Inferno (Blood for Blood #2) Read online

  He didn’t deny it. He didn’t say anything at all. He wasn’t finished with Jack, and his feelings for me weren’t going to change that. He would never choose me over his family.

  ‘Goodbye, then,’ I said.

  ‘Goodbye, Sophie,’ he whispered unsteadily. ‘Bella mia.’

  He pulled away from me, out the door, and by the time I made it into the hallway he was already disappearing into Luca’s room, back to his brothers, back to their world.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE CUT

  Aside from the obvious injuries – a swollen nose, some thorny ribs and a general pervading sense of my own mortality – Jack’s beef with the Falcones had gifted me something else, too, only I didn’t find out about it until I got home.

  Post-traumatic Stress Disorder: post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a mental health condition that’s triggered by a terrifying event — either experiencing it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares and severe anxiety, as well as uncontrollable thoughts about the event.

  Great. I stared at my faint reflection in the laptop screen as the words settled in. I looked like a very sad, very sleep-deprived panda.

  Everything had changed, and being back in my house and sleeping in my own bed only made that more apparent. Sophie Gracewell, one-time expert at sweeping things under the rug and reigning queen of the ignorance-is-bliss hypothesis, had disappeared. Or been killed, I guess, given the circumstances.

  Before Nic, before everything bad that had happened, I was just sort of there, existing, but not really living. Everyone around me had their lives and hobbies and friends and passions, and I had a dead-end job, a dead-end future and a friend who would go so much further than me after school. I was Sophie, but that’s all I was. Bored, aimless, mostly alone. And then suddenly I wasn’t. I was part of something bigger, a player in a world that lived and breathed passion and danger, and it was wrong, and scary, but it was more than just existing, and now that I had experienced it, it was hard to shut off. It was hard to leave it behind.

  Every noise made me jump, every screaming nightmare demolished my throat, every pleasant moment was squashed by harder, stronger memories of darker ones. I couldn’t stop to smell a flower without my brain going: Hey, this is a nice rose, but also, remember that time you saw a guy get shot in the chest? I couldn’t even watch Aladdin any more. Yeah, this genie sure is charismatic but on a slightly different note, do you think blood is stickier when it’s warm and still inside a person’s body, or when it’s drying all over your hands an hour or so later?

  When I stood in my room amidst old DVDs and books and clothes and all the other comforts of my old life, I felt completely unlike myself. Something new had taken hold of me. It began as a pinch, an uncomfortable twinge in the pit of my stomach that twisted into something darker. It wasn’t my ribs. It was fear. I was afraid, and the fear was relentless.

  And the solution?

  If you believe you are suffering from PTSD, we advise you to seek help from a qualified health professional.

  The solution was to tell a therapist about the night my mother and I almost got shot in the head by a bunch of trigger-happy mobsters, and the lingering irrational urge to make out with the boy who had tried to kill my uncle directly after I stuck my hands inside his brother’s chest cavity to save his life.

  I’d rather go on a picnic with Hitler.

  Instead I replaced my preferred hobby of watching Netflix and eating ramen noodles with a couple of new games called shadow-watching and street-staring. You don’t really notice how many shadows there are in the world until you start being afraid of them. I spent hours at the windows looking at shapes go by, watching pedestrians to see if they were watching me. I studied every car on the street with manic interest. After a time I saw the same one cropping up over and over – a blacked-out Mercedes with black rims. I convinced myself someone was watching me. When I went outside to check, it was gone, rolling down the street and disappearing from view – whoever it was, they were just going about their life.

  I missed my father more than I thought possible; his absence was like a physical ache in my chest – this haunting sadness that I couldn’t shake, this face that was never far from my mind. I needed him and he wasn’t there. Sometimes, the anger surfaced and I would curse him – how could he have left us? How could we possibly face this without him?

  I started to dream of him – of that fateful Valentine’s night a year and a half ago. My mother’s screams rose up through the floorboards, and before she crashed into my room with news of what he had done, I heard her, somewhere far away, shouting in a voice thinned by hysteria: ‘He got him. He got him!’ Was my mind playing tricks on me, or was this fresh new horror lifting the veil on all the other things I had squashed down to the bottom of my memories? ‘He shot him!’ And then it was my voice, screaming into a void inside an impossibly expanding warehouse, looking for Jack in the blackness and knowing he was already gone.

