Chapter 148

Chapter 148


PAOLO

The traffic light ahead turned red.

I stopped the car and sat with my hands on the wheel and stared at nothing. The engine idled. The city moved around me the way it always did, indifferent, continuous, unbothered by the fact that I was coming apart inside a stationary vehicle on an ordinary street.

I should have been home an hour ago.

I couldn't make myself drive there.

My fingers tightened on the wheel and I felt it coming the way I always felt it coming — not gradually, not gently, but all at once, like a door being kicked open from the inside. I tried to breathe through it. Tried to stay in the car, on this street, in this body that was twenty five years old and nowhere near that room.

It didn't work.

It never worked.

I was fifteen the first time I understood that there were people in the world who hurt others not out of desperation or anger or fear but simply because they could. Simply because nothing and no one had ever stopped them.

The room had no windows.

I remember that clearly. No windows, one bare bulb hanging on a cord from the ceiling, walls and floor that were bare concrete and smelled of damp and something metallic underneath that I didn't have a name for at fifteen. They had thrown me inside and the door had slammed behind me and for a moment I couldn't see anything, just the swinging bulb casting moving shadows across the walls.

Then my eyes adjusted.

My mother was already there.

She was against the far wall with her knees drawn up to her chest, still in the dress she'd worn to dinner three hours earlier before the men came. Her hair was loose. There was dried blood above her eyebrow. When she saw me she made a sound I had never heard from her before — something that broke open in the middle — and crossed the room in three steps and pulled me against her.

You're okay, she kept saying. Her hands were shaking. You're okay, you're okay.

I wasn't okay. I was fifteen and my legs wouldn't hold me properly and the only thought in my head was Elisa. Where was Elisa. What had they done with my sister.

The second door answered that question.

I heard her before I saw her. A sound — high and thin and completely unlike anything that had ever come out of my sister before, who was twelve years old and had never in her life been afraid of anything. Elisa who climbed walls and argued with grown men and laughed too loudly and took up space without apology.

That sound didn't belong to that girl.

They brought her in with four men. Four, for one twelve year old. Two had her arms wrenched behind her back so severely her feet barely skimmed the floor. One had a fistful of her hair, her head pulled back at an angle that made my stomach lurch. The fourth walked ahead of them with his gun already out, not pointed at anything specific, just visible. Just there. Just a statement of intent.

My sister's eyes found mine the moment they brought her through the door.

She wasn't crying. I almost wished she was. Crying would have meant she was still present, still reachable. Instead her face was something I had no words for at fifteen — scraped completely empty, all the life and noise and stubborn brightness hollowed out of it, replaced by a blankness that went somewhere much deeper than fear. She was twelve years old and she was already gone somewhere inside herself that I couldn't follow.

Elisa, I said. Nothing came out.

They pushed her against the wall opposite me. One man kept her arms pinned. Another stood directly behind her. The third pressed the barrel of his gun against her temple with a casualness that made the room tilt — like she was nothing. Like this was nothing. Like my twelve year old sister with a gun against her head was just a logistical detail.

She kept staring at me.

I think she was trying to memorize my face.

Then I heard the chair.

I hadn't noticed the chair. I hadn't noticed him. He was positioned slightly to the left, half in shadow, one leg crossed over the other, a glass of something amber balanced on the armrest. He looked almost bored. Like he had somewhere better to be and we were making him late.

Lorenzo.

My half brother.

Nineteen years old. Built like our father. Same jaw, same dark eyes, same absolute stillness that had nothing peaceful in it. He looked at me for a long moment and then he looked at my mother and then he looked back at me with an expression that made something cold move through my entire body.

He had never liked us. And if I had thought he hated me and my sister, that hate definitely got nothing on how much he loathed my mother.

Lorenzo, that cowardice bastard who would go for an easy target instead of taking his anger out on the perpetrator. Our father was the one who offended him and his mother by sending them away, but my mother, my sister and I were the ones who always pay for that crime. And even now, I knew he kidnapped us just to watch us suffer for what our father did.

"You know what I want," he said. His voice was completely pleasant. Conversational. Like we were discussing something ordinary over dinner. "Stop wasting my time, Paolo."

