Chapter 33
33
SAMANTHA
A clock strikes midnight somewhere in Philadelphia, and Sunday becomes Monday. The ship has docked by now. The container has been unloaded. The drugs are working their way through Braiden’s criminal empire, financing the Philadelphia Flower Show and St. Columba’s and Thornfield and all the aspects of the Irish Mob I’ve carefully kept myself from thinking too much about.
Russo’s been at the summit. He hasn’t had a chance to fire his weapon, to destroy me with That Night—but he will, the instant the meeting ends.
I’ve hidden the truth for eleven years, imagining and re-imagining everything that will happen when my story is revealed. For the past forty-eight hours, Russo’s kept me on tenterhooks, every twinge of my sprained shoulder reminding me of the painful reveal that waits.
Tonight all that ends.
And suddenly, I can’t bear one more minute of delay. I open the door of the suite where I’ve spent the past two days and say to Liam, “Please take me to where they’re meeting.”
He looks exhausted. “I can’t do that.”
“Then take me to the lobby.”
“I have orders from Himself. You’re to stay here.”
“Please,” I say. I need to face Russo now .
But Liam remains unmoved.
I have no choice. I fall back on the lessons I’ve learned in six weeks of living with the Mob, in decades of watching the Mafia work. “Don’t make me lie, Liam. Don’t make me tell Braiden you touched me. That you tried to force your way into the bedroom.”
His forehead creases, and he looks like a child who just found out the Easter Bunny is a lie. “Samantha…” he says.
“Oh, God,” I answer. Liam has only been good to me, patient and steadfast and true. “I’m sorry. I won’t say that. I won’t do it.” But then I add, “This is just so important…”
He shakes his head, like he’s tossing off a bad dream. But then he says, “You’ll stay by my side?”
“Of course.” I answer as quickly as I can.
“And if I say it’s too dangerous, we come back here—no argument.”
“Agreed.”
It’s nearly one in the morning at the most exclusive hotel in Philadelphia. The only danger is the man I’m about to face. And after Russo drops his bomb, no other threat on earth will matter.
We wait in the lobby for nearly an hour. In deference to Liam’s nerves—and my throbbing shoulder—I take a seat in one of the heavy leather armchairs near the hotel doors.
Finally, one of the elevators opens. Six people enter the lobby. I stand, without making a conscious decision to move.
There’s Braiden, of course, and Madden. They flank a woman who looks like Cruella DeVil’s younger, more chic sister.
Russo is there too, with a man I recognize from newspaper articles as his lawyer. The third man is Luca Scuderi, godfather of the New York Mafia. He came to my parents’ house when I was six. I cried, because my cousin Gianni said Don Luca was a skeleton come to life so he could eat the livers of little girls like me.
The woman and Scuderi say “Ciao,” and they kiss each other the European way, right cheek first, then left. Madden and the lawyer scowl and shake hands. Braiden and Russo follow course, shaking like they’re in an arm-wrestling match to the death.
Only then do they cross to the hotel doors. Only then does Braiden see me. “What the—” he starts.
But Russo cuts him off. “Giovanna!” He sounds like we’re old friends. Braiden stiffens, his fists turning to oak. Russo ignores him, saying to me, “We have some unfinished business, you and I.”
He reaches inside his jacket. Liam moves for his weapon, but he stops when Russo only produces a phone. It’s so small in his hand. It seems so harmless.
“You should have listened, sweet Giovanna. I do not make idle threats.”
“Go to fucking hell,” I say.
He laughs. “Where you will go yourself, of course. The proper place for killers like us.”
And just like that, I’m back on the mountain road.
Giorgia is lying down in the back seat, her head in Gianni’s lap. They’re even more drunk than I am, too far gone to manage their seatbelts. They’ve rolled down the windows, hoping fresh air will sober all of us up before we get home.
A man darts out of the ditch beside the road, so bent over that at first I think he’s a dog. The impact knocks the steering wheel out of my hands, and the car skids out of control.
I pound on the brakes, but the car’s already halfway off the mountain road. I yank the wheel as hard as I can, and we don’t go over the cliff. But the wheels lurch over the man, the one I barely saw.
The car flies over the ditch on the uphill side. It rolls twice before it smashes into a massive oak tree.
I black out.
When I come to, Gianni’s sprawled across the back seat, lying on his stomach with his eyes staring at the ceiling. That’s not right. That’s not the way necks work. Eyes don’t work that way either. They need to blink. Gianni’s not blinking.
I start to scream.
It takes forever to figure out how to undo my seatbelt. And even longer before I find Giorgia at the bottom of the ditch, face-down in an ankle-deep puddle. When I roll her over, her face looks black in the moonlight.
She’s dead too.
I struggle up to the road. The man is there, dragged almost to the edge by the wheels of my car. His back… His legs… There’s clearly no need to check for a pulse.
