Inferno (Blood for Blood #2) Page 15

  I ate what I could manage, tasting nothing but ash in my mouth. The coffee was too bitter; the juice was too red. My mother was picking at her plate, dissecting her eggs as I cleared my plate and excused myself.

  It was overcast outside, but the humidity was unbearable. Even indoors, I felt stifled by it. It frizzed the ends of my hairs, sticking them to my neck. My T-shirt was warm; it clung too tightly around my arms.

  Millie came by in the afternoon.

  ‘Soph!’ Her face broke, and she surged into me, wrapping her arms around my neck and knocking me backwards into the hallway. ‘I can’t believe they actually did it, I can’t believe they went through with it.’

  ‘I know.’ The thing is, though, I could.

  She looked utterly deflated. I had done this to her. I had pulled her down with me, into a murky, unforgiving world. Now we were like zombie versions of ourselves, trying to climb back out. But it’s hard to forget the things you’ve seen once you’ve seen them, it’s hard not to wonder about the people you’re trying to leave behind, once you’ve gotten to know them. If the blood war had begun, with deaths on both sides already, then who knew who would be next? It’s hard to ignore it, even if they’re liars. Even if they’re assassins.

  I ushered Millie into the sitting room, where we sank into the couch. She brought her legs up and curled her feet underneath her. ‘I can’t stop thinking about it. We should have done more.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have believed Nic. He’d already betrayed me by showing up at Eden in the first place.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ she said, her voice quiet. ‘I believed him too.’

  ‘I shouldn’t have let him take that red card from me.’ And that was the awful reality – they wouldn’t have come if I hadn’t slipped up that night in the parking lot.

  ‘Nic took it from you,’ said Millie.

  ‘And I let him.’ I thought of our kiss, the dark passion, the cloying sense of wrongness in it. ‘I’ve been an idiot. I feel like I’ve been waiting my whole life for something to happen to me, something to shock me into living. I couldn’t wait to fall for someone, to feel loved. But this is not what I expected. This is not what I wanted. Everything is so messed up.’

  Millie was silent for a while, chewing over her words. She leant forward and knitted her hands together. ‘People rarely end up with their first love. It’s, like, this stupid fairy-tale myth that they peddle to you in Disney movies. Did you know Snow White is, like, fourteen? If I ended up marrying my fourteen-year-old crush, I’d be stuck with Tom Peterson and his stupid bobble head. You’re allowed to make mistakes.’

  ‘I got involved with an assassin. And I guess I never realized how messed up he was until he made me that promise and then killed Sara anyway. She was his cousin, Mil. I can’t get my head around it. How could I have been so blind?’

  Millie shrugged, her eyes trained on a spot on the floor. ‘I went out with Dom. The warning signs were there for me too. But I don’t regret it, Soph. I learnt from it.’

  I raised my eyebrows. ‘What did you learn?’

  She huffed a sigh. ‘That I’m painfully shallow.’

  Her candidness roused a small smile, a spark of amusement inside the darkness that surrounded us. ‘I wish I could tease you about that, kettle.’

  ‘Sorry, pot,’ she said, her smile as small as mine.

  I flopped back into the couch and looked up at the flecked paint on the ceiling as I voiced the realization that had been unravelling in the pit of my stomach. ‘I don’t think I ever really knew Nic at all,’ I said quietly. ‘If I really understood him, I would never have walked out of that house and left Sara behind. I romanticized him,’ I admitted, the painful truth almost choking the words out of me. ‘And it killed her.’

  Millie tugged my arm so that I looked at her. ‘They killed her. If we had tried to do more, there might have been three bodies in that lake and not one, and that’s the hard truth, Soph.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Millie’s tone turned low and dark. ‘And there’s something else, too.’

  I could feel my face going pale, the faint prickles of nausea from earlier coming back in full force. ‘What?’

  ‘When I was at work earlier, I found the safe. After what you told me Jack said in Eden, I knew there had to be something to it. So I went looking for it.’

  ‘We’ve always had a safe.’

