Chapter 25 Lucie
TWENTY-FIVE
LUCIE
“Mariella?” I call into the room my aunt has decided to hide in today. It’s not her bedroom. She’s elected the piano room, and Aleksei plays for her, but she looks out the window like she’s not hearing the music.
Dante’s mum lifts her head when I press a gentle hand to her shoulder. “Who are you?”
“It’s me, Lucie. I’m your niece.”
But today isn’t a good day. She shakes her head. Aleksei stops playing and stands. His bulk must scare her because she starts to stand and steps back, stumbling over furniture. “What are you doing in my house?” she yells as she holds her hands in front of her.
Dante barges into the room, but approaches her softly.
“I’m here, Mama. Come, let’s get you in bed.”
“Who are they? Why are they here?”
My aunt’s voice is fearful and confused and my lips tremble. I swallow before leaving, letting my cousin deal with his mother. He’s the only one she remembers these days, though she often calls him by his father’s name.
When coming home for the holiday break, I thought it’d be better to avoid the sterile flat Aleksei and I shared.
I just can’t go back to a place that held me captive.
I got a hotel room but spent most days with zia at the Ventura mansion.
But her health is declining rapidly, breaking me all over again.
One more parental figure fading away. Dante kept it from me.
Yet another secret that makes my blood boil and resentment grow.
Later that evening, we sit at a beautifully dressed table, silence thick and painful between us.
“You’re not eating, Lu?” Dante asks from across the table where Irina, Aleksei, and I sit. Sadness taints our dinner but none of us is ready to acknowledge it.
I know it’s particularly difficult for Dante to spend his first Christmas dinner without his mother. She was too distraught and I heard her call Dante by his brother’s name earlier. He looked like he wanted to die, and I understood it all too well.
The mansion is tastefully decorated for the holidays, in shades of silver and green, no doubt after Dante’s efforts. Yet, it doesn’t hold any appeal.
I used to love Christmas. Back when I lived in France and my father would organise a proper feast bathed in love, good food, better wine and extravagant gifts. His absence is too obvious. His silence an insult at this point.
“I’m not hungry.”
Everyone has been treading carefully around me, unused to seeing me withdrawn but more than that, I think the fact that I haven’t smiled once has unnerved the chaotic trio.
They think I’m in pain. They don’t know the details of my relationship with Toma and how he abandoned me, saying awful things to me just to provoke me into hating him.
I believed him then but I know he lied. In a very short amount of time, he showed me devotion, obsession, love.
He might not call it that, too stuck into believing he’s incapable of it, but I know the truth of his heart.
“I’m going to kill the bastard,” Dante seethes and I ignore him.
They think Toma succeeded in hurting me.
And somehow he did. But he also set me free.
The compulsion to lie and smile to make sure my family’s pain and sorrow or concern is lessened is gone.
I’m not in the mood to entertain with silly stories and my dazzling personality. So I don’t. The shift is invigorating.
Dante starts an inane story and I have no patience left in my body. “Where’s my father?” I ask.
“You don’t want the answer to that,” Irina says, but I keep my attention on Dante.
“Does she also decide when you take a shit, cugino?”
Their gobsmacked faces would be comical if I just didn’t want to throttle them for keeping things from me.
“What did you just say?” Aleksei’s voice drops low, the menace in the words evident but I couldn’t care less. We’re family. He wouldn’t hurt me. I feel comfortable and loved enough to be myself for once, and to demand answers.
“You need me to repeat myself, old man? Let me try in Russian. Where is my father?” My knowledge of the language is rudimentary but it drives the point across.
They exchange looks, the silent conversation short but effective.
“You wanted out,” Dante grinds out, settling his elbows on the table and his chin on his hands, assessing.
“And I’ve changed my mind.”
He reclines in his chair, eyes sharp clashing with mine. He clicks his tongue, annoyance flaring his nostrils. He doesn’t like to be defied. None of them do. “He’s on a mission.”
“On Christmas?”
“You think crime rests for the holidays, Loulou?”
“I think he hasn’t called me or visited me in months and that’s not normal. I think Diane’s phone has gone dark and that’s not normal. I know about the war against the Moscow Bratva, but this is different. Where are they?”