What’s left of his toothless mouth smells like a still. His hair is a solid mat of grease. His sweat-stained shirt reeks of a body odor so sharp my eyes water.
I dig in his bloodied pockets to find out who he is. He has two dollars and twenty-seven cents, all in change.
No wallet. No keys. No ID.
“He lurched in front of me,” I say now, in the safety of the Rittenhouse lobby. “No one could have stopped. He came too fast.”
“Of course,” Russo says conversationally. “You were drunk.”
It was a graduation party. We all had too much to drink before the boys and girls started pairing off. Giorgia and Gianni wanted to stay, but I insisted on going home. I wanted to collapse in my own bed, to sleep off the peach schnapps and the watermelon vodka, the cheap champagne and the joint we passed around.
“No one could have stopped in time.” I insist, because it’s important. “I couldn’t— He wouldn’t— I didn’t?—”
Russo picks up the narration, as if he’s my ally. “Elisabetta had a car. A gift from me. She drove up the mountain to help you.”
I had my whole life ahead of me. So much potential. I could be more than the orphaned brat the Cannas took in. More than the best friend Eliza needed when she married her don. More than the mindless wife Holy Family trained me to be.
I could be so much more.
“Elisabetta learned so much, sitting at my dining room table.” Russo sounds proud, more like a father boasting about a daughter’s college GPA than a husband describing a bride who mastered handling bodies. “Was it her idea to put Gianni behind the wheel? Or was it yours?”
After her initial shock, Eliza suggested it. Giorgia and Gianni were already dead. She couldn’t stand to lose me too. And no lie we told mattered. It only had to look good enough for a bought-off country sheriff to accept.
Because Eliza learned that from Russo too. She arrived at the mountain with stacks of hundred-dollar bills. She said it was her allowance. She said it was our secret.
“Elisabetta gave you money and told you to flee. Your story might have fallen apart if your Zia Sara was still alive, but she wasn’t there to mourn her twins. No one watched the Canna family. Not after Elisabetta was mine.”
I told Eliza it would never work. Someone would track down Giovanna Canna.
But no one bothered. No one came to New York.
So I became Samantha Mott—a law student, then a lawyer, then a success. I had everything under control. My world was clear, in simple black and white. I didn’t need anything else. I didn’t deserve anything else—no soft colors, no lace, no ribbons, no bows.
Russo says, “A wise man keeps records. Mileage logs from his wife’s car, for example. Do you know how many fibers show up after a crash like that? How many long, black hairs can be trapped in a headrest? You know fingerprints can identify a person holding a steering wheel. But did you know they can prove that person used marijuana?”
I didn’t know, that night. I’ve learned, over the years.
I offer up the only explanation I’ve had for ages—the one I whisper to myself when I jerk awake from nightmares: “I would have hit him if I was one hundred percent sober. He moved too fast. He was too close to the car when he lurched onto the road.”
Russo says, “If you truly believed that, you would have admitted what happened long ago.”
He’s right.
I was drunk. And high. I killed a man, an absolute stranger, and I never made any attempt to find his family. I killed my cousins and left Gianni to take the blame. I corrupted Eliza, making her an accessory after the fact. And for eleven long years, I’ve pretended none of it happened.
I’m a monster.
“I made a mistake,” I plead. “Please don’t do this.”
“You’re a killer.”
“Please…” It’s not too late. His finger still hovers over his phone.
“The worst kind of killer,” Russo says. “Because you put the blame on poor Gianni.”
“Don Antonio…” I beg.
His finger lands heavily on the screen. “Good luck, sweet Giovanna.”
I’m close enough to hear Braiden’s phone buzz in his pocket.
Russo starts to leave. He reaches the door flanked by his Mafia colleagues, only turning back at the last possible moment. “What sort of man am I? I nearly forgot to thank you, Giovanna. The information you provided about the port was exactly what I needed. Without you, we never could have intercepted tonight’s shipment. Grazie mille. ”
The lie splits his face into a grin, as if he’s some sort of deranged clown.
I’m stunned. “I didn’t?—”
He interrupts with ruthless efficiency. “ Ciao, bella. We will talk soon.” Finally, he leaves, carrying his lies and devastation into the freezing winter night.
I whirl toward Braiden, digging for words to explain.
He already has his phone out. He’s staring at the screen, scrolling down for more. I don’t know if he’s looking at evidence from that night on the mountain. Maybe he’s already getting a report about the stolen drugs, about how Russo got them, about how much the Fishtown Boys have lost.
I stretch for his arm, but he steps beyond my reach. “Braiden…” I plead.
He looks at me like I’ve sprouted horns and leathery black wings. When he speaks, I can’t begin to recognize his voice: “What the fuck have you done?”