Inferno (Blood for Blood #2) Page 18

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m always right.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Smart-ass.’

  ‘So, are we even now?’ he asked. He was watching the street again – country fields blurring into each other on either side of us, while trees jostled for space overhead. ‘For you saving me in the warehouse, I mean. I figured the doughnut might make a good thank-you.’

  ‘Oh, no, no,’ I said, flopping back against the seat. ‘Correct etiquette demands a bouquet of flowers. A doughnut, I’m sorry to say, simply won’t cut it.’

  Luca’s exhale whistled through his nose. ‘It’s an impossibility,’ he said, his words filled with mock regret. ‘Surely the sprinkles made it a worthy thank-you gift?’

  I shook my head against the leather. ‘I don’t make the rules, Luca. And if we’re being technical, you really only gave me half a doughnut.’ I grinned, revelling in his frown.

  ‘OK then.’ The car jolted to the side and Luca slammed on the brakes, pulling us into a mud ditch at the edge of the street. My body strained against the seatbelt as I lurched forwards. He pulled the parking brake and flung the door open.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I half-shrieked, undoing my seatbelt and whipping my head around at the same time. The place was deserted. There were no cars behind us – just fields and trees and muck on either side of us.

  Luca was already out of the car, striding towards the field beside us. ‘Wait there,’ he called over his shoulder. He ducked through the fence and got lost in the grass. It brushed against his knees as he walked through it, bending low and scouring the ground. Clad completely in black, and with a switchblade sticking out of his back pocket, Luca ran his fingers along the grass.

  He was completely and utterly out of his natural environment. And it didn’t bother him at all.

  I waited in the car with his keys and his phone and his gun and the radio still on, and tried to figure out just what the hell he was looking for on this random dirt road.

  He ducked back into the car a couple of minutes later, his cheeks tinged with the faintest circles of pink. He was holding a small bunch of flowers in his hand, dirt still clinging to some of their ends, heads drooping against one another where he had grouped them together in his fist.

  He held them across the armrest between us. ‘Here,’ he said, not quite looking at me.

  A bouquet. For me.

  My jaw unhinged. I took them from him, my fingers scrabbling against his palm as he released them and I tried to keep the mashed bunch of blue flowers together.

  ‘Thanks,’ I finally managed, rotating them, checking that they were really real. ‘You got me violets.’

  ‘Is that what they are?’ He was already easing the car back on to the street. I caught the hint of his smile. He so knew what they were. Nerd.

  Something swelled in my chest. They were half-wilted, ripped from the earth and strewn with stray blades of grass that were probably covered with tiny bugs, but they were the first bouquet of flowers I had ever got. And they were beautiful.

  ‘I earned these,’ I said, beaming at my bounty as I held them in my lap.

  Luca nodded at the road, his lips stretching to reveal a flash of white teeth. ‘You definitely did.’

  The start of the afternoon – the prison, the highway scare, the gun, the terror – faded with the fields behind us.

  Luca dropped me off at the end of my street just after six p.m. I scooped my flowers up and hopped out, turning to wave them at him. ‘Thanks for the ride.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  I gestured down the street, in the direction of reality as it came creeping back in. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you have … diner business to attend to.’

  He shook his head, his expression turning sombre as his seriousness returned with thoughts of his family. ‘I don’t watch the diner, Sophie.’ He sighed, just a little, and his brow furrowed. ‘My responsibilities are closer to home.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, realizing that Luca’s presence in Cedar Hill really was just a favour to me. An act of kindness that had saved me from melting on that bus. ‘Thank you for going so far out of your way for me.’

  He raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t have to seem so surprised.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I teased, pretending to consider him. ‘Maybe you’re not so bad after all.’

  He leant across the seat, jabbing his finger in the air. ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it. I have a reputation to uphold, you know.’

  ‘Oh, you mean the whole asshole thing?’

  ‘And speaking of reputations, don’t do anything stupid,’ he added, leaning back into his seat and releasing the parking brake. ‘Fight your natural urges.’

  I frowned at him. ‘And it almost ended so well.’

