Mafiosa (Blood for Blood #3)(74)

I watched Donata and her two lackeys receive communion, heads dipped in reverence and hands clasped as they passed us by. As they passed us by and kept walking. Towards the exit, away from the final blessing.

I sneaked a glance at Valentino. Of course, he wasn’t kneeling – his chair was apart from the pews – but his head was down, as though he was sleeping.

I looked back at Luca. He was frowning, but his lips were still. Was he wondering about Donata, too? Why she wasn’t staying? Elena was sitting bolt upright in her seat, watching the back of Donata’s head as she made her way down the centre aisle. Everyone was watching her go. Felice cleared his throat. There was a scuffle somewhere to my right, but by the time I looked back, everything was normal again. Valentino was still praying, his head bowed slightly.

I looked again, leaning closer to Felice and ignoring all that honeyed scent to see around him properly. Head bowed, shoulders slumped. I couldn’t see Valentino’s face, but his body was creasing, his forehead inching towards his knees, slowly, slowly.

I grabbed Luca’s arm and shook him.

He snapped his head around, forgetting to whisper. ‘What?’

I jabbed Felice in the shoulder. He was already looking at me.

‘Valentino,’ I hissed. ‘Valentino!’

I stretched around Felice, without bothering to ask permission. His head turned slowly, following me. The others were turning around now, too, following the disturbance and ignoring Donata Marino as she left the church.

Valentino was still falling forwards. Not praying. Not sleeping. Felice, seeing that I couldn’t reach, grabbed Valentino by the shoulder. He didn’t raise his head.

‘No,’ I muttered, ‘no, no, no.’

‘Valentino!’ Luca said, his voice carrying over the dying music. Felice pulled Valentino back with a stiff yank. His head lolled backwards until he was gazing at the ceiling, his eyes wide open. A trickle of blood striped his chin.

Felice gasped, and his hand fell away from his nephew. ‘No,’ he breathed.

No. No. No.

I looked down, to where Valentino’s hands were folded across his middle, his fingers still half clenched. I saw the handle of the knife, long and sleek, and the dark pool spreading across his jacket, right over his heart, at the same time as the others.

Elena screamed.

The choir stopped singing.

Nic and Dom jumped over the pew and barrelled down the middle aisle, shouting as they pulled their guns out. A lone figure crashed through the doors, just a shadow at the end of the church, her laughter rising up like a chorus. Laughter I had heard for the first time recently, trapped inside a darkened hallway in my school.

Elena’s scream echoed down the aisles of the church, reverberated around us as she folded in on herself, her face pressed to the pew as she gasped and heaved. Luca stumbled past me, past Felice, and out into the aisle. He sank to his knees in front of Valentino, his arms encircling his middle, his head slumped forward, touching against Valentino’s knee – his position a mirror image of his twin brother’s. When the sound gurgled in his throat, it was a scraping, primal thing, carved from pure, soul-shattering grief, and I could feel it, this sharp, twisting wound, right down in my own heart.

Valentino was gone.

The boss was dead.





PART IV

‘Vengeance is in my heart, death in my hand,

Blood and revenge are hammering in my head.’

William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus





CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR


WINTER




The weeks passed slowly. Every day was a trickle of time, of renewed pain and loaded silence. A thick blanket of snow draped itself over Evelina, and with it came the ice. It made spectres of us all, roaming the halls, looking for something to say, and knowing there were no words left.

There was no laughter, no joy.

Just rage.

Intent.

My father remained elusive – no sightings, no word of him anywhere. I started to wonder if he had been there that day, too, hiding somewhere with Jack, laughing behind a church missal as Elena’s screams filled up the church like an aria.

Over twenty witnesses at Holy Name Cathedral on All Souls’ Day pointed to Zola Marino as Valentino’s assailant. They had seen her in the communion procession, hooded and in plain clothes, as she approached Valentino in the aisle and leant over him from behind. They had passed it off as a friendly greeting at first, a hug that lasted just a little too long. By the time they understood what had happened, Elena was screaming the walls down and Nic and Dom were already charging out of the church.

The boys never caught up to Zola.

They never even fired their guns.

The incident made every single local paper, and most of the national ones, too. News of the escalating blood war between the Falcones and the Marinos was now public knowledge. They rehashed old murders – details of my paternal grandparents, Vince Marino and Linda Harris, splashed across the pages, photographs of Angelo Falcone, of Felice, and even Luca – the ‘striking blue-eyed twin’ of the latest Falcone victim.

Zola had been discovered hiding in the back of a well-known Marino-friendly restaurant eighteen blocks from the church and was taken away in handcuffs by the police. On her second day in jail, she was found hanging by the neck. The newspapers called it suicide. The Falcones called it retribution. They had people everywhere. Prison wasn’t good enough for Zola, so death would have to do.