CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE LIFE
I pulled back from the table. I was finding it difficult to stay calm, more difficult than it was to believe what Felice was saying. I had seen that crest a ton of times, on hot days when my father worked in the garden, when he got out of the shower in the morning. He had told me he and Jack had gotten the same one as teenagers – as a way to always remember each other no matter where they ended up in the world. So they would never forget where they came from.
So they would never forget where they came from.
The room was deadly silent. I stumbled backwards, pressing myself against the wall and feeling its coolness through my tank top. I was going to pass out. I was going to get killed.
Felice seized the stunned silence. ‘If you examine the records, collated with Angelo’s research, you will see that the prison-recorded birthdate of Michael Gracewell matches exactly that of our own dear Vince Marino Jr, the boy who disappeared on me all those years ago. The missing Marinos might not legally exist any more, but they are still living right under our noses. And I’d bet my own blood and bones that their nearness to this family is no coincidence. I put a bullet in their parents, so little Vince Marino put a bullet in Angelo, and Antony put five stab wounds in Calvino in Eden. All this time, we wondered what Gracewell was offering Donata. It was simply his true identity. A Marino always sticks by their own.’
At that, the seated Falcones broke into a rush of frantic murmurings. The tide was turning. Felice was winning. Chaos was rising. I was going to drown in it. ‘No,’ I insisted, shaking my head violently. ‘No, it’s not true. It can’t be true.’
‘Liar!’ Elena sprang to her feet. ‘We’ve caught you out. Admit it! Admit your father is Vince Marino. Admit your uncle is Antony Marino.’ She jabbed her finger at me. ‘Admit that you, Sophie Marino, are a rotten liar.’
‘I’m not a liar!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t know anything about this!’
Dark gazes pressed against me. They were waiting for me to say something, to justify the insanity of walking into their house and expecting to live.
They’d never believe my innocence. Not now. How could I not know where I came from? How could I not know who I was?
How could I not know?
How could they not tell me?
‘It’s not true,’ I said weakly, hearing the doubt in my words. ‘It can’t be true.’
Luca turned to his brother. ‘Valentino?’ he said quietly. His expression was thrumming with unexpected vulnerability. It made me want to slam my head against the wall. ‘Is this true?’
The room fell deathly silent. Valentino nodded. ‘È la verità.’
Luca turned, slowly. His face was shuttered again. He was in commander mode. To me, he said, as simply as if he were asking my age, ‘Are you a Marino?’
‘I—’
‘You heard Valentino,’ said Nic, who had become markedly dishevelled in the last minute. He threw his eyes to the ceiling, his hands raking through his hair. ‘She’s a fucking Marino.’
I backed towards the door.
‘So we’re agreed?’ Felice yelled above the rising commotion. ‘I can kill her?’
‘No!’ said Luca, arms outstretched towards him. ‘Keep your head, Felice.’
‘Everyone be quiet and don’t move!’ said Valentino, and the room fell silent again. ‘We must come to a decision.’
Run, said a voice in my head. Run and don’t stop. Don’t stop even if they shoot your legs out from under you.
‘Nicoli.’ Felice’s voice was shrill as a bell. ‘Let’s let Nicoli decide her fate.’
‘Felice,’ Valentino warned. ‘This is not a game.’
Felice pulled out his gun and waved it above his head. ‘I want to know which is stronger,’ he told the room. ‘Loyalty or love.’ He pointed the gun at my head and cocked the trigger. ‘I want Nicoli to tell me what to do to the Marino in our midst.’
‘Basta,’ said Luca, his voice little more than a growl.
‘Felice,’ said Paulie.
Valentino said nothing. So Felice kept his gun high.
Nic stepped towards me, but without blocking Felice. He cocked his head, his expression unreadable. ‘She can stay if she proves herself. She has to kill a Marino. We can use her connection to them.’
Luca came to stand by Nic, the two brothers shoulder-to-shoulder, both of them looking at me as if they had never truly seen me before.
