CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE BREAKDOWN
‘Sophie?’
I snapped my head up.
Luca was standing in my room. He was so close to me his knees were brushing against my bed. How had I not sensed him before now?
I sat up, shrouded inside the bedcovers. His hair was swept back from his face so his blue eyes shone unnaturally in the duskiness. His mouth was quirked to one side, frowning, but otherwise he looked well. Smoke inhalation obviously agreed with him.
I didn’t have the strength to be indignant. ‘I want to be alone, Luca.’
He glanced at the door, his teeth nipping across his lower lip. ‘Why have you fashioned yourself like an Eskimo?’
‘Excuse me?’
He gestured at the duvet pulled over my head and around my shoulders. ‘That can’t be good for your burns. You must be incredibly overheated.’
‘I’m fine.’
He pinned me with his gaze. ‘Are you?’
‘I don’t recall inviting you up here.’
He lowered himself to the floor and sat on my carpet, leaning back on the palms of his hands. ‘Come on, Sophie. You should know well enough by now that I make a habit of showing up to places I’m not invited.’
His gaze was appraising. I had the horrible sense that he was leaning right over the waters of my soul. It occurred to me then, rather inappropriately, that this was the first time he had spoken more than a few words to me since he had twined his fingers in my hair and crushed his lips against mine. Stop.
I regressed further into my Eskimo-blanket. ‘What do you think you’re doing here?’
‘I’m waiting,’ he said.
I shook the duvet off and tossed it behind me. ‘What are you waiting for?’
‘This.’
‘This?’
‘Conversation, Sophie. You need to talk to someone.’
For one precious, golden minute, there was nothing but incredulity filling me up. ‘Now you want to talk to me?’ I said.
He screwed his face up. ‘What do you mean by that?’
‘Nothing’s changed,’ I said. ‘I’m still a Marino.’
He gestured at himself. ‘And I’m a Falcone. Who cares?’
‘You did, Luca. That day at your house.’ I wasn’t really mad about that – it made sense, given everything – but it bore mentioning, especially since I sure as hell wasn’t going to mention the other reason he acted so weird at the Council. ‘You cared,’ I repeated, trying to shake off the sting that came with the memory.
He leant closer. ‘You’re damn right I cared,’ he growled. ‘I cared that the Marino standing in front of my entire family with a red target on her forehead was the only Marino in the history of the world that I have ever and will ever care about.’
‘Oh,’ I said. Beneath the dull thud of grief there was something else flickering inside me. ‘You didn’t care about the … the name.’
‘Not the name.’ He held my gaze, unfaltering, unblinking. ‘Just the girl.’
I looked at my hands interlocked on top of the duvet. ‘You really aren’t like them,’ I murmured.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not.’
I thought of my own family. The safe, the switchblades, the ring. Evelina. God. The things I knew. The things I wished I didn’t know.
I shook my head. ‘If you knew how badly I’m tangled up in this Marino thing …’ I trailed off, my words falling into breathlessness. It was too much to think about.
He offered me a conspiratorial smile. ‘If you knew how badly I’m tangled up in this Falcone stuff …’
I grimaced. ‘You know what I mean.’
‘I’m not going to judge you,’ he said. ‘You’re the same person you always were. So please,’ he leant back again and this time his smile was soft, ‘don’t worry about all that other stuff, Marino.’
‘OK, Falcone.’ I scowled at him and he scowled right back. ‘But I really just want to be by myself right now, so if you think I’m just going to sit here and spill my guts to you about what I’m feeling, then you’re wrong.’
‘That’s fine.’ He shrugged, looking past me towards the slivered gap in my curtains. ‘Did you know it’s going to be a blood moon tonight? You should open your curtains so you can see it.’
‘Are you being for real right now?’
He raised his eyebrows, the movement making his eyes seem impossibly huge and bluer than ever. ‘Have you never seen one?’ he asked. ‘The moon looks like it’s been dipped in red paint and it glows so bright you can barely see the stars. It’s one of those phenomena that remind you how—what? Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘OK, Mufasa. I get it.’
Luca’s mouth dropped open and I had the absurd feeling of laughter catching in my cheeks. ‘Excuse me for trying to enlighten you about the wonders of this universe.’
‘Don’t waste your breath on me, Nature Nerd. Save it for the space documentary you so obviously want to make.’
He shook his head. ‘See what happens when I try to be sincere? You stomp on my dreams.’
‘I’m not stomping on them, I’m making fun of them. There’s a difference.’
‘Is there?’
‘It’s very subtle.’
‘So are you going to let me finish?’
