18. Contessa
18
Contessa
Apparently, I am having an engagement party. I thought an engagement party was meant to bring the two families together, to celebrate an upcoming happy union. For Salvatore and me, too many words in that sentence need asterisks next to them. My engagement party will only be attended by Salvatore’s family, and how happy our union turns out seems to depend on something a little finicky, like the weather or my rising star sign.
But for a few days now, I have been able to blissfully smile and pretend like Salvatore and I are just another couple. It’s easier than it should be, and I think Salvatore is starting to like it, too. He really took my little challenge to heart.
It’s a little adorable—though he might spontaneously combust if I used those exact words with him out loud.
He promises me that the engagement party won’t be the whole family, not like that first formal dinner. The people I’ve gotten to know—Ava, Marcel, Vinny—will all be the main attendees, and those close to Salvatore will also be invited, with a sprinkling of people who are invited out of respect and tradition.
By the time the weekend party arrives, I’m warmed up to the idea, and so is the weather.
Tables with white tablecloths are set up in the backyard, around the bubbling fountain that serves as the centerpiece. Ava and I are setting floral arrangements in the middle of each table when Marcel comes rushing up to Salvatore.
I only catch the words, “You might want to bring her.”
Both men look my way.
My instincts bristle. They talk in lower tones for a few moments before Marcel returns to the house.
“What was that about?” I ask, throwing down a circle of pink and white flowers.
Salvatore motions for me to follow him. I give Ava my basket, exchanging bewildered looks.
“This was supposed to be a surprise,” he says, something grim in his voice. “Well, in a way, I guess it still is…”
I follow him to the very front of the house, to the main door, where someone is coming through—one of Salvatore’s men, his face blood red, snot and tears pouring down his cheeks and chin as he stumbles inside. I stop in the middle of the room, stunned. He screams for Vinny as he blindly navigates toward the kitchen.
“What happened to him—”
“She did,” Sal sighs.
I swear, for just one minute, time stops.
Kay is hauled in between two men, in a short black and white print dress with her wild curls flying right alongside a few flamboyant curses. Until she sees me.
“Tessa!” She shrieks. It brings time back to motion as she breaks away from the two. We meet in the middle of the room, embracing each other in a crushing hug. I feel her shaking against me, sobbing, her hands so tight in my hair it hurts.
“I’m so sorry. Girl, I’m so sorry.”
I don’t know what she’s saying it for. I try my hardest to comfort her and shush her. I’ve seen Kay deal with a lot of shit before. I’ve never seen her actually cry until this moment.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m okay. Look,” I pull back, trying to let Kay look me over and see for herself that, at least superficially, I’m no worse for wear.
“I thought—”
She can’t bring herself to say it. I shush her again, and we end up in each other’s arms a second time. I don’t know how long our hug is going to last, but it might be until one of our lungs gives up first.
Finally, when we both have a handle on ourselves, the questions start rolling in.
“Why are you here? How are you here? And what the hell did you do to that guy?”
Kay glowers over my shoulder, toward the sniveling and groaning still audible from the back of the house.
“That’s what we’re here to discuss,” Salvatore says. “I invited Miss Lowry as a surprise guest for your engagement party. Apparently, she came armed.”
Still near the door, Marcel brandishes a small, sleek pistol.
“Concealed in a harness around her upper thigh,” he says. “I’m told when the guards attempted to disarm her, she fought back with pepper spray that was concealed as a tube of lipstick and tried to run up the driveway. It sounds very James Bond. I’m a little disappointed I wasn’t there to witness the whole disaster.”
Kay sniffs, as though taking this as a compliment. “I was coming to get my girl back,” she says, without a shred of shame.
“I’m afraid your girl has changed hands,” Salvatore replies.
“Hello?” I say into the crowd, waving my hands. “I’m still standing right here.”
Kay takes me by the wrist, rubbing her thumb over the veins to comfort me, finally dragging her poisonous glare from Salvatore. “I’m sorry,” she finally says to me. “I’m so sorry. I really wanted to help; I couldn’t just do nothing —”
“It’s okay,” I assure her. I glance to Salvatore. “ Isn’t it ?”
Salvatore is visibly reluctant. Jaw set, shoulders squared, arms crossed. I’ve never seen him look quite so torn before. Usually, his judgments feel like snap decisions. No indecisiveness.
But he’s weighing this one.
“Miss Lowry has acted how I would if someone took you from me. I suppose that’s forgivable,” he allows, reluctantly. “Except I wouldn’t have walked up to the front door, alone and in a dress. You should have accepted my offer of a plus one. Your odds would have been better.”
I glare at Salvatore’s thinly veiled taunting.
“My plus one bitched out,” she says. “So, I said fuck it and came alone. He’ll be doing a lot of that too from now on.”
It takes a second for the meaning to click.
“Wait—Cole?” I ask.
“Yeah, fucking Cole,” she says, on the verge of flying into a rage. “Apparently, when men say they’ll do anything for you, you really gotta press them on that shit. Because suddenly, they didn’t mean they would ‘ fight the mob .’ Well, then what fucking good are you?”
I gawk numbly in the face of her ranting.
“Kay, please don’t tell me you actually broke up with him. Over this? Because of me?” I try to keep my words quiet, as if there’s any chance of us having something like a private conversation in this room.
“Hell yeah, I broke up with him!” I swear she gets louder the quieter I get. “That boy bailed before I ever got the invitation to this place. Once I was on this whole mob trail, he wanted me to just let it go. Let you go. He wouldn’t even sleep over at my place anymore because he was afraid somebody was gonna kick my door in in the middle of the night. He was a big enough pussy; he clearly didn’t need mine anymore. And I wasn’t gonna be able to fuck him after that unless I bought a strap-on, so—”
“Okay, okay,” I say, frantically trying to cut off her increasingly vulgar ranting. The familiar banter finally sinks in, and I find myself laughing with just as much sadness as amusement. “I really did miss you.”