My mother's grip on my arm tightened instantly.

"He's a child," she said. Her voice was fracturing with every word. "Lorenzo, please. He is fifteen years old. He is your brother. Please don't do this. Please. I will do anything. Anything you want. Just don't make him—"

"You're already part of it." Lorenzo sipped his drink. "That's rather the point."

"Please—"

"Paolo." His eyes moved to me. Flat. Patient. Absolutely certain. "Go ahead. Or I blow her head off right now." He nodded toward Elisa without looking at her. Like she was a prop. "Your choice. You have ten seconds."

I looked at my mother.

I looked at my sister across the room — her face, that blank terrible face, the metal barrel cold against her temple, her arms pinned back, her feet barely touching the floor.

I was fifteen years old. I had no weapon. No power. No door that wasn't blocked by men with guns. I was fifteen and I was alone and there was nothing in that room that could save us except the one unbearable thing Lorenzo was asking me to do.

My mother pulled me close and pressed her mouth to my ear.

"Don't you dare feel guilty," she whispered. Her voice was completely destroyed. "You hear me? Whatever happens in this room — none of it is you. None of it belongs to you, it's not your fault. None of it."

I heard her.

I have never once believed her. Because how could I have sex with my own mother while my sister watched and not be guilty for ruining her sanity?

A horn blared behind me.

I came back to the car all at once — the wheel under my hands, the green light ahead, the city moving normally around me like nothing had happened, like nothing ever happened, like the world hadn't ended in a windowless room when I was fifteen and then simply continued anyway without my permission.

My hands were shaking.

I pressed them flat against my thighs and breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way Dr. Linda had taught me. One breath. Then another. The concrete room receded slowly back into the place inside me where it lived, where it had always lived, where I suspected it would live until I died.

The car behind me blared again.

The city stretched ahead through the windscreen, indifferent and glittering, and I drove through it with shaking hands and thought about Reina sitting alone in our apartment and the emerald necklace resting against her collarbone and the way she had looked at me on that yacht like I was still worth looking at.

I needed to get home. Even if I couldn't tell her what happened, the exact shameful thing I did that ruined my sister, the same thing that made my mother take her own life and left me broken since I was fifteen. Even if I couldn't exactly tell her any of that, I still needed to apologize to her. She didn't deserve to be treated like that.

I needed to get home before I lost what little courage I had left.

My phone buzzed on the passenger seat.

I glanced at the screen to see it was Aunt Marilyn who was calling. I had half a mind to ignore her call just like I had been ignoring her niece's call, but I couldn't do it. Aunt Marilyn barely calls me and whenever she does, there was definitely an emergency. I answered immediately.

"Aunt Marilyn—"

"Paolo." Her voice was tight. Controlled in the way that meant she was working hard to stay calm. "I haven't been able to reach Reina. I've called her seven times in the last hour and it keeps going to voicemail. She called me this morning asking me if she could come stay with me and she didn't sound like herself. She sounded frightened. And now she's completely unreachable and I just—" A pause. "I have a very bad feeling, Paolo."

My grip on the wheel tightened. "I'll find her. Let me make a call right now and I'll ring you straight back."

I hung up and immediately dialled Calestino. He picked up on the second ring.

"Paolo—"

"Where is Reina." It didn't come out as a question. "Her aunt just called me. She can't reach her. What's going on?"

Silence.

Not the silence of someone thinking. The silence of someone deciding how much to say.

"Calestino." My voice dropped. "Where is my wife? Did something happen to her?" I choked on the last sentence because I wouldn't forgive myself if something has happened to her because of me.

What came through the phone next stopped every single thing inside me. My breathing. My thoughts. The blood moving through my body. Everything just — stopped.

The phone slipped from my fingers and hit the floor of the car.

I didn't notice.

My hands found the wheel on instinct and I drove because driving was the only thing my body remembered how to do. My eyes were on the road but I wasn't seeing the road. I was seeing nothing. Hearing nothing except Calestino's voice on a loop, those words, playing over and over in a mind that was refusing — completely refusing — to accept them.

Not Reina.

Not my wife.

Not her.

I pressed the accelerator to the floor.