I was pulled back into myself, the amusement draining from the ache in my cheeks. Had I been smiling? I frowned, scolding myself. I rubbed at my chest, trying to soothe the sudden roaring pain inside it, demanding to be felt.
Luca was talking again. What was his game plan? Did he really think I was interested in astrology at a time like this? ‘What are you still doing here?’ I interrupted. ‘I mean, seriously.’
He fell out of his sentence. I watched him weigh his words, surprised at how accustomed I had become to the subtleties in his body language. ‘We went through a big thing, Sophie. You went through a big thing.’
‘So?’
‘So?’ he repeated with emphasis. ‘I’m worried about you.’
‘Don’t.’ The pang was growing deeper. I lay back and looked at the ceiling.
‘You saved my life, Sophie. Again,’ he added after a beat, like he couldn’t quite believe it. I wasn’t sure which shocked him more, the fact that he kept almost dying, or that I kept saving him.
‘That’s 2-1 to me,’ I said, without feeling any amusement. ‘You owe me a grand gesture.’
‘I thought it was a bouquet.’
‘One is a bouquet. Two is a grand gesture.’
‘Name it.’
‘Go away. Is that grand enough for you?’
‘That’s too grand.’
I exhaled noisily at the ceiling.
‘So what’s going on with that old lady in your kitchen? She’s been here all week. I asked her if she was your grandmother and she called me a worthless heathen and told me to mind my own business. Millie had to force her to let us inside and when Nicoli tried to make a sandwich she threw a fork at him. As someone who has thrown many forks at my brother I wouldn’t advise it. He has a very bad temper …’ Luca kept talking, filling the space with words upon words, waiting for me to bite.
I unbunched the duvet and pulled it over me again with a groan. He could sit in my room for ever and burn a hole in my carpet, but if he thought he could get me to open up to him he was wrong.
He changed tack. ‘What did you say to Nicoli earlier? I’ve never seen him look so contrite. Was it the whole beard thing? It makes him look creepy, doesn’t it? A couple more days and he’ll turn into Rasputin. That’s a historical reference, by the way. It’s very funny, I assure you …’
I had done a history project on Rasputin. I smiled despite myself, then bit the inside of my cheeks and concentrated on the soreness as I made myself remember my mother’s face.
Finally Luca fell silent, defeated by my stillness. I could still feel his presence. I smelt the faintness of his aftershave in the air. I was keenly aware of his every exhale, his every quiet movement.
He didn’t budge, didn’t even take out his phone. He just sat staring into the darkness, and for what? After ten minutes I sat up again and burrowed over my duvet, freeing myself from its clinging heat. I sat facing him on the bed. ‘Can’t you take a hint?’
‘I can,’ he said. ‘But that doesn’t mean I have to follow through on it.’
‘Well, it’s inappropriate for you to be here. This is my bedroom.’
He lifted his brows. ‘You’ve been in my bedroom.’
There. So he remembered. He didn’t seem to care, but at least he hadn’t forgotten about it. ‘Sorry,’ he said quickly, dipping his head and running his hand across his jaw. ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’
We sat in silence. After a little while, he turned away from me and lay back against the carpet, folding his arms behind his head. I studied his profile, the sureness of his brow line, his straight-edged nose. Then I turned away too. What a time to be so superficial and distractible.
I thought of my mother again. I remembered being six years old and missing the ice cream truck when it came by my house. I had chased after it and just as it disappeared around the bend at the end of my street, I tripped. I started to cry as blood dribbled down my legs. My mother was on the phone to one of her clients at the time and had been watching from the window. She rushed outside and folded me into her arms. I could smell lavender and sunscreen. Don’t cry, sweetheart. We drove to the corner store and filled a basket with every colour popsicle imaginable. At home we packed the freezer until it was overflowing. She smiled at my blue-frozen lips. Now you’ll always have backup, so you don’t have to chase the truck if you miss it.
There – that pain again, sharp and twisting. I gasped, falling back into myself.
‘Are you thinking about her?’ Luca asked.
I didn’t answer.
I heard him shift and caught his outline in my peripheral vision. He was sitting up. ‘They say internalized grief takes longer to heal.’
I opened my mouth and then shut it again. I had nothing to say.
His voice twisted into something soft and sombre. ‘When my father died I didn’t cry for three weeks. It’s not that I wasn’t sad. I was sadder than I ever imagined a human being could be. It felt like something was burrowing inside me, trying to claw its way out. Even gunshot wounds pale in comparison.’ He smiled a little, wryly. ‘But for some reason I couldn’t talk about it, I couldn’t cry about it. It’s like everything was trapped inside me, and the longer it stayed that way the more it felt like it was ripping me up. I kept wondering what was wrong with me, why I couldn’t grieve the way my brothers were. Why I couldn’t just feel it and … let it out.’
