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 telling 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 her 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.’
A familiar surge of regret flooded through me. I should never have gone to Eden. I would go to my grave regretting that decision. Maybe Jack would have come to me in the end, but it would have been on my terms. It would have been on my turf. But now the choice was gone.
‘What did you promise her?’ I asked.
‘Something I have no intention of delivering.’
I turned to her.
‘I told her I would get you to cooperate,’ my mother continued. ‘She said she would hurt you if you didn’t. I would have promised her the moon if it got her out of my house.’
‘I’m not going to help her. I don’t care what she wants. I’m not hurting anyone.’
She looked alarmed. ‘Of course you’re not.’ She pulled me back into the darkness of the house. ‘You’re not getting involved in any of this. It’s not our world.’
‘Dad says we have to leave Cedar Hill.’
She nodded, a shadow passing across her face. ‘I see now he’s right. Sophie,’ she tugged at my arm and took my hand in hers, ‘you know everything I do is to keep you safe. You know I would die before I let anyone put you in danger, right?’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Of course I know that.’
‘Good,’ she said quietly. ‘Because sometimes it’s hard to know what the right thing is. Sometimes … especially lately, everything seems so fuzzy. But we have each other, and that’s what matters. I’m sorry Donata Marino lost her daughter, but I have no intention of letting her gamble with mine. Not ever.’
I squeezed her hand. ‘We’ll be OK.’
She nodded, but her gaze was lost somewhere over my shoulder. ‘We’ll go away from here. I just have to find the money.’ Her face crumpled but she caught it, stretching a smile as her eyes turned watery. ‘I’ll think of something, sweetheart.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I told her. ‘I already have.’
In the kitchen, I filled a glass and put the violets inside it. I placed the makeshift vase on the windowsill and swallowed my nerves. We’ll come back for you soon. Soon the world would tilt into darkness. Just how soon was soon? I wasn’t going to stick around and find out. Tomorrow my mother and I would disappear.
I pulled out my phone and dialled Millie’s number. She answered on the third ring.
‘What are you doing tomorrow morning?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ she replied, cagey as ever. ‘Why?’
‘I need a ride to Evelina.’