  Millie shook her head. ‘Not that safe. A different one. A bigger one. It’s in those giant cabinets above the stove in the kitchen – you know, the ones that are really high up?’

  I nodded. We never used them – they were too hard to reach.

  ‘I wouldn’t have noticed the actual safe except it’s hidden behind a sheet of lino inside the cupboard. It was peeling at the corners so I pulled it away. It’s massive, Soph, and old. It’s all fancy around the edges too, so you just know it’s chock full of stuff that shouldn’t be in there. I’m guessing you need a big fancy key to get in, from the look of the lock. We don’t have any like that at the diner.’

  ‘He probably carries it with him.’ My head felt very light all of a sudden, but I didn’t really feel surprised. Jack had said there was a safe – only a small, naïve part of me had thought he meant the one we always used. Of course there was another one – a secret one, full of things only he knew about. ‘That’s what the Falcones are watching the diner for.’

  Millie nodded. ‘I’d bet anything that whatever Jack needs is still in there. That’s what he wanted you to help him with. That’s what he’s bargained to Donata.’

  ‘I don’t have the key … or the desire to help him,’ I added. ‘He’s poison.’

  ‘Have you heard from him?’ Millie was looking at me with cautious interest now. She was a little paler than usual. Her hair was greasy. Millie’s hair was never usually greasy.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you think you will?’

  We both knew the answer. I thought about that crimson card, about the stuff he’d yelled at me at Eden. He knew I was the one who gave their position away, but how could he have known it was an accident? ‘Yeah,’ I said, pushing my answer through a sigh. ‘He’ll be back.’

  Millie’s eyes grew wide with fear. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘The question isn’t what I’m going to do. It’s what he’s going to do.’

  I remembered the clawing feeling of Donata Marino’s grip on my arm, how she had dug in as though she never wanted to let go. How Jack’s anger at my betrayal had surged through the crowds that night. I remembered Sara Marino, nose pressed to the grass at Felice’s mansion as it glistened with her blood. Images of her waterlogged corpse pressed against my brain, demanding to be seen. I already knew what my course of action would be when Jack came back.

  Deny deny deny.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  THE CONVERSATION

  The Kardashians played on a mindless loop in the background as all the things we had seen in the last week choked the conversation from us. There was more to come, and yet there was no predicting any of it. All we could do was stay away and hope against hope that when the storm came, it would pass us by.

  The house phone rang, and my mother’s footsteps sounded in the hallway. I strained to listen, noting the rarity of the phone ever ringing at all these days. A new client? I hoped so. My mother dropped her voice, so I lowered the volume on the TV. Millie was scrolling mindlessly through Instagram on her phone, looking at pictures of someone else’s food.

  ‘… left it all to me and it’s not fair.’

  OK, definitely not a client, then. She was never usually rude to clients. In fact, my mother, interminably polite, was really only rude to one person.

  I muted the TV.

  ‘… just up and leave like it’s nothing!’

  Her voice had risen, her pitch rousing Millie from her scrolling. She snapped her head up and I put my finger to my lips.

  ‘I have to clean this up again, and how am I supposed to do that? There’
s no money.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ Millie mouthed.

  I shrugged, keeping my finger at my lips.

  My mother dropped her voice again, and the words that reached me this time were disjointed, plucked out of sentences so I couldn’t find their meaning.

  ‘… since that night … normal … the truth … promise when I thought … any more.’ I got up and crossed to the door, easing it open a notch. I still had to strain, but the words came together now, and I held my breath so I could hear them all.

  ‘… not fair on either of us. I have to.’

  I peeked out. My mother was standing in the hallway. She was leaning against the bathroom door, one hand twined in her hair, the other clutching the phone. ‘Fine!’ she hissed. ‘But it’s not right. I don’t think it’s right!’ She dropped her head and brought her hand to her eyes, rubbing them. ‘I’ll send her,’ she said. ‘But we’re not done talking about this. Not even close.’

  By the time she had hung up, I was standing in the hallway, my eyes burning holes in the back of her head. She turned around and instead of surprise, there was defeat in her reaction.