‘Why couldn’t you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I think I was too scared to cry. I never knew how much grief felt like fear. I was terrified of my life without my father in it. He was a part of my identity, and when he left it was like he took a chunk of me with him.’
‘The best bit,’ I whispered, feeling a deep thud of empathy.
‘Yes,’ he murmured. ‘The best bit.’
‘Do you think he did?’
‘Maybe.’ He jerked his head. We still weren’t looking at each other, but I could see most of his face now. His brow was furrowed. He was lost in another time and place. ‘But at the time I never considered that he had left behind a part of him, too, in me.’
‘His best bit?’
I caught the corner of his smile. ‘I like to think so.’
Slivers of moonlight were peeking through the gap in my curtains, streaking across the carpet. I could see Luca’s hands bathed white beneath it.
I found myself moving closer, straining to see him and wishing he would look at me. ‘Does it get easier?’
‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘They say it gets better but I think the pain becomes bearable not because it’s quieter or lessened, but because you get used to it being there. Life goes on, and you go with it.’
I frowned, rubbing the pain beneath my chest. ‘I can’t imagine I’ll ever get used to this,’ I conceded.
He turned to watch me in the darkness. The moonlight fell across his face, alighting the deep cobalt in his eyes. ‘You’d be surprised at what you’re made of.’
‘I don’t think I will be.’
‘I do.’
My throat was starting to feel wobbly. ‘How do I do it?’
Luca got to his knees so that we were leaning towards each other at eye level. He didn’t touch me, but something inside made me feel like maybe he wanted to. I wanted him to. His hands were hovering close to mine. ‘You embrace the pain, Sophie. Don’t fear it. Let it wash over you. Use it as fuel to spur you on.’
‘I don’t want to think about that night.’
‘You have to, sooner or later.’
‘I should have saved her.’
‘You couldn’t have.’
‘I didn’t try hard enough.’
‘Sophie.’ Luca came closer still. I was overwhelmed by his smell, fresh and familiar. My fingers were starting to shake. I could feel the walls starting to buckle, the things I had kept hidden beginning to emerge once more. ‘When I pulled you out of that fire you were nearly dead. Even if you had gotten to her it would have been too late for both of you.’
I gaped at him, and something flashed at the back of my mind. I remembered the feeling of hands on my ankles, my shoulders, my waist, dragging me from her. ‘You pulled me out?’
He fell on to his haunches. ‘Who did you think it was?’
‘Why didn’t you let me get to her?’
‘You wouldn’t have been able to.’
My voice changed. ‘Why did you take me away from her?’
His voice changed too. Anger, fear, insistence strained his words. ‘Because you were burning alive. You did the thing I told you not to do. You jumped off the cliff.’
‘I was trying to save her!’
‘You were killing yourself!’
The walls were coming down and my mind was exploding with that night. ‘She was calling out to me.’
Luca’s movements changed. They became slower, more deliberate. ‘She wasn’t calling you.’
‘I heard her.’
‘The fire does strange things to your senses.’
‘You’re wrong.’ I kept thinking about those white sneakers.
Luca placed his hands on either side of my legs, his fingers curling in the sheets. ‘Sophie,’ he said softly, ‘your mother lost her life in the explosion. She was too close to the stove when it happened.’
I rose up, away from him. I was disconnecting, the room spinning as memories crashed into me. ‘I could have saved her but you took me away from her!’
He was shaking his head.
The fire burnt inside my mind. My arms were stinging. I could taste singed hair across my lips. Before the fire there was the explosion, before the explosion there was the gas and before the gas there was Jack. Before that … there was everything else. A raging war. I grasped at the thread of understanding. ‘They lured you to them. They knew you’d come to protect your brothers.’
‘Yes.’
How could he remain so calm? Wasn’t he thinking about all the things that I was? Wasn’t he feeling the heat of the memories like flames?
‘You’re supposed to be smarter than that.’
‘I know.’
‘My mother is dead.’ That was the first time I ever said it out loud. It felt like I was flaying myself. The backs of my eyes were stinging.
‘I know,’ he said gently.
