48. Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Seven
Olivia
Polina Stepanova
1980-2008
‘The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.’
Pain. All of it is visceral, even the mental kind. It’s become a dull ache now, a slow throb in both body and mind. I’ve gotten to know pain very well in the past few days, and I’ve experienced enough to last a lifetime. I was shot in the chest by my own brother. Waking in the hospital bed with a drainage tube in my lung, an open gunshot wound and forced to cough up blood and tissue? Yeah, that hurt. It was all sharp and terrible, but it feels like nothing compared to the pain in my heart.
It feels like deep fissures have opened up, gaping deep and bleeding poison into every other part of me. Days have gone by, crawling at a lazy pace and bringing the dark truths of my new reality. I was disappointed to wake up and find a nurse staring down at me, and not the ferocious maw of my monster, his blue eyes burning with fury. I would have preferred his retribution and anger to the constant hum of hospital equipment and the deafening silence.
I’m free. In some ways, the death of my brother freed me. But my freedom has come at the price of a broken heart. I guess Alessandrio won. He has ruined me in ways I hadn’t realized were possible in his absence and lack of care. Did Lucia tell him? That my betrayal was as fake as our engagement. If she did, it didn’t change a thing. When the doctors and nurses asked if they could get me anything, I could say nothing, because the one thing I desperately craved was Alessandrio. His presence, his strength, but most of all, his forgiveness.
My only other constant, aside from the pain and mental exhaustion, was the good Detective Tony Mathers, who is now standing a respectable distance away as I place flowers on my mother’s grave. He has been full of revelations, an open book to all the questions I had. The man who pulled me from my mother’s skirts after she was murdered and placed me in my father’s hands. Tony decided from that moment on to right some terrible wrongs. He had questions of his own, of course. What was I doing with my brother? A man they had been hunting themselves and were intent on bringing to justice for a string of brutal murders. And even harder, what was my connection to the Greco brothers? Despite the pain at the back of my throat, I spilled lies and half truths, knowing I couldn’t betray Alessandrio any worse than he thought I already had. Not just for him, but for me, because I couldn’t bear reducing our time together to cinder and ashes.
“Have you ever been in love, detective?” I ask quietly, tracing my mother’s etched name on the cold tombstone.
“Yes. I’ve been married to my wife for twenty-five years.” His breath mists out in the frigid air with each word.
“What does it feel like?” I whisper.
I can see by his face that he can see the terrible pain beneath my surface wounds. He has visited me every day I was in that hospital bed, saw the dark bruises beneath my eyes grow even more deep, watched me lose my appetite and gnaw my lip until it bled.
“Home,” he says simply, eyes tight with concern and sadness.
I feel it then; the wet streaks down my face are sharp with the cold. I can only offer him a weak smile as I turn to her grave again. Home. It sounds so simple, and yet it’s not. Home should be where you feel safest, the place where you are free to be yourself and know that person will protect you no matter what. A sob rips from my throat at the irony of sitting at my mother’s grave. A woman killed for her love of a man in the Mafia. All the while, I pine for a man carved by the same world that ripped her from me. Because in truth, when I was with him, home is exactly what it felt like in Alessandrio’s arms.
“Where to from here?” Tony asks over his steaming mug of coffee.
“I have to go back to Ironwood,” I reply, clutching my own warm mug of hot chocolate, in awe of the room full of people. “I have no identification and no access to my inheritance. Both of which I will need.”
He nods at that as if it makes sense and I feel relieved he approves. I like him. The lines on his face are at odds with the job, deep laugh lines around his mouth, crinkles around his eyes that scrunch up when he laughs. And brown eyes the color of his coffee, that glow with warmth and actually see you when he looks at you. I cringe a little as I scan his face, remembering how I clutched my sheet to my chest in terror that he was a hitman coming to finish Riccardo’s job. How I ever thought this grey-haired golden retriever of a man was a hitman, I do not know. That doesn’t mean he’s a pushover, though. From speaking to him, I learned that he’s part golden retriever, part bloodhound, who single-handedly rooted out the corruption in the NYPD and put the entire precinct under the microscope.
“Then where?” he asks, as if it’s that simple.
Isn’t that the ultimate question? Where from here? Where from Alessandrio?
“I don’t know.” Because I don’t know if there is a where from him.
“You have time to figure it out,” he replies, checking his watch. “We better get going. Traffic will have eased up by now.”
“You know, you don’t have to drive me.” I can see by the look he gives me that, despite my protests, he absolutely does.
He cares. To him, I was dead, the little girl who disappeared into a fractured system and, most likely, an unmarked grave. I will never forget the look on his face when I confirmed my name, the way it seemed to relax, fifteen years of heavy burden and unknowing leeching from his countenance. So I let him care, because for him this was his redemption story.
We leave the cafe a little while later, the street around us bustling. No matter where you look, people are everywhere. Tony expertly dodges other humans, leading me safely to his grey sedan. My heart comes to a crashing halt as he opens the car door for me.
Oh God.
“Olivia?” Tony’s voice sounds distant and yet near all at once.
Mind racing, I step out of the gutter, away from him, heart racing as I fight the urge to sprint to the black van with its heavily tinted windows. He’s here! I fight the losing battle and run, bumping into other pedestrians in my desperate need to get to him. Someone swears at me as I sway into them, my name bouncing off the concrete behind me but Alessandrio! My feet slow as the driver’s door opens, my heart galloping in my chest as all the things I want to say race through my head.
“Alessa…” His name trails off into nothingness.
A new fissure opens in my chest as a man climbs out. A very human man, who walks around the back of the van and opens the door as someone rushes to help him remove a mattress from the back. Disappointment is a tidal wave, a throbbing ache that makes my knees buckle.
“Olivia.” A hand settles on my shoulder as I meet brown eyes full of worried concern. “What is it?”
“I…” feel so stupid. I look back toward the van and see how different it is from his. What I thought was black is actually dark blue, the paint peeling in places and a hub cap missing. Not at all like Alessandrio’s, and yet in my desperation, I wanted it to be so bad. “Nothing,” I reply with a shake of my head, ignoring the way his face only tightens with deeper concern.
I turn my back on the van and hurry back to his car, not waiting for the detective to open my door. I need out of this city with a renewed determination. Ironwood and its fresh air will help me decide what move I want to make next.