled with tears, and I let the music sweep me up, away from the badness of the last year, and all the darkness it had left behind. I felt it then – the keenest sense of possibility – surrounding me. This other life – with creativity and art and music and love.
We emerged feeling giddy and breathless. I had a thousand different thank yous waiting on my tongue but they all jumbled together, so instead I grabbed Luca’s hand, pulled him around the side of the theatre and kissed him until I lost my breath.
‘Well,’ he murmured, his finger tracing a line along my bottom lip. ‘I should take you to the theatre more often.’
‘Let’s go home.’ Back to a small, inconsequential town on the edge of Wisconsin that would do for now. Back to not yet.
He wove his arm around my back, his fingers trailing along my waist as we walked. ‘My thoughts exactly.’
We hopped out on to the sidewalk, our footsteps made quicker by desire, our words lost to the thoughts in our head. At the next crossing, we hovered inside a huddle of theatregoers scattering into the evening, and I don’t know quite how, but I sensed it before I saw it. I felt it in the hairs on the back of my neck, in the goosebumps rippling along my bare arms. This feeling that the world was dimming, just a little.
We watched as a familiar black SUV rolled to a stop on the street beside us, the traffic light reflecting bright crimson along the hood of the car.
‘Luca.’ The word lodged in my throat, my heart climbing up to meet it.
He bristled against me, his hand moving behind his back. We stayed frozen like that until the traffic light turned green.
Slowly, the SUV started to move, and I wondered whether it was all in my head – the feeling that we were being watched as it rolled away from us.
When the SUV had disappeared down another side street, Luca released his grip on the gun inside his waistband.
‘Just a coincidence,’ he breathed.
‘A coincidence,’ I echoed.
He took my hand, pulling me with him. We ran all the way back to the car, the dying sun hot on our backs, Nic’s face seared into my mind.
We were safe.
We were together.
We were running.
Always running.