  He shrugged as I shut the door. Through the open window I heard him say, ‘Well, then it wouldn’t really be us, would it?’

  He didn’t wait for my answer and I didn’t stand watching his car as he took off, back to Evelina and the underworld. My thoughts skipped to the safe and all the secrets it held, to his brothers who were lurking somewhere nearby. I turned for home, my bouquet of blue violets held tightly in my hand.

  There was a time, not too long ago, when I never would have expected eleven flowers and half a doughnut to lift my mood so high. But that was before Jack, before the diner, before the Marinos, before the Falcones. That was before my father told me to get the hell away from Cedar Hill.

  My footsteps slowed as I realized that to honour my father’s wishes, I would have to ask my mother to do the impossible. I was caught between them – between everything – and all the roads were hazy and grey, and I didn’t know which one to choose. The sky was grey too, heavy with a distant rolling storm, and it pressed down on me as I walked, suffocating me slowly under its heat.

  The violets were electric blue, and I held them tightly. I was still holding them like a perverse life raft for my sanity when I shut the front door of my house and found myself face-to-face with Donata Marino. She was perched, like a Gucci-fied vulture, on the threshold of our kitchen.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  ALLEGIANCE

  In the giant game of human ping-pong that was fast becoming my life, Elena Falcone held one bat, Donata Marino held the other, and I was a small, white ball, whirring back and forth.

  And I was so over all this.

  My mother was hovering behind Donata, her hands curling around the kitchen sink edge as she leant against it. Donata was rigid, squared shoulders cutting her neck in half, hands fisted at her sides as she stood between us. She wore all black for her daughter. Sara Marino had been dead less than a week.

  My body deflated in a mixture of shock and fear. The flowers went limp at my side, their blue heads drooping towards the floor. I forced myself to look at Donata as memories of her bony grip at Eden brought a phantom sting to my wrists. She moved aside, granting me entrance to the kitchen.

  ‘Well, here you are, Ms Gracewell.’ She lingered over my name as though it burnt her mouth. Her darkened lids fell heavy over bloodshot eyes.

  ‘Sweetheart.’ My mother said the word on an inhale. Her brow was creased, the sun-tanned skin rippling. She looked like she was trying to figure out a riddle.

  I put the flowers on the countertop beside me, tossing them with forced casualness, the irrational part of me worrying that Donata might sense where they had come from, who they had come from. In that moment, those flowers felt as incriminating as a giant neon sign on my forehead flashing FALCONE SYMPATHIZER.

  The atmosphere was strange – loaded, like the entire room was tilted on a knifepoint, waiting for the plunge into something darker.

  ‘Mom?’ My fingers clutched my phone inside my pocket. I was already unlocking it. ‘What’s going on? Did she hurt you?’

  She shook her head. The circles under her eyes were moistened. ‘No, sweetheart … she was just telling me about …’

  ‘About my daughter,’ said Donata, peering at me through black-rimmed eyes. ‘I was tell
ing your mother about what the Falcones did to my nineteen-year-old girl.’

  ‘Dreadful,’ whispered my mother. ‘Those boys … it’s just dreadful.’

  ‘I was telling your mother how it might have happened to you …’ Donata paused, calculated, waiting … and then, ‘how it still might.’

  ‘Oh, Sophie,’ my mother said, falling head over heels into Donata’s manipulation. She pressed a hand to her chest. ‘I’d lose my heart.’

  ‘You’re not going to lose anything,’ I told her calmly. ‘I’m sorry about your daughter,’ I added, speaking to Donata and being careful to keep my features in check. I didn’t want her to know I had seen Sara after Eden that night – how close I had been to saving her. How dreadfully I had failed. ‘But I can take care of myself.’

  Donata waved my words away, a manicured hand flying between us. My mother shrank further into herself. ‘Let me cut to the chase. I’m here to tell you what the Marinos expect from you, Sophie.’

  ‘The safe in the diner,’ I answered, without even blinking.