  During the day, I called every number I had ever had for my uncle. I left messages with old acquaintances. But there was nothing. The Falcones were gone, too. Millie said their house was deserted now. There was no sign of them ever having existed in Cedar Hill, nothing except for the memories seared into my brain.

  And something else, too.

  One morning, when I had beaten the sunrise, and was pacing around my room, attempting half-heartedly to tidy it, I came across the shorts I had been wearing that night at the warehouse. I held up the frayed denim, and Luca’s switchblade dropped on to my bed.

  Oh. I picked it up and traced the letters. Gianluca, March 20th. It was heavy, the crimson falcon swooping across the handle like it was going to unstick itself and take flight. I sat down on my bed and stared at it. I had his switchblade. The proof that he had set me free against his family’s wishes – that he, of everyone, had done the right thing in that one moment. I had one last piece of the Falcones sitting in the palm of my hand.

  It felt good. I had an unexpected surge of confidence holding it. I guess it reminded me of the confidence he’d had in me. Plus, it was a weapon, and a weapon meant protection. I slid the pad of my index finger along the sharp edge of the knife, revelling in the feeling of metal on skin, the quiet sureness it gave me.

  I started to carry the switchblade with me everywhere, like it was some depraved comfort blanket. I ate in the kitchen with my mother, the knife tucked into my shorts, pressing against my hip. At night I kept it under my pillow, curled in my fingers. When Millie came over I thumbed its edges inside my pocket. In moments of idleness I flicked it open, measuring its sharpness against my palm.

  I thought about using it, wondered what it would feel like to pierce someone’s flesh. Sometimes I really freaked myself out. I used to fantasize about moving away from Cedar Hill and starting a new life as just an unknown girl in a big city, working on film sets, holding a boom mic, adjusting a shot, or helping to run lines with Liam Hemsworth while he fell hopelessly in love with me. Now I was fantasizing about chopping Felice Falcone’s finger off and laughing in his face. God.

  It happened almost ten days after leaving the hospital. I had been looking out the window – counting the black cars that rolled too slowly down my street, my eyes vibrating from exhausted concentration. Now I was nearing the edge of unconsciousness, where I knew sleep would come whether I willed it to or not.

  My mother hovered in the doorway to my room, a mug cupped between her hands. She raised it in offering.

  ‘No, thanks.’ My words slurred.

  ‘It’s chicken noodle.’ She bit down on her smile to keep it from shaking. ‘You haven’t had anything all day.’

  Hadn’t I? Had she? ‘So tired.’

  She edged into the room, setting the soup down on the nightstand. ‘Sophie, please. I’m worried about you.’

  I shook my head, squishing my cheek into my pillow. ‘Don’t be.’

  It was almost like a ritual: Won’t you eat a little more, Sophie? Won�
��t you have a bite of this? Do you want to talk about it with someone? You’re not trying, Sophie. Please just try.

  Her blue eyes were wired with red. She seemed tired, too. I felt her hand on my arm. ‘Will you drink some of this at least? It will help you to sleep well.’

  ‘You have it,’ I said, feeling myself sink. ‘Please.’

  She stroked my hair, her voice quiet. ‘I will. I’ll have some too.’

  I couldn’t lift my head even if I wanted to. My lids drooped shut and I fell, down, down, down into the blackness that was waiting to envelop me. The shadows swooped. The gunshots rang out.

  I woke with a start. It was dark outside but my curtains were still open. The moon was high and full, the stars casting streaks inside my room. Everything was silent. I wasn’t screaming. I wasn’t sweating. I hadn’t woken myself up and my mother wasn’t there, fretting by my bedside like she usually was.

  She’s asleep, I realized with such a flood of relief it took me another second to notice the searing pain in my hand. I flicked on the light and stared in horror at the blood on my sheets.