‘They wanted to destroy you. They wanted to teach me a lesson. And they killed her to do it. She wasn’t supposed to be there.’ Everything was colliding and I felt the white-hot edge of rage burn inside me. The words sprang from me, strung together in hurried sentences. ‘If you and Nic hadn’t come in they wouldn’t have done it. I told you Donata was coming. I told you she was planning something but you couldn’t walk away – you couldn’t back down! You had to risk everything for some stupid game of honour that means nothing in the end! If you hadn’t been there at the diner, watching, waiting for them, trying to hurt them instead of trying to protect yourselves, then this wouldn’t have happened. If you Falcones hadn’t murdered Sara Marino – if you didn’t insist on killing everything and everyone – then my mom wouldn’t be dead now. You shouldn’t have followed them. You shouldn’t have forced your way into the diner. Why couldn’t you have just left it all alone?’
Luca was getting to his feet.
I stood up, too. ‘You don’t get to leave before you hear this,’ I shouted.
He just stood there, his chest squared towards me. His gaze was unfaltering. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Say whatever you need to say.’
‘Don’t patronize me!’ My face was wet and I realized with surprise that I was crying. Tears were dripping down my neck, soaking into the collar of my T-shirt. ‘Ever since your family came into my life, everything has gone wrong!’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And now I have nothing.’ I was sobbing so hard the words were catching in my throat. I coughed and it turned to wheezing, and I doubled over, spluttering, on to the bed.
Luca moved his hand towards me but I slapped it away. ‘You’ve destroyed my whole life.’
‘That was never our intention, Sophie.’
I backed up, hitting my knees on the bedside table. I dragged my hands across my face, wiping away the moisture. ‘You’ve obliterated me.’
He edged towards me. ‘I know what it’s like, Sophie.’
‘No.’ I prodded his chest. ‘You don’t know. You gamble with people’s lives all the time. You’ve probably taken as many as you’ve grieved. You are used to the possibility of death, you live inside the nearness of it. My mother and I lived in this house, in this peaceful place where we worried about pork chop dinners and making rent and getting the car fixed and making sure the dishwasher didn’t break down again! She didn’t deserve to die the way she did.’
‘I’m not trying to—’
‘You have brothers and cousins and uncles and a mother who loves you!’ I cut in. ‘Even with all the bad things you do, you have a whole family to turn to, and I don’t have anyone.’
‘Sophie—’
‘I thought you’d protect us from them,’ I choked out.
‘We will protect you, Sophie. Come home with me,’ he urged, ‘where he can’t get to you any more.’
‘Don’t you see?’ I said, hearing my voice rise to a manic level. ‘He’s already gotten to me.’ I pushed Luca and he stumbled backwards, clutching at his side. His wound. Pain flared behind his eyes.
‘Just get it out,’ he said, gritting his teeth. ‘Get it all out.’
‘Get it out?’ I said. ‘Get out my “feelings”, is that what you mean? How about this—’ I pushed against him. He faltered, his hands clutched harder around his torso. ‘I.’ I shoved him again and he turned sharply and backed against the wardrobe. ‘Hate.’ I pushed him. ‘You.’
He ground his teeth. ‘OK.’
‘Not OK,’ I shouted at him. ‘NONE OF THIS IS OK.’ I curled both my hands inside his T-shirt, scrunching the fabric in my fist. ‘Why did I save you? Only to have it lead to this!’
I shoved him and he hit his head against the wardrobe. His eyes grew, two big expanses of startling blue, shadowed by his frown. I felt a flicker of something unpleasant – regret, remorse? I hadn’t meant what I’d said – not really – but the words weren’t coming from a logical place.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, breathless.
I stared at my hands still curled in his shirt. I fell back from him, examining my fingers. They were twitching in and out of fists. I looked at Luca. His body was dipping towards his injured half. His lids were at half-mast. How many ways had I hurt him? How far could I go? He was letting me – even though he could stop me easily, he hadn’t. I had come at him with every drop of venom I had in me and I felt none of the relief I had expected. I felt like a damaged version of myself. My mother was gone, and in her absence I was bitter and cruel.
A familiar feeling of panic took hold of me. I didn’t know what to do, how to make him go away, how to tell him this wasn’t really about him at all. It was about her. The tears were breaking through a second time, coming harder and faster down my cheeks. Strangled cries sprang from me and I realized I was hyperventilating. I am breaking down, I realized with horror. I am losing myself.
Luca pushed against me and I thought he was finally going to retaliate, to do to me what I had just done to him. But he didn’t. He rounded on me, pulling me into his chest and crushing his arms around me. I collapsed into him, feeling the weakness in my legs. I was so startled I let him hold me, feeling the hardness of his body beneath my cheek, the frantic thrumming of our heartbeats pressed against each other.
