Chapter 7
Aron
My head pounds, and my ears won’t stop ringing.
Matt shouts something at me, but it’s so muffled, I have no clue what he’s saying. I watch with blurry eyes as he races straight into the inferno that was my home.
Emily … She had already gone inside …
I want to get up, to chase after him, to save my wife and unborn child, but the second I’m upright, I fall the fuck over again. Something in my inner ear must be fucked up; my equilibrium is shot.
I can’t get to her. I can’t save her.
Minutes later—though it feels like hours—Matt comes back out, hacking and coughing as he falls to his knees next to me.
I grab his shoulders and yell in his face, I curse and threaten him, but he just shakes his head and mutters something I can’t understand.
He holds out his soot-stained hand, and it takes my mind an eternity to process what I’m seeing there.
A wedding band.
Not just any wedding band; it’s the band I spent hours picking out, the band I put on Emily’s finger as I trembled with excitement and nerves, the band I see every day as she washes dishes or folds laundry.
“Why did you take it off?” I scream at him. “She needs this! Why the fuck would you bring her wedding band and not her?”
The look on Matt’s ash-covered face … I could have gone an eternity without seeing that look in his blue eyes.
His sapphire blue eyes. The same blue eyes that Emily has.
Had.
Fuck.
There’s only one reason Matt would rush in to save Emily and come out with only her wedding band.
I’m shaking so hard I can barely grasp the ring to pick it up from Matt’s palm. Tears fill my eyes as I turn the ring over and over, like maybe if I look at it from a different angle things will be better. Nothing changes, though. It’s still just a ring—a ring pulled from a dead body.
Once I accept that, once my mind finally goes to that dark place, I break.
I throw my head back and scream into the night. Matt sits there, tears running wet trails through the dirt on his face, as I keen and wail. He lets me vent my grief and rage until my voice breaks, until a coughing fit ends my song of mourning.
The next few hours are a blur. Matt helps me stand and half-carries me to his stolen car.
He puts me in the seat and buckles me in, digging my phone out of my pocket and tossing it in the yard.
He drives off, away from the ruins of my home, away from my wife’s burned body.
The car turns at random streets, weaving in and out of neighborhoods, running lights and speeding onto the highway.
In some distant part of my mind, I recognize what Matt’s doing. He’s evading, taking a route that’s hard to track, watching the rearview for any tail we might have picked up.
He’s doing my job.
Since Matt’s not in a talkative mood—and I don’t think I could hear him if he tried—I recede into my own mind while he drives. Thoughts of Emily flit through my head.
The day we met, one of my rare days off from work. Our first date. Our first kiss. The first time we made love. A thousand little moments that added up to a fulfilling love, gone in an instant.
Dear God … Our baby was due next week.
She didn’t get a name. We had it narrowed down to a few, but we thought we had more time to decide. More time for everything.
She wasn’t baptized, either. Fuck, what’ll happen to her? I think back to that Catholic school Matt and I went to. What did they teach us about unbaptized babies?
Her soul’s fate is up to God now. She’s in His hands.
What am I going to do?
I have to call Emily’s parents. Make funeral arrangements. Pick out a casket.
Do I need to pick out two caskets?
Then, an even more sickening thought surfaces, one that makes all this a thousand times worse:
I can’t call Emily’s mom and dad. Can’t make funeral arrangements. Can’t pick out their caskets. I can’t do any of that because until Matt gets to the bottom of what happened tonight, I can’t exist.
The moment I contact anyone outside the Syndicate, the moment I let my guard down, we’re dead.
Not just me—Matt, too. I know him; he won’t leave my side after tonight.
It would take an act of God Himself to get Matt to leave me alone for a second after this.
If I let even one person know I’m alive, they’ll know Matt survived the attack, too.
After a while, I notice that something about Matt’s driving seems off. I know all the Syndicate escape routes and hideouts, but nothing about this road looks familiar. “Where are we going?” My voice comes out in a harsh croak, reminding me that I broke it screaming.
“Somewhere safe.”
“C’mon, Matt. I need to know, too.”
His lips—still covered with dust and ash—spread in a wry grin. “I’m not supposed to tell you. In fact, Dad set this place up with your dad in mind. ‘In case the Martinezes turn,’ he said.”
I’d be angry at the insinuation, but in Tito’s mind, anyone was a potential enemy, I suppose.
Matt continues. “Only Dad and I know about this place. We bought it in secret, kept it off the Syndicate books. It’s probably the safest place in the underworld right now.”
“Tito really thought my dad might turn on him?”
Matt shrugs. “He said not to trust anyone.”
“You’re trusting me.”
His fingers grip the steering wheel tighter, knuckles turning white beneath the soot. “I’ll always trust you, Aron. The entire world could be on fire, and you could be holding the only match, and I’d still trust you.”
I rasp out a gravelly laugh. “That trust will get you killed one of these days, Matt. Tito’s right; you’re not supposed to trust anyone in this business.”
“You’ve got the tense wrong, Aron. Tito was right.”
Matt’s words are a harsh, sobering reminder that I’m not the only person in this car who lost someone close to him tonight.
Say what you want about Tito Mangione: for all that he was a bloodthirsty don, he was a good father to Matt.
He cared, which is more than many could say about their dads.
I’ve known average Joes who had less paternal instinct, and I’ve known kids who grew up to be shitheads because they had terrible fathers.
Matt is anything but a shithead. He’s a fucking saint in my eyes. Ran into a burning house, one that had just exploded not once, but twice, one that could have had more explosives rigged, just to try to save a woman he’d never met.
“Saint Matteo,” I mutter as an image of Matt dressed in robes with a glowing halo over his head flashes in my mind.
“Huh?”
“Oh, nothing. Sorry.”
Matt chuckles as he turns down a dirt road. “I wonder what I’d be the patron saint of. Horny tops?”
“Brothers.” I say it without hesitation.
An unreadable expression crosses Matt’s face. “I think there’s already a saint for that, Aron.”
The car grows uncomfortably quiet as it ambles down the bumpy road.
He’s not taking as many precautions as earlier, so my guess is we lost whatever tail might’ve been following us.
The car turns off the road, winding through the trees, and my jaw gapes open as I see the sprawling …
cabin is the wrong word for it. Country manor?
It’s certainly big enough that I’d wager on multiple bedrooms and baths, and a jacuzzi or swimming pool wouldn’t surprise me.
Matt spares a glance at me as he parks the car, but he doesn’t grin at my surprise.
“Yeah, it’s got all the amenities. Most importantly, a panic room. If anyone finds us, we can hold out for a month or two in there.”
“Shit, Matt, Tito really thought Dad would go to such lengths?”
“Your dad, or someone else. Think of this as an all-expenses-paid trip to Chez Paranoia.”