“Your father is retrieving Diane. Tonight.” Dante picks up his fork like this is answer enough and I slam a fist on the table, surprising Biscuit who lets out a little whimper from her place on the couch.
She jumps down and scampers to me. She’s been very aware of my every emotion since Toma left and she never leaves my side.
I pick her up and resume my ridiculous staring contest with my cousin.
I’m getting tired of those hateful secrets everyone keeps. All in the name of protecting me like I’m incapable of doing it myself.
“What do you mean?”
“Diane’s been sent to Split,” Dante finally surmises.
My blood turns cold.
Toma’s brother’s domain. My brain runs a mile a minute. “Are you out of your mind? You sent her to The Butcher? How is she not dead?”
“She will be if your father doesn’t extract her. Tonight.”
For months, I’ve been wallowing in self-pity, thinking that maybe Diane abandoned me. That now that I was away, it was the perfect excuse to stop pretending she ever cared about me. Meanwhile, she was in danger. The resentment I felt pops up like a balloon.
“Has she always been a spy?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you send her? Why her? I need to know everything.”
We retire to the office where the lights aren’t as bright, the space offering comfortable warmth as I drag my weary body to the sofa, Biscuit in my arms.
They explain to me how they needed to infiltrate one of Petrov’s closest allies because access to Petrov himself was impossible to get to.
The man responsible for flesh trade in Europe is elusive, well-guarded and more importantly, paranoid.
It also seems like the Moretti have a personal vendetta against him and want to be the one to get rid of him.
The Butcher was my family’s next best target, as the alliance goes after each of Petrov’s allies to weaken him.
Diane is the perfect Trojan horse. I wince as Aleksei tells me that she started at the bottom of one of the brothels the Butcher owned in Split, and soon climbed up the ladder, gaining the favours of multiple men.
She even got invited to one of The Butcher’s parties and used her time in his home to gather more information on the number of men armed in the house, how people used as slaves are taken in and out of his headquarters, then shipped across Europe.
It’s not enough to storm the place and take his whole organisation down but it will help The Morettis save as many people as they can while we continue to gather forces and make new alliances to blow the whole system to the ground.
The main problem remains that without severing the head of the snake, it will be for nothing.
“Why didn’t you ask Toma for help?” I ask, his name ashen on my tongue.
“Because we don’t know where his allegiance lies.”
“He helped rescue you,” I counter, pinning Dante with a dark look.
“It’s not enough. He ran right back to his brother just a few weeks ago and we don’t know why.”
I grimace, then swallow. Threads of information weave themselves together. The sudden shift between how he loved me openly and with maddening obsession to the cold, ugly words he said. He admitted that his brother called. His brother attacked my flat. I was the target.
“You know why, Dante. Did he know about Diane?”
“Yes.”
It’s not hard to understand Toma. Everything he does is for me.
Despite the horrendous way we parted, the hurtful words he said, the memory of how he doted on me, of the force of his devotion makes me smile sadly.
I have been keeping my own set of secrets from my family.
“His brother threatened me. Toma believes the only way to get The Butcher off my back is if he does whatever he wants.”
The air shifts, vibrating with violence as all three pairs of eyes set on me.
“What do you mean?” Aleksei asks.
“My flat got broken into by one of Toma’s brother’s men.”
“And you didn’t think to tell us?” Dante growls.
“I was a little heartbroken. And with the exams, I… I don’t know, I just didn’t think to tell you, I guess.
He said Petar called him back to Split. He would have never left me unless he thought his brother could get to me.
” I start to think out loud. “I told him about Diane. How she was like a mother to me. If he knew she was there, he might have left to protect me and to protect her.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because I already lost two parents. And because he loves me.”
I hate the way he spoke to me the last time I saw him. But now, I’m mad for what he said and for not involving me in his plans. That stupid, selfless asshole.
“Do you think Petar’s still after me?” I ask my family.
“It’s not impossible. The reason why your father is extracting Diane today is because she reported that the Croatian Bratva has been acting strange.
They’re being more closed off. Something’s brewing.
And she thinks it will happen tonight. While their focus is on that operation, we take her out, unscathed. ”
I sneer at him. “She still had to fuck her way to the top. Unscathed isn’t what she’ll be.”
“She volunteered.”