CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EDEN
When I told my mother I was staying the night at Millie’s, she nearly fainted with relief. Every step I took outside our front door was a small victory for her, and an entire night spent with my best friend was music to her ears. In her mind, I was coasting back to normality, and it didn’t matter that I was leaving her behind. She pressed a twenty into my hand, ‘for pizza, ice cream, whatever you girls need. It’s on me.’ I tried to give it back, but she clasped her hands behind her back and shook her head. ‘You deserve to treat yourself!’
Oh, if only she knew. I swallowed my guilt – it was getting easier to stomach these days. I consoled myself with the knowledge that meeting Jack head-on would keep him from showing up unannounced at my house at some point in the future, which would be so much worse for both of us.
‘Are you sure you’ll be OK here by yourself?’ I asked instead.
Her laugh was a short tinkle. ‘Of course, sweetheart. I have plenty to keep me occupied. I’m putting up that new trellis at the back of the garden. I’m planting wallflowers!’
My mind flicked to her unfinished dressmaking projects, now long overdue. ‘A trellis, eh? Cool …’
She swatted my arm. ‘I don’t just sit around and stare listlessly into the distance when you’re not here, you know.’
‘What? So you don’t spend all your free time thinking about how much you miss me?’
‘I replace my affection for you with my beautiful new plants,’ she said, her voice teasing. ‘They’re much less sarcastic.’
‘Just wait till they’re teenagers.’
‘Have fun,’ she said, pulling me in for a hug. ‘Talk about boys. Plan some adventures!’
When she pulled back, she was beaming so hard her lips were twitching. I grabbed my purse and tried to act like I really was going to an innocent sleepover at my best friend’s house and not a Mafia den in the middle of the city.
I had second thoughts about Eden – big ones – but in the end Millie ended up convincing me.
‘Whatever your uncle’s doing, Soph, you could squash it before it’s too late.’
‘Something tells me it’s already too late.’
‘You’ll have to face him one way or another. Isn’t that what Lego-head said?’
‘Her name is Sara.’
‘All right, all right,’ said Millie, waving her hand around. ‘You don’t have to act all kinshippy with her. She was stalking you, don’t forget.’
She googled the nightclub. There were pages of paparazzi scandals involving local celebrities and alleged underworld figures. Donata was featured in almost every article, sometimes by her maiden name, Genovese, and sometimes by Marino. She was a tabloid darling, each piece hinting at an undercurrent of fear. No one dared speak ill of the ‘Genovese Queen’, as one newspaper called her. She was the great and fearsome femme fatale of Chicago.
Her affluence shone through the expensive stoles and designer dresses. Her dark hair was a mane of the world’s finest extensions and her dramatic make-up airbrushed her expertly. But underneath the pomp and glamour she was a skeletal figure with a scrawny neck and severe features. She had that unmistakable Genovese ice – the same chill that Elena Genovese-Falcone had brought with her to my hospital room. The sisters were imprints of one another; each one surrounded by rival Mafia families, waiting to pick off the other. And Donata had a glittering night palace of her own making in which to plot.
Millie pressed the pad of her index finger on the screen, at an interior shot of Eden where everything was draped in white beneath a ceiling of chandeliers. ‘We have to go,’ she resolved. ‘We just have to.’
‘And what if I don’t like what he has to say?’ I countered. I had no doubt I wouldn’t like it.
‘Then we can just leave. And then it’s done, Sophie. You’ll have heard him out.’
I was chewing a pattern into my lip, staring at the screen, my mind playing out all the possible ways this could go. How angry would I be when I saw him? How angry would he be? And Donata. What was her role in all this? If Elena was anything to judge by, I had seen quite enough Genovese ladies for one lifetime.
‘Sophie, look.’ Millie was tapping her fingernail on another picture, this time of a different floor, where everything was bamboo, and fire-lamps blazed around the contours of a pooling dance floor. ‘It’s the most exclusive club in the city. We have to go.’
The logistics of actually getting inside were still hazy. Millie had a pretty good fake ID. I didn’t. If that crimson business card was my ticket into Eden, I was in trouble, because it was in Nic’s pocket.
Stupid Nic.
