Chapter 46 #2
Her eyes widen, jaw clenching, before she hears Rodion and Niko’s steps as they approach behind her. She turns her face to see them then looks back at me and my husband, a hint of fear flickering there. Good.
“You brought your brutes to scare me off?” she sneers.
“It’s not us you should be scared of,” Mikhail says. “What my wife wants, my wife gets. And if she wants you dangling by your vocal cords from the ceiling…” He shrugs.
She tilts her head. “What lies has this man filled your head with, cara? We’ve talked about this. You know what you did that night, and you don’t need me to remind you.”
Her words make my upper lip curl. I step closer until we’re almost toe to toe.
“Did you carry me into my mom’s bedroom?” I ask.
She scoffs, her mouth opening without any words coming out.
“Did you put that knife in my hand?”
Again, silence.
I look up at Mikhail and nod. “Break it.”
My husband pounces and snaps her wrist backwards with a sickening crack. A pained grunt erupts from her chest. My stomach twists, but I don’t look away. Not this time.
“What are you doing…?” she asks me through rugged breaths. “You’re letting him hurt me?”
“Again,” I say, and another crack follows. This time, my husband kicks her knee, which bends under the weight of her body. She drops to the concrete, bringing her hand to her chest. “Answer me,” I command.
“Cara mia…please…” Her voice breaks, exactly like I remember it from childhood. It’s the same voice she used when I fell off my bike and scraped my knee, or when my father used to scold me and she tried soothing me.
When she looks up, her eyes are glassy with tears. She blinks, and they roll down her cheeks, one faster than the other. “I raised you. Loved you like my own.”
My breath stutters. What is this?
Her pain…it looks real—too real.
Could she be telling the truth? No, of course not. I’ve seen those documents—I know what she’s capable of. And yet…w-what if…what if I’m making a terrible mistake? What if—
“Sweetheart?” Mikhail asks.
I blink, and seconds pass, my ribcage rapidly expanding with shallow breaths. I grind my teeth, looking for any sign of deception in her eyes but finding none.
Except, when I glance down at the rest of her body, I see it.
Her hand pressed tightly against her chest beneath the opening of her coat, holding something.
White, round plastic. The faintest glint of a needle cap between her fingers.
My stomach drops. She’s just biding her time, waiting for me to come closer, to let my guard down for a second too long, allowing her to drive that syringe into my throat.
My eyes widen—not because I didn’t think she’d be capable of trying to kill us, but because it’s the first time I’m witnessing the extent of her skillset. Of how good a liar she is.
I wonder how many people trusted her right before she killed them.
“Mikhail—” I whisper.
He moves as she lunges, the syringe flashing under the broken lights, a pale blue liquid swirling inside it.
The rest happens in the span of a second.
Rodion catches her just in time, as if he already knew what she was hiding.
Ms. Donatello screeches, and the object clatters across the concrete, rolling towards me.
“Figlio di puttana!” she curses, thrashing when Niko and Rodion pin her down. The last hint of doubt inside me dies as the frustration in her voice becomes evident, as if we inconvenienced her.
“Mikhail?”
“Yes, sweetheart?”
I swallow, nodding. “Please…make her talk.”
His lips flick upward. “Anything for you.”
My husband pulls out a knife, crouching next to Ms. Donatello, and the rest is a combination of screams and bone crushing sounds that fill the empty parking garage.
He cuts through her flesh, tossing two fingers aside as if they’re splinters from a tree trunk.
The scent of iron fills my nostrils, a pool of blood gathering around the scene.
I force myself to look, chin held high, even though my heart is breaking all over again. I loved her. As a mentor, as a friend…
It doesn’t matter now. What she did to me is unforgivable. I don’t want to be stuck with those dreadful nightmares anymore. I want this very moment to replace them—her screams, her blood, her pleading. Not my mother’s. She didn’t get to look away when she was stabbed to death.
“I’m asking you again,” I drawl, my voice low and steady this time. “What the hell did you do that night?”
“I did what I had to do!” Ms. Donatello grunts, her entire face twisting with pain. “I had a son to think about, a son I had to give away so I could clear the path for him later, when your father came to his senses.”
“You mean he fucked you and then he dumped you?”
She huffs out a breath. “Since when do you talk like that?” Licking her dry lips, she continues, “Your father isn’t exactly known for his kindness, Cecilia. And my fucking him had nothing to do with love either. I had a job to do.”
“You were his handler,” I say.
She nods. “The feds wanted him dead. They came to The Hive and hired me as a honeypot. But killing someone at his level isn’t simple. I had to infiltrate his life. Get him to trust me. That…took time. And then, one day, I found out I was pregnant. I don’t even know how it happened…”
“So it was you, then? You killed my mother so you could raise your son at the palazzo?”
A subtle smirk appears on her face as she begins to shiver. She closes her eyes, remaining silent.
Mikhail pulls on her hair, hard enough that she winces. “Keep talking. Unless you want your other eight fingers chopped.”