Maybe they hadn’t.
‘Go,’ Luca mouthed. ‘Now.’
I seized their makeshift shield – whether they meant it that way or not – flung open the door and ran as fast as I could. I didn’t turn around to see if they were following me, or to listen to the rising shouts and screeching chairs. I sprinted and sprinted until my chest burnt and my legs shook, and then I pulled out my phone and called Millie.
My mind whirred as I ran. It couldn’t be true. Fate wouldn’t be so cruel. My own parents wouldn’t be so dishonest as to keep something like this from me. The secret was too huge. Too impossible.
And yet that tattoo kept flashing in my mind. Forgotten arguments from long ago undusted themselves – all those times when my parents thought I was asleep, all those times my father looked over his shoulder, or stood at the windows of our house, watching the darkness. The clawing sense of wrongness in what he had done to Angelo Falcone. The anxiety that rested behind his eyes now he was in prison, the sense that something bigger was coming and he couldn’t stop it. Puzzle pieces were shifting all around me … and somehow, somehow the impossibility of it didn’t seem so big at all.
I’d escaped from the Falcones with my life just now. But I knew that once Donata realized what I’d done, it would be forfeit either way. If loyalty was supposed to bind us, then I was the worst Marino in history, because I had just unravelled it completely in the course of one afternoon, and laid her imminent plans to move against the Falcones right on their doorstep. I was stuck between two bloodthirsty crime families, and over the course of one day I had made enemies of them both.
Millie pulled up when I was almost a mile outside Felice’s house, forcing myself along the main road, staying close to the thicket of trees in case an offending SUV rolled by and put a bullet in my head. I threw myself into her car and doubled over, covering the back of my head with my hands. I was half-crying and half-choking.
‘What happened?’ Millie asked. ‘What the hell happened in there?’
‘Just drive, please,’ I begged her. ‘I have to get home.’
She crushed her foot on the gas pedal, and after a minute I sat up and blinked into the darkening sky. It was later than I thought. She was waiting for me to speak.
There was only one thing to say.
I had added it up in my head. The tattoo. The Marinos’ interest in Jack, in me. Sara’s dimples. The sense of kinship I felt with her. Donata had yelled for Antony that night at Eden. He was already standing behind her, trying to entice me into their family, their business. He was my only uncle, and I didn’t really know him at all.
Everything I thought I knew was changing.
There was only one way I could ever know for sure. Only one person who would tell me the truth. And she was at home packing up our lives so she wouldn’t have to face it.
‘Millie.’ I heaved a shuddering breath. ‘I think I’m a Marino.’
‘What?’
‘I think my dad’s real name is Vince. I think he and Jack are the missing Marinos.’ I started to hyperventilate, my hands clutching around my throat as I tried to gather myself. ‘Say something,’ I pleaded. I needed it to go away. I needed my life to be normal. I needed to calm down. ‘Say anything.’
‘Wait,’ gasped Mil. ‘Wait, wait, wait, hang on. Wait. Does this mean that you and Nic are somehow … related? Have you been like … incestuously making out this whole time?’
OK. Anything but that. ‘Ew. God. No.’ I reeled backwards, disgust warring against my rising freak-out.
‘OK, sorry, my bad,’ she said, raising her hand in placation. ‘But in my defence, these Mafia family trees are incredibly complicated and I really only concern myself with the hot members.’
‘I’m not related to Donata,’ I said, realizing the small mercy in that at least. ‘She married into the family.’
‘But isn’t she, like, the Marino boss now?’ Millie released a low whistle. ‘Damn, that lady is ambitious.’
‘Mil,’ I groaned as I stuck my head between my knees and shut my eyes. ‘My whole life is literally turning upside down, and I really just need you to talk about something else. Anything else. Please, just distract me. I need you to make it stop.’
‘OK.’ I heard her suck in a breath, and after a moment of consideration, she said, ‘Did you know a baby puffin is called a puffling?’