  ‘The money is no longer your concern,’ she replied, unfazed by my knowledge of the safe. ‘Your uncle thought you might remove it for us – but I think trusting you with that task given your current attitude is not such a good idea.’

  So it was money. It must have been a whole lot, considering how hell-bent they were on getting back in there.

  ‘We intend to retrieve the contents of the safe ourselves.’ Her lips peeled away, revealing a line of yellowed teeth – a wolf waiting to pounce. ‘It will be more … opportune this way.’

  I narrowed my eyes. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means we will no longer back down from Falcone threats. We are going to hang them with their own noose.’

  The explanation might have been vague but the image was horrifyingly vivid. I tried to blink it away, to school my features so she wouldn’t know how hard my heart was thumping, how it felt like it was climbing into my throat. I shouldn’t care. I shouldn’t show it.

  Her smile was tight, pinching the hollows in her cheeks. ‘Their soldati are watching the diner. We know exactly how and where to get to them. When we take the safe, we’ll take the heads of the Falcones who stand guard over it, too.’ She inhaled sharply, her face reflecting some imagined glory. ‘We are ready for them.’

  ‘An ambush,’ I whispered. I thought of Eden, of all the pain and rage it had caused when the Falcones had made their move. I imagined the scene unfolding: a couple of Falcones outnumbered and trapped at the diner with Donata and her Marino soldiers surrounding them. Dom’s arrogance. Nic’s blind determination. I shook my head, my eyes growing wide at her polluted scheme. How could she roll the dice again, and so soon?

  ‘It’ll be a bloodbath.’

  ‘And you’re going to help us,’ she returned calmly, as though it had already been decided. ‘You’re their weakness.’

  ‘Me?’ I said, dread draining the colour from my cheeks. ‘How?’

  Her smile grew, shifting the sharp planes in her face until she appeared more skeleton than human. ‘You’ll see.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t see.’ I pushed away from the counter and stood in the middle of the kitchen, heaving. ‘I won’t help you.’

  She knitted her arms across her chest. She seemed so infuriatingly sure when she said, ‘You will.’

  I shook my head. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘This will be your task. When we come back for you, you’re coming with us. You’ll help lure them into our trap.’

  ‘I don’t want a task,’ I said firmly. Everything inside me told me to run, to hide. Everything was darkness and Donata, rage and ice, expectations and consequences. I could feel the walls closing in, my mother’s muted panic pressing against me.

  ‘If you do as I tell you when the time comes, you stake your allegiance with us and we’ll take care of you.’ Her eyes flicked to my mother. ‘You’ll be safe. Provided for.’

  My mother hung her head. So she was shaming her. She knew about our money troubles, about my absent father, and she was using it as a weapon against us.

  ‘If you don’t kill them, they’ll kill you.’ She was still looking at my mother. ‘It’s only a matter of time now Jack is in the fold.’

  ‘What’s he offering you?’ I pressed. ‘Are you really so easily bought?’

  The ghost of something sinister passed over Donata’s face. ‘If you fail to do what I’m telling you, then your allegiance is with them.’ She snapped her fingers. ‘And we will kill you.’

  The flowers pulsed in my peripheral vision. I could never hurt the Falcones. Not in a thousand nightmares. ‘Can’t you just leave me out of this?’

  Donata looked at my mother. ‘It is my experience that in matters of life and death, everyone should know what’s at stake.’

  My mother raised her head. Her eyes were rimmed with red. She looked at Donata, shook her head, and sighed.

  I didn’t say anything. I wouldn’t lie to her and agree to her demands, and yet I was afraid of refusing her. I needed her to leave so I could gather myself. So I could snap my mother out of whatever day-coma she was in. So I could find a way to warn Luca. I remembered Sara’s advice to me in Eden – I had to pretend. I had to pretend so Donata would slacken her grip just enough so I could breathe. So I could think.

  Donata shifted and a gun appeared in her hand. Before I could move, she was pressing it into my mother’s jugular, lifting her to her tiptoes as she bent her backwards across the sink. I froze, a half-scream jolting from me.

  My mother choked out a whimper.

