Mafiosa (Blood for Blood #3)(95)

I pressed the back of my head against the wall and took a deep breath. The ceiling fan whirred above me. There were paper butterflies tied to it, whizzing around, their wings painted messily in different colours. Here was something; a kernel of light. I had to hold on to it. I had to keep it safe. But there was still so much to wade through.

‘Evelina,’ I said. Emilia had skipped into a different room. ‘My father is dead.’

‘I know,’ she said, softly. ‘I saw it on the news. I am sorry, Sophie. He was a good man.’

I swallowed the lump. ‘And Felice, too,’ I said, my voice turning to a rasp.

Her expression changed. ‘Yes.’

‘I was there,’ I whispered. The guilt was flooding through me and the words were tumbling out before I could stop them. I couldn’t stand in her kitchen and pretend to be innocent. I couldn’t lie to her face, not while his child was one room away, humming and skipping, her paper butterflies flying around above me. ‘He was going to kill Luca,’ I said. ‘He was going to kill him. He had the gun pointed at his head, and – and I had to do something. I didn’t set out to do it. I didn’t want to harm him, not really, but he was going to kill Luca, and I had to stop him.’

‘You saved a life,’ she said.

‘I took a life.’

Evelina took a step closer, a glass of lemonade held out in offering. I took it from her, held it tight against my chest. It felt bigger than it was. Another life raft.

She took a sip of her lemonade, swallowed hard and then looked right at me when she said, ‘I have known both Falcones, Sophie. You made the right choice.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, because there was nothing else to say, and I could still hear his daughter singing to herself in the other room.

Evelina nodded. ‘It is a kindness to us,’ she said, quietly. ‘That we no longer have to live in fear of him. And a kindness to Luca, whose life you saved.’

‘I love him.’ My voice was wobbling. ‘I couldn’t lose him.’ Evelina’s face creased, a whisper of empathy lowering her brows. ‘I can see why. Luca is very easy to love.’

‘And he loved you,’ I said, remembering my conversation with Luca about the stars, about possibility, about all the things she made him believe he could be.

And he’ll never know, I realized. He’ll never know you made it out alive.

A rogue tear slid down my face.

Evelina rubbed my arm, her fingers grazing my bullet wound. ‘It’s OK,’ she soothed. ‘I once lived in that world. It is a cruel, unforgiving place, where good men suffer and bad men thrive. It is filled with loss and regret, and guilt. I understand what you’ve been through.’ She waited until I raised my gaze again. ‘It’s been hard for you. For both of us. But you are all the better for being here right now, with us. Will you stay?

For a while?’

Emilia was laughing at something in the other room. It was such a beautiful, foreign sound. I found myself nodding. ‘Yes.’

‘A new year starts tomorrow,’ she said gently. ‘A new beginning.’

But first there was tonight. And I couldn’t get tonight out of my head.





CHAPTER FIFTY


MIDNIGHT




I was sitting beside Evelina Falcone with a half-drunk glass of red wine in my hand, watching the New Year’s Eve countdown on a local news station, when the massacre began back in Chicago.

The screen changed, and footage of fireworks in Colorado was replaced by a BREAKING NEWS bulletin. Bile gathered in my throat as the words flashed across the screen: ‘DISTURBANCE AT CHICAGO MAYOR’S YACHT PARTY’. The cameras were zooming in on a huge white yacht on Lake Michigan, and several police boats were already racing towards it. The scene shifted, and a reporter flashed on-screen, the yacht behind her right shoulder, horror etched across her face.

Evelina and I fell into silence, and I tried my hardest not to rip the skin from the backs of my fingers as I stared, barely blinking, at the final scene of my worst nightmare.

‘MASS SHOOTING ABOARD MAYOR’S YACHT PARTY’ scrolled across the screen.

Evelina covered her mouth with her hands, her scream trapped inside her. I was gripping the seat so hard, my fingernails were ripping into the leather. I stayed like that, glued, as the headlines changed, and slowly, slowly, the death toll mounted. All of them nameless.

I was still staring at the screen when Evelina got to her feet aeons later.

‘Sophie,’ she said, a hand laid on my shoulder. I barely felt it. ‘I think we should call it a night.’

‘Seven,’ I said, my mouth so dry the words croaked out of it. ‘And bodies in the water, too, they think.’

‘Sophie,’ she said.

‘And injured. Lots of injured.’

‘Sophie,’ she said again. ‘Look at me.’

I tore my eyes away from the screen, stared up at her. She was wearing a long pink robe – she had pulled all the threads from the ends, and now they were frayed around her fingers. ‘This is part of your new life, Sophie. Learning to walk away. You can’t look back. We can’t look back. No matter how much we want to.’

Her mouth was moving but all I could hear was the word ‘seven’. Seven. Seven dead already. Seven was a big number. Too big. One was too big.