We barricaded ourselves in Millie’s bedroom and rifled through every single item of clothing in her wardrobe. ‘If we want to get past the bouncers, we have to be sexy but not slutty. It’s a very fine line,’ said Millie, picking up and discarding a floral peplum dress. I examined a cream chiffon blouse. Millie snatched it from me and flung it on to the ground. ‘I said sexy, not politician!’
After almost an hour of indecision, Millie chose a royal-blue strapless dress, a thick silver necklace and hoop earrings. I picked a black body-con dress with spaghetti straps and a lace hem. I borrowed a simple gold necklace and stud earrings, pairing the outfit with Millie’s patent black ankle boots. Millie insisted on doing my hair and make-up. ‘Voila!’ she triumphed, spinning me towards the mirror.
I gaped at my reflection. I had been Barbie-fied. The dress was miniscule, and so tight it clung to every inch of me. My hair brought new meaning to the word ‘volume’ and the hairspray had turned it into a glittering blonde rock. My eyes were rimmed with so much black it was hard to find the blue inside them, and my lips had been lined and glossed until they shone at twice their normal size against my bronzed and blushed face.
‘Well?’ Millie wiggled her high-definition eyebrows at me through the mirror.
‘I look like a hooker.’
She came to stand beside me.
‘You also look like a hooker,’ I told her.
‘A twenty-one-year-old hooker?’ she asked with big, hopeful eyes.
Eden was a sleek three-storey building on the corner of West Grand Avenue. It climbed into the sky in a display of black monochrome and tinted glass. On the corner, two bouncers and a severe-faced woman holding a clipboard were guarding a velvet-roped entranceway. Above them, ‘EDEN’ was imprinted in illuminated red letters that lit up the street below. The spiralling tree emblem from the crimson card stretched across the entire second storey.
My mind flittered across Luca and his disdainful thoughts of my intelligence. Oh, if he could only see me now. ‘I never considered myself an idiot until this very moment,’ I said, staring wide-eyed at Eden as we drifted towards it.
‘Really?’ said Millie, blinking heavily. ‘But you’ve done so many idiotic things already.’
I winced.
‘If anything, this is the least idiotic, because we’re going into a public place and, most importantly, I am here!’ She waved her hands in front of her. ‘It’s cool, you know. Some people just wait for danger to find them, but not you, you go after it. You say “Hey, Danger, bet you weren’t expecting me. Suck it.” You don’t wait for the dolphin.’
‘Huh?’
‘The dolphin,’ she emphasized. ‘You don’t wait for the dolphin to hit you in the face.’
‘Oh.’ I touched my head against hers as we reached Eden, smiling, despite everything, because I had found someone just as weird as me to be friends with. Smiling because I was doing my best not to freak out.
There were two lines of people trickling from the entrance; the first was a short one that moved quickly. The second line stretched all the way around the building and down the street and was moving at a snail’s pace.
Millie flipped her hair over her shoulders and sashayed into the smaller, elite line. I went with her, pursing my lips to try and look pouty and important. The woman with the clipboard dragged her gaze along our outfits. A smug smile flitted across her thin red lips. ‘Names?’
Millie had already pulled her ID card from her purse.
The woman didn’t glance at the ID or her clipboard. ‘Sorry, girls. You’re not on here. You’ll have to join the back of the line.’
Millie bristled. ‘You didn’t even check.’
Her smirk returned. ‘Hon, I don’t need to check.’
Millie released a sharp laugh. ‘Excuse you? Perhaps you need a refresher course on who we are?’
The woman’s expression faltered. She flicked her gaze to me. ‘Your name?’ she asked me.
‘Sophie Gracewell,’ I said. ‘I have … an appointment with my uncle.’
An appointment?
Smooth. Real smooth.
She looked down at her list again. ‘Sophie,’ she muttered, flicking a page up so she could look at the one underneath it.
Millie poked her head forward so that it was almost right on top of the clipboard. ‘He’s a close friend of Donata Marino.’
She deflated in front of us. ‘Miss Gracewell,’ she said, unclipping the rope and standing back to let me through. ‘My apologies. We’re expecting you.’ She eyed Millie with badly concealed contempt.
‘I think you mean you’re expecting us,’ Millie said. Her smile was deliciously false. ‘We wouldn’t want a second mishap, would we?’
With a sigh, Clipboard Bitch stepped back to make room for Millie too. ‘Ladies,’ she said, ‘welcome to Eden.’