Chapter Eleven Marino Blood

CHAPTER ELEVEN MARINO BLOOD

Fear is a relative thing.

‘Don’t hang up whatever you do. Don’t you dare hang up on me during my hour of need, Sophie.’

It was 9.15 p.m. on Monday night, and I was in my bedroom on the third floor of the Falcone mansion. I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, my unfinished poetry assignment in my lap, my cell phone pressed against my ear. I had just finished two hours of shooting practice with Nic, and even though my trigger finger hurt like hell and my arm was aching, it was worth it.

‘I’m here,’ I assured Millie. ‘I wouldn’t miss this for the world.’

‘Stop laughing at me!’ she whined.

‘I’m not laughing at you.’

‘I can hear the amusement in your voice!’ she said, before descending into another bout of shrieking. It sounded like she was on a rollercoaster. ‘Oh my God, he’s coming right at me! Oh my God, OH MY GOD. HELP ME SOPHIE!’

Millie had been trying to kill a daddy-long-legs for the last fourteen minutes. ‘Run!’ I said, faux panic raising my pitch. ‘Run before he turns you into one too!’

‘Oh Jesus, I think there’s two of them, Soph!’ She fell deadly quiet, and then a gasp dragged in her throat. ‘I think they’re having sex mid-air! Oh, that is so gross.’

‘You insect voyeur, give them some privacy!’

There was a very audible thump on the other end. I imagined her throwing her chemistry book at the wall. ‘Damn,’ she cursed. ‘Missed them.’

I flopped back against my pillows and closed my eyes. I took myself out of Evelina , away from the homework and the guns and the threats and the boys, and imagined I was sitting on Millie’s floral bedspread beside her, watching her nearly twist an ankle as she tried to tackle a couple of harmless insects. ‘Calm down,’ I soothed. ‘They’re more scared of you than you are of them.’

‘Somehow I doubt that, Soph. If they were the least bit scared, they’d stop having sex, but they’re just floating around here, copulating in my face .’

Another thump. Another curse.

I tutted. ‘The nerve .’

‘I don’t think my heart rate has ever been this high,’ Millie panted. ‘I can feel it in my throat. Does that make sense? I can actually feel my pulse choking me.’

‘Why don’t you just learn to coexist peacefully with them?’

‘Oh, shut up, you’re not here,’ she hissed. ‘You don’t know the trauma I’m enduring right now.’

I opened my eyes – the stark white walls seemed to loom inwards, boxing me in. I could hear the distant sound of Elena arguing with someone downstairs. Two rooms over, CJ was playing obnoxiously loud rock music. Little Sal had woken up screaming every night this week. My gaze flicked to the side table, where the photograph of Libero Marino was staring up at me, daring me to look at him. ‘Yeah,’ I said, dispassionately. ‘I can’t possibly imagine it.’

‘You know, I think this is probably the most scared I’ve ever been,’ Millie panted.

‘Really?’

‘Not counting Eden,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘But it’s close.’

Millie was the queen of compartmentalization. Once a thing was over, it was over, in a neat little box in a filing cabinet in the back of her head, never to be disturbed again. I envied that in her. I would need that skill soon.

‘Should I just start vacuuming the air until they get sucked in?’

‘Sure.’ I was looking into Libero’s dark eyes, and wondering what Sara would say to me now. But Sara was dead. The blood war made corpses of good people.

Was Libero a good person?

Did it matter?

Another loud thump, and this time, the accompanying sound of triumph. ‘Yes!’ she whooped. ‘Yes! I got him and his lover! Oh, my God! It’s over. I finally did it!’ Millie was an entirely different version of herself now, all the good cheer returning to her voice. ‘I feel so accomplished.’

What would I feel like when it was done? Would it change me for ever, or would it invigorate me, the way it seemed to invigorate Nic?

‘Soph?’

I was still staring at Libero, tracing that silver scar, studying the quirk of his mouth underneath his facial hair. ‘Huh?’

‘I just want to thank you for your support. It can’t have been easy for you, hearing me in such peril.’

‘No,’ I said, pulling my attention from the photograph. ‘No, it wasn’t.’

‘Well, I’m fine now, so I’m going to hang up and watch Grey’s Anatomy .’

‘Sure, Mil, just use me and then discard me.’

She made kissy noises down the phone. ‘Much love, Soph. I’ll see you at school tomorrow!’

When she hung up, I tried to return to my assignment, but my brain had been wiped blank. I was so not in the mood for this. A yawn bubbled up in my chest, and I contemplated forcing myself to sleep. It wasn’t like there was anything else to do, unless I wanted to stay up and further humanize Libero Marino. Maybe he liked chocolate. Maybe he had a dog. Maybe he used to buy his sister a Christmas present every year. Maybe he had cried the hardest at her funeral.

Maybe he murdered innocent people, like his mother did. Maybe he distributed drugs that ended up killing people. Maybe he was coming for me too.

The less I thought about it the better. I could drive myself crazy with all these what-ifs.

There was a knock at my bedroom door. I snapped my head up, then checked my phone. No messages. No missed calls. Usually they called me if they wanted me.

‘Who is it?’

‘Nic.’

I was in teddy bear pyjama pants and an oversized hoodie. A part of me wished I looked better. The other part of me told me to shut up and stop being so superficial. I smoothed my hair back from my face and tugged my hoodie down.

‘Come in,’ I said, brushing the homework aside until it fell on to the floor in a heap.