  ‘Sophie.’ Her arms fell limply to her sides. ‘Oh, Sophie, I’m so tired.’

  I took a cautious step towards her. ‘Was that Jack?’

  She blinked dumbly. ‘That was your father. He wants you to go see him tomorrow.’

  Surprise bubbled in my mind. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he knows what happened with the Falcones,’ she answered flatly, frown lines rippling along her forehead as she conceded, ‘I told him.’

  ‘Why?’ My horror seeped through my voice. Why would she do that, knowing there was nothing he could do to change it? Why worry him needlessly when she was so worried herself? And then I pinched myself as guilt wrapped around me. She wasn’t coping, that was why. And once upon a time, he had been her rock. Maybe he still was, even though animosity lingered between them. Maybe she still needed him just as much as I needed her.

  She raked her hair away from her face. Her defences were down and she was too tired to put them back up. ‘Because I wanted to make him see.’

  ‘See what?’

  Her gaze shifted past me to where the sun was pushing through the hall window. ‘That everything isn’t OK,’ she told me plainly. ‘That it hasn’t been OK for a long time.’

  ‘No,’ I said, quietly, feeling a strange sense of relief at unveiling the truth we had been so carefully avoiding. I didn’t realize how badly I had been craving it. ‘No, everything isn’t OK.’

  But, why, I wondered, did he want to see me and not her? I studied my mother’s slumped frame, and saw in her what he probably had heard in her voice – weakness. It’s me, I thought. I’m the one who has to fix this.

  As if a switch had flicked inside her, my mother snapped her head up and her gaze became hard and shining. ‘You know, despite everything that’s happened, I love your father very much,’ she said, her words woven through a heavy sigh. ‘I love the life he built for us. I love the daughter he gave me. I love our family.’

  ‘That’s good …’ I ventured, ineptly. She hadn’t spoken so openly or tenderly about him in a long time. The words were warm, but there was something beneath them … a barb, a sadness.

  ‘I miss him, Sophie,’ she admitted. ‘I miss him every day.’

  Tears spiked behind my eyes, her sudden candour jarring. ‘Me too, Mom. I miss him too.’ I miss us. I miss our family.

  ‘But sometimes …’ She shook her head, slowly, her gaze drawn to the ground between us, to another time and place, to something I couldn’t access. ‘Sometimes I feel like I might just explode.’

  She turned from me abruptly and stalked through the kitchen and into the garden, where she disappeared into her flowers.

  I watched her go. I had come to know that feeling all too well.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PRISON

  The bus to Stateville Correctional Center was airless, the seats dank with years of enmeshed body odour. I curled up by a window near the back and flicked through the playlists on my iPod. I listened to Joshua Radin and watched Chicago fade into remoteness.

  I arrived early in the afternoon. My hair was flat against my head where I had leant against the window to sleep. I wound it into a ponytail. My clothes were sticky. The humidity hadn’t broken yet and the heat outside was stifling. The sky was overcast, a thick blanket of blinding white pressing down on me. The air was charged, the ends of my hair floating with static.

  A storm was coming.

  Inside Stateville, the meeting room smelt like disinfectant. Three prison guards lined the walls, watching with glazed indifference. I tried not to catch their eyes, afraid they might see through me and find out the things I knew.

  My father shuffled in to meet me. He was a little slumped over, like the act of keeping his head up required too much energy. He was still wiry and thin, with greying hair that flicked out behind his ears and dipped into big, grey eyes. They used to be bluer, like the ocean.

  He lifted his head and his smile lit up his features. For a passing moment, he could transform himself into the father I used to know outside of these walls. ‘Sophie, it’s so good to see you.’

  I wasn’t allowed to hug him, so I struggled with what to do with my hands. I settled on an awkward wave/salute.

  We sat down. I was studying his face, his neck, his hands – any part of him that I could see – searching for signs of injury. He was studying me just as closely. It threw me a little. The bruises on my face had gone now, and the swelling around my nose had disappeared. I was paler than usual, but other than that, my injuries no longer marked me. Still, he knew about them now, so it made sense that he would try and search them out.

