Mafiosa (Blood for Blood #3)(38)

He was really asking me, waiting for me to answer. ‘I want you to want what I want,’ I said slowly. ‘I want you to support me …’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not raise you up and give you a gun. I will not take you shooting and fawn over how great your aim is. I won’t tell you how brilliant you can be or how many Marinos you can murder if you really put your mind to it. I won’t walk you into danger and clap as you shoot to kill. I will take the gun from you and tell you you’re a thousand times better without it. I will always take the gun from you, Sophie. I will always tell you that you don’t need it. I will always support you, but I will never support that. Never.’ He scrubbed his hands across his forehead, dragging his hair away from his face. ‘You always manage to work me up,’ he said ruefully.

All this time, I thought he put himself on a pedestal, but it was me he had raised up. He thought I was better than him – than his life, than his family – but I wasn’t.

‘We’re the same,’ I said. ‘We come from the same kind of blood. How could you say all these things to me, and not say them to yourself? How do you expect me to take any of it to heart, when it’s said with such hypocrisy? If you really believed your family was truly bad then you’d walk away from it. I know you’re strong enough.’

Luca shook his head. ‘It’s not the same.’

‘Why not?’

‘It’s too late for me. I’ve done too many heinous things already. There is no getting out.’

I lay back on the roof, a wave of exhaustion washing over me. Couldn’t he see it was the same for me? Couldn’t he understand I felt the same way? It was pointless having this argument with him. We would never agree, and the truth was, he had lied to Valentino to keep me here – and that meant I was staying.

‘I’m tired, Luca. I’m tired of this conversation.’

Luca lay down next to me. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m tired too.’

We welcomed the silence, and the respite it brought. He wasn’t the enemy and neither was I. Our world was the problem, and we were both stuck in it. We lay side by side, at an impasse, but not wanting to separate. My chin brushed against his shoulder. Our arms stretched out next to each other, my pinky finger brushing his. I ached for the fleeting closeness we had once had, couldn’t help but wonder whether we would ever have it again.

‘Tell me about the life you would have had,’ I said, into the big expanse above us. ‘Tell me about the person you would be if you weren’t a Falcone.’

I had never delved this deeply before, and I didn’t know if Luca would let me. But the moment was quiet again, and I just wanted to talk, to be with him, even if the conversation was hypothetical, even if it didn’t really matter.

‘I would have gone to college.’ His breath fogged the air above us. ‘Studied astrophysics. I would have been the biggest nerd.’ He imitated my voice on the last word. ‘When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut more than anything.’

‘Did you have those sticky glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What aspiring astronaut doesn’t?’

‘So what happened? Didn’t you think you were smart enough?’ I said, teasingly.

‘Oh, I’m definitely smart enough, Sophie.’ His laughter echoed mine. ‘I just didn’t like the idea of having to eat cardboard food for months at a time. When I was seven, my dad bought me a star for my birthday. It came with all these specific coordinates and a certificate with my name on it, and we waited for it to get dark and then found it through the telescope.’

‘Of course you had a telescope,’ I interjected.

I caught his smirk. ‘So we found the star – The Gianluca Falcone Star – and my dad helped me get the coordinates until it lit up right in front of me. When I pulled back from the eyepiece, he clapped me on the back, and asked me what I thought about it.’

Without meaning to, I had rolled on to my side and hitched my head up with my hand, so I could see him better. I liked looking at him when he was telling a story. One, because he was abnormally handsome, and two, because his face lit up when he spoke. ‘And?’ I prompted.

He glanced sideways at me, a smile flickering at the edges of his lips. ‘I turned around to my father, who had just spent all this money on a really thoughtful, unique gift, and I said …’ He cleared his throat, and did his best impression of himself as a child. ‘“Dad, are you aware that the light from this star takes so many years to reach earth, that in reality it’s probably already deteriorated into a ball of dust and ash, and so the gift, technically speaking, is dead, and therefore useless?”’

‘Oh, man,’ I said, lying on my back again, my laughter warm inside me. ‘Remind me to never ever buy you a gift.’

‘Just make sure it’s a real star, not the memory of one,’ he said. ‘In my defence, I was only seven. I didn’t know about conventional rules of present-acceptance. I thought I knew everything.’

‘Some things never change.’

‘Well, the only difference is, now I actually do know everything.’

‘What else? What else would you do?’

His attention was trained on the stars again. ‘I’d visit Machu Picchu and do the Inca Trail, I’d travel Route 66 on a shoestring budget in an old Camaro. I’d study the Renaissance in Florence, I’d sleep under the Northern Lights in Iceland …’ He trailed off, and I could feel it, just as I knew he could – the sense of sadness creeping over us. He had really thought about it. All the things he would be, all the things he would do. Whispers of a life unlived, of dreams unmade. It hurt, right down in my core, to know that he would never have those things – the things that made his eyes light up and his smile stretch like a little boy’s again.