Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Finnic
After our conversation, Dante says that he’d go on watch so that I can get some sleep. He mentions that it will be a long two days ahead of us if she makes it difficult.
I hope that she doesn’t.
In the furthest portion of my head, I have faith that she will just give him one piece of information to let her go. Anything.
But Dante is probably right. She most likely knows more than she is letting on but is ultimately deciding to keep it to herself. I’m not sure what she thinks will come from keeping important information about her father cooped up. Because without that information, she has nothing to bargain with.
After a few steps, I plop down on a cot against the wall that’s positioned just outside the hallway. I lounge back as comfortably as I can get against the rigid surface.
There are nights my mind goes quiet enough for the past to crawl back in.
Tonight isn’t quiet, but she still finds me somehow.
Her scent finds its way into my nostrils. She always smelled like warm espresso and honey. She tasted like the latter.
Now my head is filled with thoughts that make me feel like shit, like a decay that is soaked so deep into me it can never be scrubbed clean.
I hadn’t always known how to hurt people.
Once, I’d known how to love. I was normal.
I grew up in a small town in an even smaller household in South Carolina.
My mom raised me when my father didn’t and I had no siblings.
But I never wanted for anything. Mom always worked her ass off to take care of me.
Sent me off to college at eighteen with a full ride because of how hard she worked, how much she did.
Baruch College was where I attended. It was where I met her.
She’d had a laugh that was obnoxious to others when something made her happy, but it was beautiful to me. She believed the world was mostly decent, that bad things happened because people were careless, not actually cruel.
But her only flaw was that she trusted too easily.
I was twenty at the time and thought it could never happen to me or someone I cared about.
But one night it happened, and I wasn’t there.
I was working a part-time construction job while in school. I wanted my mom to not have to be concerned with what food options I had and if I needed anything extra while going to class.
When my phone rang, I expected to answer and for her to complain that I didn’t make it back in time for our late night pizza run and our second time of re-watching The Vampire Diaries. Instead, I had an officer on the other end of the line asking me if I was her next of kin.
That is the specific detail my brain replayed on a continuous punishment loop. It was her I expected to answer the phone.
Not the police who asked me to come to the scene.
Her body was found by a room-mate she shared the dorm with.
The officer who spoke to me kept using small words to explain the entire situation to me as if I were a child and knew nothing of the dangers in the world.
He spoke gently and carefully, like it would soften what had happened. I remember staring at his mouth, watching syllables move while my brain refused to translate them into anything real.
Blunt force trauma. Sexual assault. Time of death.
I never asked for anymore details. My imagination was already too willing.
They let me see her once before the funeral and I wish they hadn’t.
I wanted to remember her as the person who snorted through laughter. The one whose cheeks blushed when she caught me staring at her in class. The one I saw my entire life with.
After the service, the world expected me to move on. My mother cried quietly and tried not to look at me like I was something fragile she might break by accident.
But grief didn’t make me reckless. It made me methodical. Angry in a way that required structure. I started asking questions no one wanted to answer. Names. Faces. Patterns. Who drank where. Who bragged about what.
That was how I fell into the rabbit hole of the Italian Mafia.
Through obsession. Through her.
I didn’t join because I wanted some type of power.
I only joined because they knew things. Because information traveled faster in those type of circles than it ever did through police files.
I told myself I’d get what I needed and leave and that would change everything for me.
I was only there to find the man who had ruined her life and mine.
I found him, eventually, but it didn’t satisfy me like I thought it would. Instead, the anger grew inside my own head. It raged because I had no one else to blame. The problem was gone, I took care of it.
At least, I thought I had.
But I was still here, and I still felt everything like it was yesterday.
It didn’t bring her back to me. It didn’t silence the wrath in my head. It didn’t make the nights easier without her. I kept expecting something like closure to drop from the sky and knock my ass out.
Nothing ever did.
So I stayed with the bad guys.
Fury is easier to live with when you give it somewhere to acclimate. The mob gave mine direction. I learned how to channel my rage into precision.
And the money definitely helped. Or it was a decent enough distraction.
But women were different. They always had been after her.
Well, women, children and anyone smart enough to convince me that they were innocent.
I couldn’t put my hands on them without memories flashing in uninvited.
The group of guys that we worked with noticed and cracked jokes. They’d call me soft and said I hesitated where I shouldn’t.
I let them continue to talk shit about me behind my back.
It was easier than explaining that any aggression toward someone who I felt was innocent, felt like betrayal.
The truth was simpler. I was scared of who I’d become if I let myself forget.
That was why Chloe rattled me to the bone.
Not because she fought back. But it was the way she looked at me. The way she flinched at Dante but sought me out for the smallest bit of safety.
She wasn’t her. I knew that. Everything was different and yet, every time she looked at me, the past fluttered through my mind.
Sleep deprivation begins to take over and my eyelids flicker shut, ending the rampage of past memories.