  The switchblade was open on my pillow, the knife slicked with my blood. Even the handle was stained, darker beads of crimson sinking into the grooves in the inscription. There was a three-inch gash running across the palm of my right hand. I had cut myself in my sleep!

  It was bad enough to drench my sheets and wake me up. It was bad enough to give my mother a horrible jolt if she walked in just then. This was the only uninterrupted morsel of sleep she had gotten in weeks, and I sure as hell wasn’t about to ruin that.

  I grabbed a T-shirt and tied it in a knot around my hand. I flicked the switchblade closed and stashed it in my drawer. I flipped the pillow over to its unbloodied side and crept downstairs. Every creak was a miniature heart attack, but my mother’s bedroom stayed silent as I descended. I would disinfect the wound, wrap it up and come up with an excuse for the injury tomorrow.

  The kitchen door was ajar and the light had been left on, but it wasn’t until I reached the door that I heard the crying. I peeked through the crack. My mother was sitting at the table, her feet curled around the chair legs. She was dressed in her pyjamas, but it was easy to see she hadn’t been sleeping. Her head was in her hands and her breaths were coming in violent, heaving gasps.

  My heart felt like it was crumpling in my chest.

  I pressed my hand on the door, and then stopped myself. There was blood all over me. I had become so obsessed with arming myself, even in sleep, that I had ended up stabbing myself. And now my bed was covered in blood and here was my mother thinking she had seen the worst of it already. She couldn’t see me like this. It would only make it a hundred times worse.

  I reeled backwards.

  I crept back upstairs, where I washed my hand in the bathroom sink and wrapped it in strips of cotton wool. In the mirror, a grey-eyed wisp stared back at me. Where had the blue gone? In the half-light, I couldn’t help thinking of Elena Genovese-Falcone’s words to me. I supposed I did look a little bit soulless. I felt a little bit soulless too.

  I found a spare sheet in the ironing cupboard and spread it over my bed, covering the bloodstain on the mattress. I buried myself beneath the duvet and lay on my back, looking at the ceiling as my hand pulsed. When the tiredness came, I stuffed the duvet in my mouth and prayed that when I woke up screaming my mother wouldn’t hear it.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE DOLPHIN PHILOSOPHY

  ‘Hey, Paranoid Patty, can I come in?’

  I opened the front door and Millie bounded through it, shaking her head at me as she slid her oversized sunglasses off her face and on to her hair. ‘You’re like something out of a bad horror movie, peering through your sitting-room curtains like that. It’s the middle of the afternoon!’

  ‘There was a car …’ I started, and then instantly gave up. ‘Never mind. Come in.’

  She padded after me into the sitting room, where I was watching old re-runs of America’s Next Top Model. Tyra Banks was on-screen berating a model for being disrespectful and not ‘caring enough’ about the opportunity. She was so angry it looked like her eyes were going to pop out of her head, but the model was just staring through her, totally checked out. I could kind of relate to that feeling.

  ‘God.’ Millie crinkled her nose at the screen and then turned in a slow swivel back to me. ‘What’s this all about?’

  ‘Tyra was rooting for her,’ I said, pointing at the screen. ‘And now she’s pissed ’cause Tiffany basically didn’t give a crap, so it’s become this whole drama.’

  Millie was moving her index finger in a big circle, gesturing at the TV in its entirety. ‘Soph, I meant gen-er-ally,’ she said, elongating the word, so that she sounded extra British. ‘You know I meant generally.’

  ‘Did you know there’s such a thing as a “smize”, Mil? It’s like smiling … but you do it with your eyes.’

  ‘Uh-huh … Did you know there’s such a thing as a sun? It’s like fire, only it’s a big round ball in the sky.’

  ‘There’s also this thing called the “booty tooch”. It’s something.’

  Millie halted me before I could demonstrate, raising her hands in the air and whipping her hair across her face in a violent head-turn. ‘Please. You know how uncomfortable second-hand embarrassment makes me. Where’s your mum? Do we need to stage some kind of intervention here?’

