Chapter 27
DOVE
I’ve never felt “normal” since the night everything died.
Lark. My old life. My memories. My very identity.
I had to relearn everything about who I was. What I liked or didn’t. How other people viewed me.
Some of those lessons were harder than they should have been, like wanting to eat raspberries so badly and then realizing the second I popped one in my mouth that I actually couldn’t because I had a mild sensitivity to them that made my lips blow up.
I cried so hard that day you’d have thought I’d just lost a loved one.
Conversely, there were things that should have been heartbreaking that were just…easy.
Like Scott.
He’d been my boyfriend for almost two years. I’d lost my virginity to him, for fuck's sake. I’m assuming at some point or another, I’d told him I loved him.
But when he came to visit me in the hospital, roses and teddy bear in hand, I felt nothing for him. Like he was a stranger. Not a stranger I wanted to remember, like Chiara. A stranger I was happy to keep walking past on the street.
I broke up with him officially a week later, when I went home. And I didn’t shed a single tear.
Nothing about any of that is “normal”.
But now, things feel even worse.
My life is spiraling out of control, and I can't do squat about it.
Not all of it is awful, of course.
There’s Bane, and no matter how this thing with us started, he’s quickly become my tether to reality. The one who grounds me. The rock I cling to when the craziness inside me wants to break me into a hundred psycho little pieces.
Everything else around me keeps changing. He stays exactly the same.
But even with Bane being this hard rock I can hold onto—pun very much intended—everything else feels like it’s slipping through my fingers like sand.
I feel like I’m getting worse: mentally, emotionally.
Psychologically.
I’m remembering things that aren’t true.
I see glimpses of shadows that aren’t there and hear snippets of conversations that no one is having.
I’ve been keeping all of this stuffed down inside me and not telling a single soul, not even Bane, because saying it out loud will cement how fucking real it might be.
Telling him means facing the very real possibility that I’m losing my mind.
…Like Lark.
What if I’m more like her than I ever guessed? More than the similar eyes and hair, or the birthdays only a month apart?
What if the corrupting darkness that was inside her is inside me, too?
“Knock knock.”
Antonio looks up from what I’m guessing are horse racing stats on his phone when I rap my knuckles on the open door to the DiCampo Street Social Club. He grins around the cigar in his mouth.
“Ayyy, piccola mia!”
A big smile spreads across my face as I step inside to meet him and he tosses the phone and cigar aside and throws his arms around me in a big hug.
Antonio is half retired now, hence spending most of his time smoking stogies, playing bocci, and gambling on horse races down here at the DiCampo Street Social Club—one of the hundreds of little “private clubs for Italian guys” in Brooklyn.
But growing up, he was one of my main bodyguards, which means I’ve spent a crazy amount of time with him.
He pulls back from the hug with a huge smile on face. He shakes his head, making a clucking sound with his tongue.
“What’s this I hear about my little tesoro being an old married woman now?”
I blush and roll my eyes, raising my hand. The diamond that Bane slipped onto my finger in his dad’s back yard a week ago glints in the light, and Antonio whistles approvingly.
“Okay, I was going to voice my objections to you marrying a Russian,” he chuckles, “but it seems he’s treating you good with a ring like that.” His brow furrows. “He is treating you good, yes?”
“Yes,” I smile. “And I’m sorry you weren’t at the wedding! It was a small thing with just family—” I frown. “Not that you’re not family—”
“Dove,” Antonio chuckles, shaking his head. “It’s okay.” He looks me up and down with a big smile, then moves back to the easy chair he was sitting in before I arrived. He pats the empty one next to him. “So what’s got a classy, married lady like you coming to see your old nanny?”
I laugh and hold up the cardboard box in my hands. I open the lid, and Antonio groans in pleasure.
“Tell me those are De Farro’s?”
“Obviously,” I snort.
He grins widely. “The best bombolini in New York? For me?!”
“Who else?”
Antonio wraps an arm around my shoulders and hugs me. “Atta girl!”
When he looks at me, and sees the way my lip twists, he lifts a brow. “Okay, why else did you want to come see me today?”
I glance down at the floor for a moment, then back up at Antonio. “Can I… I wanted to ask you something about that night.”
His smile slowly fades.
He knows what night I mean.
Antonio shakes his head and looks away. “I don’t like talking about that night.”
“Please? I’m trying to remember—”
“Yeah, and I’m trying to forget,” he growls. “The sight of you chained to that wall, head shaved, dirty, scared…” He scowls. “I think of that night all the damn time. There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t wish I could just forget it.”
Antonio was the first one through the door that night. From what I’ve heard murmured by some of my father’s men, Antonio’s also the one who shot Lorenzo first, right though the head.
“I know,” I say gently, putting a hand on his arm. “But… I really need to know something, and I can’t remember. I need you to remember for me.”
Antonio scowls, but then slowly, looking away from me, he nods. “Okay, what do you want to remember?” he growls.
“You heard about the Cielo family and their—”
“Fottuti figli di puttana,” Antonio swears. “Yeah, I heard. Your papa is taking care of that shit, yes?”
I smile and dip my chin. “My husband is, yes.”
He nods. “I like this Russian more and more.”
My mouth twists. “Apparently Lorenzo’s throat was cut?”
The words hang heavy in the silence that follows. Slowly, Antonio nods.
“It was. We came in hot, you know? And when I saw that son of a bitch, I just pulled the trigger and didn’t stop until my mag was empty. But…” He looks at me with a dark expression. “Yeah, his neck was cut wide open. Blood fuckin' everywhere.”
I shudder.
“But if these motherfuckers push it,” he growls. “I’ll testify that you were chained up in that room. Not a chance you could’ve done it.”
I smile weakly. “You’ll testify that, or that’s really how it happened?”
Translation: how crazy am I actually?
I don’t know.
I really, really haven't got a clue anymore if me being the one who cut Lorenzo’s throat is an utterly insane idea or a frighteningly possible one.
Antonio’s brow furrows deeply. “Dove,” he growls, shaking his head.
“Don’t listen to those fottuti figli di puttana, okay?
Don’t let them get in your head.” He takes my hands in his.
“You were chained in a locked room. You didn’t kill that man.
I don’t know who did. Maybe he killed himself.
” He shrugs. “I don’t know, and frankly I don’t care.
My goal that night was to save you. I did.
That piece of shit—” He turns and spits on the floor.
“He can burn in hell, no matter how he died.”
My face winces. “And Lark?”
Antonio’s face softens. “She was my other goal that night, tesoro. You know that,” he says quietly. “But I failed. I will never forgive myself for that.”
“You came for us, though,” I choke as I hug him. “There’s nothing to forgive.”
As comforting as it is to hear that Antonio really did find me chained up and not standing cackling over Lorenzo’s body with a knife in my hand, it’s also…not.
The fact that I had to ask it in the first place is enough to shake me to my core.