  There was a crack running down the back of my plastic chair. It dug into me and I shifted, trying to get comfortable. There was no point. I folded my hands on my lap, searching for the right words. How should I begin? How much should I say?

  The discomfort on his face mirrored mine and I almost smiled at how similar we were. He dipped his head and gave me a look. The room around us faded, until it was just the two of us, secured in our own little bubble. He dropped his facade and his face crumpled.

  His words tumbled out. ‘I know what happened, Soph. Your mom told me.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ I said, lacing my fingers together in front of me. ‘Jack’s an asshole.’

  Grief etched itself into the planes of his face, pulling them down until he looked old and weary. ‘I’m so sorry. That’s all I can say. I am sorry all of this has happened to you. I’m sorry your life was in danger and I wasn’t there to help you. I’ll never forgive myself.’

  Something settled deep inside me, burning, and I had the sudden urge to clutch at my stomach and rip the feeling out.

  ‘You don’t have to say sorry,’ I said, sounding angrier than I had meant to. But I was angry with him, about what had happened, about the mess he had made for all of us. ‘It didn’t have anything to do with you.’

  He dropped his head into his hands. ‘You’ve been through too much. And I wasn’t there. I’m never there.’

  I looked at the crown of his head, where tiny white hairs were beginning to sprout beneath the grey and brown. ‘Dad, I’m fine.’ No thanks to you. I didn’t say it though, I couldn’t be cruel.

  He lifted his head. ‘You’re not fine. And neither is your mother. She’s terrified, and I don’t blame her. I’m trying to give her advice but she won’t listen to me. She’s angry at me, Soph. And she has every right to be, but she’s not coping and I’m worried about her.’

  ‘You and me both.’

  I asked the question that needed to be asked, the one flashing at the front of my brain. ‘Have you heard from the man of the hour?’

  ‘Not yet.’ My father’s breath whistled through his nose. When he spoke again, his words quivered with anger. ‘The things he’s done, the position he’s put you and your mother in. He was supposed to keep you safe in my
absence, not risk your lives.’

  ‘Did you know?’ My fingernails were digging into my hands, making crescent shapes in my skin. ‘Did you know what he was up to all that time?’

  ‘No.’ I had barely finished my question before he snapped out his answer. ‘Of course I didn’t know.’

  ‘Did Mom fill you in on everything?’

  ‘As much as she could,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to talk about that, I want to talk about my girls.’

  ‘Well, I want to talk about the drugs and the Golden Triangle Gang and everything else that’s put us in hot water. I want to talk about everything you missed.’ So I did talk about it. I told my father everything that had happened up until the warehouse shoot-out – I told him about Jack’s shadiness, about the drugs and the gang he had been a part of, how he walked my mother into the warehouse, how he stood over me and tried to kill the Falcone underboss. I talked until my voice nearly ran out. I talked until I was sure I had toppled Jack over in my father’s mind, until I was sure he saw the cold, hard truth about his little brother.

  Then I let up, breathing long and deep, as a small weight shifted inside me and I felt less bound up than before.

  My father, who had been listening intently, unblinking as he watched me, straightened in his seat. ‘Soph, I promise I’ll make him pay for endangering you and your mom,’ he said. ‘I’m so disappointed in him – in his choices, in the path he’s chosen. I should have cut him off long ago.’ Compared to all the words I had just hurled at the space between us, his answer felt like nothing, but I could see how his face had changed, how everything in his brain was slotting into different places. He was completely wrung out. He scrubbed his hands against his forehead. ‘But I can’t get to him. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.’

  That was the moment. Indecision flickered inside me. To tell or not to tell. To stir or not to stir. But I needed guidance. A plan for when Jack came back – I needed my father to intervene so I wouldn’t have to. So I decided to give him this chance to step up and protect us, the way he’d said he would. ‘I know where he is,’ I said, without batting an eyelid. I sat back in my chair, instinctively pulling myself away from him in case the force of his reaction was too great. ‘Jack’s with the Marino crime family.’