  ‘She’s in the garden … it’s her new hobby.’ Obsession might have sounded a little harsh, if true. My mother was constantly planting new flowers. Sometimes she stayed in the garden so long she forgot to eat dinner. She forgot to work, too – maybe she didn’t want to – and now our garden bloomed with ten shades of strange flowers and unruly shrubs, while her commissioned projects lay in unfinished piles of fabric around the house. I think she hated being indoors the same way I suddenly hated being outside. I think she hated idle moments of stitching or sketching when her brain would bring her back to that night in the warehouse, to the sound of bullets and the smell of blood. She had the garden, I had the switchblade, and I had no right to judge her obsession.

  ‘At least one of you is getting some vitamin D.’ Millie flung open the curtains and I recoiled like a vampire, flinching at the sun’s invading rays. ‘You’ll go see-through if you get any paler.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I was surprised at how genuine I sounded. I couldn’t remember the last time I had slept properly. The slash from Luca’s blade was still fresh and pulsing, and every couple of hours, my heart would do this weird thing and seize up, and then my breathing would quicken and I’d get the sudden sense I was about to die.

  ‘Very believable,’ said Millie. ‘You are not fine. You are in deep denial. And pretending this fear doesn’t exist is not beating it, it’s accommodating it. And it has to stop, OK?’ She had her hands on her hips. She was definitely not smizing. ‘Bad things happen. And then you get over them. That’s how it goes. I know this whole situation has been … unfortunate.’

  I decided not to bother ladling out any more lies. My best friend could see right through me – even if she couldn’t hear it in my voice, she’d see it on my face. I sank back into the couch. ‘You know, I’ve been thinking lately.’ That was pretty much all I had been doing. ‘My whole family is unlucky. What’s to say I’m any different from the rest of them? Did you know that my dad lost both his parents in a car accident when he was only sixteen? They were deadbeat alcoholics and one day they drunk-drove themselves into a barrier on the interstate. Jack and my dad went to live with their grandmother and she ended up dying of cancer, basically leaving them out on the street. My mom’s dad died on her birthday and then her mom died of a broken heart a couple of years later. That’s literally what they told my mom. Her heart just … gave up. My only uncle is a freaking drug dealer, who could be dead right now for all I know, and my dad’s in jail for shooting someone … Sometimes it feels like I’m being circled by something that’s just waiting for me to put one foot out of line. It’s l
ike it’s inevitable.’

  Millie unstuck her hands from her hips and sat down next to me. ‘What’s inevitable?’

  I shrugged. ‘My destruction?’

  ‘Your destruction?’ Her eyebrows had reached full arch height. ‘Really?’

  ‘OK, maybe that was theatrical. But you know what I mean.’

  ‘That is ridiculous. Seriously. So your dad had shitty parents. It happens. And his granny dying of cancer? So did mine. That’s a crappy fact of life too. He and Jack were on their own from a young age and that’s probably why Jack ended up dealing. We know why your dad shot Angelo Falcone. It was an accident. And if he hadn’t shot him, who knows? Angelo probably would have murdered Jack. I’m sorry you don’t have a large family and that all that bad stuff happened, but the universe is not against you. You’re not, like, doomed, or whatever. This isn’t a Game of Thrones episode. You’re good, OK? You’ve come out the other side.’

  ‘I just wish it felt like that.’

  ‘It will. Eventually. You just have to try.’

  ‘I know,’ I conceded. She was right. Of course she was. I just wasn’t really dealing in logic, so it was hard to see it.

  ‘So,’ she said, leaning back with a triumphant smile now she felt she had gotten through to me. I let my gaze drift back to the window now that the direct sunlight had stopped assaulting my retina. ‘With all that in mind, I was—’

  ‘Mil,’ I shrieked, bounding from the couch and gluing myself to the window. Outside, a black Mercedes was crawling by my house again. No one drives that slow. Not even in a residential zone. ‘Get your ass over here and tell me this car is not the most suspicious thing you’ve ever—’

  ‘Dammit, Gracewell.’ She yanked the back of my T-shirt and dragged me away from the window. ‘Listen very carefully to what I’m about to say.’

  ‘Can you just humour me and take a look—’