  Donata cocked the trigger, her eyes boring into mine as I stood stock-still across from her. ‘How high do I need to make the stakes, Sophie?’

  ‘Don’t,’ I pleaded. ‘I’ll do it. I’ll do what you want.’

  Donata pushed the gun harder and my mother choked again. Her eyes were bulging, the capillaries angry and red. Donata leant over her, and when they were nose-to-nose, she said, as calm as if they were old friends, ‘Remember your promise, Celine.’

  ‘I’ll help you,’ I said. ‘I’ll do what you ask. Just don’t hurt her.’

  Donata pulled back, slipped her gun into the pocket of her dress and smoothed the stray black tendrils around her forehead. My mother fell forwards, her hands circling her throat as she gasped for air. ‘You are a cruel woman,’ she heaved.

  Donata straightened the sleeves of her dress. ‘I have to be.’

  ‘Leave my house,’ my mother said. ‘You’ve made your point.’

  I followed Donata into the hallway, making sure she really was leaving. Her heels click-clacked with purpose, the sound pulling me back to the memory of her sister, Elena, as she thundered down the Falcone corridor at Evelina. What a twisted destiny the two of them had secured for themselves.

  Donata turned on the threshold, her back towards the heaving sky and the heat pummelling against us from the driveway. We stared at each other. ‘We’ll be back for you.’

  My stomach lurched, but I regarded her calmly. ‘When?’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘I’ll be ready,’ I lied. My mind was whirring with all the ways I could beat her. I wouldn’t let her win. I wouldn’t be her pawn.

  Her voice turned weary, the pitch dropping as her shoulders dipped. She exhaled a sigh and her mask shifted, just a little. ‘We’re not the enemies, Sophie.’

  The air was too warm; I could barely feel it as I sucked it in and forced another lie. ‘I know.’

  She lowered her voice then, and her words fell into something else – a plea. ‘Girl, you might think you love one of them, but that is the Falcone game. Don’t make the mistake my sister made. Angelo Falcone might have once been a shining star but he was violent and cruel. Do you know what he gifted to my sister on the night of their wedding? My father’s death. Elena and my father never saw eye to eye, and her elopement with Angelo Falcone didn’t help things, but to kill a girl’s father simply to remove a nuisance from he
r life? That’s no gift. Yet she was so wrapped up in his glittering eyes and his wealth, she fell more in love with him for it. You can curl your lip because your uncle and I deal in the business of drugs, but the game of murder for murder’s sake is a twisted one. The path is dark and there is no going back.

  ‘The next time you think about those boys, ask yourself how many fathers, mothers, sons and daughters they have killed. Ask yourself who dumped my daughter’s body into that lake? Who carved “La nostra vendetta” across her heart?’ Her voice cracked and she stopped abruptly, covering her mouth with her hand and pressing her lids tight shut. ‘Mia bella bimba.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘You will help us destroy them,’ she interrupted, ‘and I will forgive you for the mystery of how Valentino Falcone knew where to send his soldati the night my daughter was taken from me.’ She caught me by the wrist, pulling me into her until her perfume rolled over me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, breathlessly. ‘I promise.’

  ‘For Sara.’ For a passing second, she wore her grief plainly on her face – it aged her, made her human, and I felt something squirm inside me at the sight. She was being ravaged by her loss, and it was driving her to bloodshed and madness.

  My throat was starting to quiver, making the words thick and heavy as I forced them out. ‘For Sara,’ I said.

  ‘You must see sense.’ She placed her other hand on my shoulder and squeezed it, as though to strengthen me, but all I felt was frightened and full of guilt. ‘Fidelitate Coniuncti.’

  She turned from me and charged into the heavy evening, taking her place in her blacked-out convoy. It had appeared from nowhere but I knew it had been there, somewhere close by, all along. The Marinos wouldn’t send their queen anywhere unaided. I wondered if Jack was with her now, sucking up to her like a lapdog.

  A hand brushed across my back as my mother came to my side.

  I watched as Donata drove away from us, my heart hammering violently in my chest. ‘What’s “Fidelitate Coniuncti”?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweetheart.’