Nic shut the door behind him. He swept his gaze across the floor, an eyebrow arching at the little bundle of notes, at the big fat poetry book squishing half of them. ‘Yeah, I don’t envy you right now, Soph.’ He stepped over them like they were toxic and plonked himself on the end of my bed. ‘I never was one for poetry.’

I gestured at the discarded poem. ‘So, I guess you can’t help me pick a deeply emotional poem to identity with for this stupid assignment?’

He pulled a face, his features growing almost cartoon-like with faux horror. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘Oh well. At least I tried.’

‘I’ll ask Luca for you when he gets home. He’s a real nerd for shit like this.’

I tried not to react to the mention of Luca’s name. The truth was, I hadn’t seen him since he had almost come to blows with my father at my mother’s ceremony. He had just disappeared, and had been gone all day. I guessed he needed some time to cool off, but that didn’t do much to soothe the squirmy guilty feeling in my stomach.

Nic arranged himself model-like on the end of my bed, like I was about to draw him à la Rose in Titanic . He was dressed casually in a black T-shirt and dark blue jeans, his hair swept away from his face in finely gelled waves, a gold cross around his neck. Strictly speaking, Nic probably should not have been in my room, but I had bigger things to worry about right now. ‘What’s going on?’ I asked him. ‘Are you looking for a bedtime story?’

‘I’d usually request a lullaby, but I heard you singing in the kitchen the other day and I saw the milk curdling.’

I slammed my pillow into his face. ‘You rude man-pig. How dare you.’

His hands shot up in surrender. I rearranged the pillow behind me and lay back against it. ‘What’s really up?’

Nic grinned at me. ‘Well, my excitement levels for one.’ At my confused expression, he gestured to the nightstand, where Libero Marino’s face was staring at the ceiling. ‘Valentino just gave me the good news. You got your target. Finally!’

‘Oh. Yeah.’ I tried to smile but my cheeks were twitching. ‘I did.’

‘Libero Marino.’ Nic laughed his name. ‘He was a real piece of shit when we were younger but he’s a joke now. He’s always high on something. You could pick him off with your little finger.’

I swallowed hard, tried to ignore the ten thousand butterflies taking flight in my stomach. ‘Great.’

Nic edged towards me, crumpling the duvet into little peaks and valleys between us. Concern swept across his face. ‘You OK, Soph?’

‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ I said, in the least convincing attempt at a lie ever.

‘I thought this was what you wanted?’

I looked at my hands, knotted my fingers together. ‘I do. I’m just getting used to it. I didn’t think—I didn’t expect it to be Sara’s brother, that’s all.’

‘Oh,’ he said softly. ‘You thought it would be someone you didn’t know.’

I nodded at the bedspread. ‘Yeah. I guess I did. It just feels a bit more personal than I was expecting…’

‘The Marinos are your family,’ Nic said.

‘Well, when you put it like that, I sound pretty dumb right now.’

‘I know what you mean,’ he added. ‘Really, I do. It’s natural to have doubts, Soph.’

I stared at all that honeyed warmth swimming in his dark eyes, and felt the knot in my chest loosen. He was silent for a minute. I soaked it up, waited for my breathing to return to normal. He moved his hands a little closer. Instinctively, I pulled away, not wanting to fan the embers of desire still inside me, not wanting to complicate an already complicated situation. ‘Nic…’

‘I heard about your mother’s ceremony yesterday,’ he cut in. Maybe I had imagined his nearness, the way his body seemed to be inching closer. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t there. I would have gone if I had known.’

I studied his face for clues of what Luca might have told him. Did he know about my father? His placid expression suggested otherwise. Another secret Luca had kept, then… another reason to feel grateful to him and guilty all at the same time.

‘How was it?’ Nic asked, his fingers still close to mine, a line of fresh bruises colouring the knuckles on his right hand. City work.

‘It was depressing,’ I told him.

He nodded knowingly, and just like that, my mood migrated from resigned to angry, my thoughts turning to everything Donata had taken from me. She had reduced my mother to a vase of ashes, a trail of memories that most people would soon forget. That was the truth of it. The cold, harsh truth.

I balled my hands into fists, released the fire inside me. ‘I want to hurt her so badly. I can’t even put it into words, Nic. I want her to suffer the way she’s made me suffer.’

‘Good,’ he murmured, sitting up and squaring his body up to mine. ‘That’s the spirit, Sophie.’ He put his hands on my shoulders, dug them in until they started to sting. I ignored it, using the pain as fuel as he poured his strength into me. ‘You need to get fired up about this, Sophie. You need to feel determined and angry, and, most of all, you should feel excited. This is your time to fight back. Don’t you want to fight back?’ That smile again, full and white and dazzling. ‘Don’t you want to take from her what she took from you?’

‘Yes. Of course I do.’ I nodded, siphoning off some of that unbridled optimism, keeping it for myself. ‘I want her to pay, Nic. I’m going to make her pay.’

‘And I’m going to help you.’ He was nodding along with me, his fingers digging harder into my shoulders, but I didn’t care. We were in this together. I didn’t have to do it alone. ‘I’ll stand by your side until there’s no one left. Until Donata begs for mercy at your feet. I’ll be there right until the end.’

A well of gratitude sprung up inside me. This was what I needed: strength, belief, support.

‘Thank you,’ I told him in earnest. ‘Thank you for helping me. I really needed this.’

‘You really want to thank me?’ He cocked his head, a slow smile curling on his lips. For a second I thought he was going to lean in and kiss me, but instead, he dropped his hands, made the shape of a gun with his fingers and pressed it against my forehead. ‘Thank me by putting a bullet in Libero Marino’s head this weekend.’ He winked at me. ‘Thank me in Marino blood.’