“It wasn’t me who stabbed her,” she says. “At least, not at first…”
My breath stops. “What…?”
“After finding out I got pregnant, the Matron wanted me dead. She organized that car accident, but, obviously, I didn’t die.
I knew she wouldn’t stop coming after me, so I went to her, and we made a deal.
She’d raise my son as her own, and I’d help him get into the palazzo when the time came.
She’d have direct influence over the biggest Italian crime family in the country.
It was the only way I could convince her to keep him alive. ”
“So you’re saying the Matron raised Remus? I thought you gave him away to a family of farmers. Which is it, Lucia?” Mikhail asks.
“Both,” she says a bit sourly. “I gave him away, and the Matron took over. She visited him regularly. Made the boy think she was related to the farmers.”
“Christ. And what does Cecilia’s mother have to do with this?” Mikhail asks.
“What do you think? I couldn’t waltz in there when she was still Antonio’s wife. He would’ve killed me and taken my son. I needed to get rid of her and then make Antonio fall in love with me. But the fucker loved her too much for his own good.”
Sure he did…
If he loved her, he wouldn’t have cheated. This entire mess could’ve been avoided.
“I fed her ricin powder.” She smiles. “A deadly poison that makes the autopsy look as if her internal organs bled out. Problem was…it can take up to three days. The Matron was losing patience, so she got one of Antonio’s guards to stab your mother while she slept.
Every powerful man has traitors around him. ”
I step back, my body colliding with the sedan my mentor was leaning on, my eyes snapping to my husband’s.
“Whoever he is, he's a dead man,” he says. “I’ll make sure of it.”
“Your mother fought back, cara,” Lucia adds.
“She almost ruined things for everyone. Until I came in—I was in the palazzo that night, putting you to sleep. I heard something break in her bedroom, and I found her with the guard. She had a wound to the chest, but it wasn’t deep enough to kill her. I had to finish the job.”
I slide down the car until I’m on the ground.
“I stabbed her right in the heart while she begged me to help her. I’d never seen your mother so helpless. And it felt…ah, it felt good, Cecilia…”
“Stop talking,” I murmur.
“Seeing the blood gurgling out of her made me realize I should’ve dealt with her this way from the very beginning.
It meant I could live, that my son could be with me as his mother.
We’d inherit everything we should’ve inherited from the start.
The only problem was that now, the murder was too obvious.
I had to think of something fast, before your father saw the mess. ”
“You killed her…”
“No, you did,” she says, chuckling with her eyes closed. “You believed it. Your father believed it. I got so lucky with your head injury. It was easy to frame you for everything.”
“F-Fuck you.” I run my hands through my hair, breathing fast and shallow.
Images of what she just described flash through my head, twisting my stomach and making my chest ache. I had meals with this woman, shared some of my most personal thoughts with her, clung to her like she was my savior…
“W-why keep me small?” I ask. “Why string me along all those years, telling me I wasn’t ready to become someone? For how long were you going to keep me a prisoner to your manipulation?”
“For as long as it was necessary so you wouldn’t remember.
Though, in the end, it never even mattered.
Your father never recovered after your mother died.
I stuck around, hoping I could help him process his feelings…
” She rolls her eyes. “But like I said, the man loved his wife too much for his own good. I had to switch plans, which is why I finally made contact with my son, consequences be damned.”
“And then you found someone curious enough about your past,” she adds, glancing at my husband, but he says nothing. He’s letting me handle this myself. He knows I need it.
Silence stretches between us. I get up slowly, ignoring the wobbly feeling in my legs and take a deep breath.
“I need a gun,” I say.
I’m handed three—one from my husband and two from his friends. Our friends. I take the one that’s closest, the metal heavy and foreign in my hand. My husband gets up from his crouch and comes before me.
“Sure you want to do this?” he asks, tucking a strand of hair behind my ear. “I’m already going to hell, Lastochka. Let me do it.”
I shake my head. “It has to be me.”
I’m not six years old anymore, and this isn’t rage deciding for me—it’s what every fiber in my body knows to be the right choice. It has to be me who ends her life.
Mikhail nods, gently stepping to the side, revealing Lucia Donatello on the concrete in a pool of her own blood and the two fingers she lost.
“It’s already loaded,” he says. “All you need to do is aim and pull the trigger.”
“If you kill me…you won’t be able to live with yourself. Who are you trying to fool with these theatrics?” Lucia asks, her voice paling from the loss of blood.
I don’t even answer. There’s no point.
Instead, I take a long breath…and pull the trigger.
The recoil jerks me backward, my short hair flying in front of my face. Blood sprays from Lucia’s wound, her face frozen in shock. Trembling hands come down to where she was shot, her gaze drawn there instinctively.
I stand and watch as she takes her final breaths, lowering the gun, which Mikhail gently pries out of my tight grip.
“Sweetheart…” he whispers.
I told him I was Catholic. I told him I didn’t want the men he killed on my conscience.
And yet…
“God will just have to understand me on this one,” I say, tears prickling my eyes. “He fucking owed me.”