He was talking to me, his voice low and urgent against my hair, but I couldn’t hear him. Something inside me was breaking; he had pricked the balloon in my chest and the pressure was draining. My cries were muffled against him, my tears staining pools across his T-shirt. I was inhaling his scent, my fingers pressed across his collarbone, and his hands were on my back holding me together as sobs quaked through my body.
And it wasn’t enough. I needed to be closer to him; I needed to forget myself. I lifted my head and he brought his hands to my face, his thumbs gently wiping the tears from under my eyes.
‘It’s going to be OK,’ he murmured, the pads of his fingers warm against my skin. He touched his forehead to mine. ‘I won’t let him hurt you again.’
My breath hitched in my throat. I gripped the collar of his T-shirt and lifted my chin. His lips brushed against mine.
‘Sophie,’ he breathed. ‘We can’t—’
‘Please,’ I said, moving my hands around his neck. ‘I need this.’ Whatever he was about to say got lost between us, because suddenly I was crushing my lips against his and he was twining his fingers in my hair, kissing me so hard it knocked the breath from me. This. This was what I needed. I pressed my body against him and dragged my fingers through his hair, pulling him closer, breathing him in. He groaned as he pushed his tongue into my mouth, deepening the kiss and gripping my waist as he spun me around. His hands found mine, our fingers splaying together as he lifted them above my head and pinned them against the wardrobe. He leant against me as he sealed every last inch of space between us with his body and took all the bad memories away.
He gasped for air against my lips, and I smiled as all the pain and darkness burnt away inside our kiss. He made me dizzy. He made me forget.
It ended too quickly. Suddenly, he was pulling away from me and panting, his hand clutching his chest.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, eyes wide. ‘Cazzo. I shouldn’t have done that.’
‘I did it,’ I said, heaving an unsteady breath as I unstuck myself from the wardrobe. ‘It was me.’
‘I can’t do this.’ He backed up. ‘It’s not right.’
I backed away too. What was I thinking? What was I doing? I looked a mess, was a mess. I hadn’t slept properly in days. ‘You don’t want to,’ I said, feeling the pain resurface sharply, grief and anger mingling in a cocktail of embarrassment and regret. ‘It’s fine.’
‘Of course I want to,’ he said, his voice spiking. ‘I want to more than anything. I always want to. That’s the problem.’
I forced myself to look up at him.
His expression was pained. ‘I won’t take advantage of your grief, Sophie. I’m not that guy.’
I nodded, feeling the numbing effects of his kiss melt away. Memories charged back into my head and the clouds regathered, heavy and unyielding inside me. I was too wrung out to fight it.
Luca was still talking. My body was shaking.
I could see my mother’s face, her sprawled legs, her glazed expression. And I hated it. I hated him and his family and everything they had done to me and he was holding me again and I realized I was crying more tears even though I shouldn’t have had any left and his arms were too strong for me to move and I felt like I was suffocating and that made me want to hurt him and yell at him and tell him to get away from me. And I knew it wasn’t about Luca and I wanted to tell him that too but in the end I couldn’t tell him anything. I pushed away from him, stumbling backwards and falling in a heap on my bed.
‘Sophie.’ His voice was gruff. I could sense him pacing by the bed, though I wouldn’t look up at him.
‘Go away,’ I pleaded. ‘Just go away. Please. I need to be by myself. I need some time.’
‘OK,’ he relented finally. ‘If you need anything—’
‘I’ll be fine,’ I said hastily.
Luca pulled his switchblade from his back pocket and laid it on the bed beside me. ‘Just in case,’ he murmured.
I fingered the engraving, the swooping letters that I knew so well. Gianluca. ‘A Falcone switchblade for a Marino girl,’ I whispered. ‘Is this really what your grandfather would have wanted?’
He pulled something from his back pocket. ‘I’m not my grandfather.’ He held his hand out between us, and my gaze settled on Evelina’s ruby ring, resting in his palm. ‘And you are not your father.’
I glanced at the empty bedside table. He must have picked the ring up when I was sulking. God. He knew. He knew.
‘Life has dealt you a rough hand already,’ he said quietly, closing his fingers around the ring. ‘You don’t have to pay for his mistakes as well, Sophie.’ He moved to the door, pausing on the other side of it. ‘When you’re ready, come to us. We’ll give you Sanctuary. I’ll vouch for you, to the family and to my brother.’ He touched his head against the frame, and smiling sadly, he added, ‘Don’t forget, I still owe you that grand gesture, Marino Girl.’
My smile was watery. Why was it so damn difficult to look at him? I shut my eyes. ‘Please just go.’
And he did.