She hugs me again.
“See? This is what all those crime podcasts were for. Preparation.”
“Kay, you didn’t even make it into the house—”
“No, but I really fucked that one guy up.”
I have to give her that. I turn to Salvatore, who does not look amused.
“So…she can stay, right?”
The silence could kill.
“Has she been searched thoroughly?” Salvatore finally asks, over both our heads.
Marcel nods, “She has. For her sake, I had Frankie do it privately.”
“Don’t make me regret this.”
Those words are spoken singularly to me. Kay bristles, completely misunderstanding the threat. I grab her arm.
“Let’s go somewhere we can talk. We’re still setting up outside—”
“We better be talking shit about that guy,” Kay says of Salvatore, too loudly as I try to usher her toward the backyard. “I don’t give a fuck how hot he is. Dumbass cheekbones and Armani suits. Fuck him—”
Kay and I enter the sunlight. She barely even looks around as I take a seat at one of the tables away from the others, sitting almost knee to knee with her.
“Tell me everything,” she says, more quietly now that we’re alone. “And I do mean everything . I already know about your whole family situation. Which, by the way, how the hell were you not gonna tell me that you have ties to the actual mob ? Best friend rules dictate that we tell each other everything! Especially about your family’s really fucked up criminal history!”
I wince.
“I couldn’t! It’s like Fight Club rules, Kay. You can’t talk about it, and I didn’t want to talk about it. I was trying to put it all that behind me. I didn’t expect to ever be involved in it, much less drag anyone else into it with me…”
Kay glances around with a sigh.
“I just feel like, if I had known, I would have paid more attention. I would have…”
“You can’t live on would haves.”
“Yeah,” she mumbles. Her distrustful gaze follows Salvatore as he leaves the house. He looks our way but gives us space, going to speak with someone else. He’s probably spreading the word to keep an eye on us. I see the way Kay looks at him. Like she’s just itching to get her hands on that gun Marcel took from her.
“It’s not what you think,” I say quietly. “He’s not terrible.”
She looks at me like I’ve lost my mind.
“What are you talking about? Not terrible ?”
“He’s not terrible to me,” I try to explain. By her expression, I’m not convincing.
“This is the guy that kidnapped you?”
I nod.
“The guy who you’re engaged to?”
I nod again.
“So, he’s the guy you’re marrying at gunpoint, who’s not terrible .”
I hesitate.
“It’s not going to be at gunpoint .”
“Well, maybe it should be! Who even are these people? You disappear one night, you end up here, now you’re going to be married to some notorious criminal, which you are freakishly okay with—are you drugged ?”
“No! I’m just—”
I don’t really know if there’s a word in the English language that describes my exact emotion. I look across at Salvatore, trying to find some way to explain him to her. Something to make this all seem rational, when even I know that it isn’t. It’s all primal and emotional and fucked up to anyone else.
“I might like him,” I say, feebly.
Kay stares me dead in the eye. I think she’s looking for signs of intoxication.
“…Stockholm syndrome,” she decides.
I roll my eyes.
“Do I look like a kidnap victim to you, Kay?”
“Can you and I walk out of here without someone pointing a gun at us?” That shuts my mouth pretty quickly. “Yeah, that’s what I thought. This whole thing is fucked, Contessa. You can’t marry this guy. I’m not going to let that happen to you. It’s the 21 st century, women don’t get carried off to some neanderthal’s den to be a cave-wife. Not even in New York.”
I can’t do this. I can’t finally get a shred of contentment here and have Kay come along and rip it away from me.
Her eyes are just as sharp as her tongue as they sweep over me.
“What’s he done?”
“Nothing I haven’t consented to,” I say, surprised at how fervently I’m defending him.
“Consented to? …Are you fucking him?”
“There wasn’t anything else to do!”
“Contessa!”
“What was I gonna do, Kay? Crossword puzzles? You would do the same thing if you were in my shoes!”
She almost argues it, but even she can’t.
“You’re supposed to be better than me,” she mutters.
“Did you want to come here and find me beat up and starving and miserable? If that was how he was keeping me, you and I wouldn’t even be talking right now. Right?” I see the reluctant admittance on her face. “Look, this whole party, you being here today—all of this is for me. Sal is only doing it because it makes me happy. He’s trying to make it all…not so awful. And it’s not lost on me that he doesn’t have to.”
Kay looks like I’ve told her he only punches orphans in the face twice a week.
Before I can convince her, the party gets underway.
Live music fills the air as Vinny takes centerstage to welcome everyone to the party.
Throughout the yard, white tablecloths are manned by faintly familiar faces, the springtime weather a perfect backdrop. And Kay is here.
It should be perfect.
Maybe it isn’t—but it’s as close as Salvatore could make it, and I am grateful to him for that.
“Ladies and gentlemen, others and both, please sit down and strap in—except for Sal, who can do whatever the hell he wants.”
Salvatore glances my way, motioning me to join him and Marcel at one of the centermost tables. I bring Kay with me, ignoring her wide-eyed look as she is made to sit at the table with a mafia don.
“Now, as always, please keep your hands and feet inside the ride at all times—” Vinny continues. From the kitchen, the women bring out large single plates for the table, each one with a live flame blazing in the middle. I’ve only ever seen Vinny’s more typical evening dinners. I have never been treated to his fine dining experience.
He personally brings our plates to our table—I have learned, in my time here, that only Vinny is allowed to touch Salvatore’s food. No one else is as trusted.
It’s a gorgeous spectacle as each table lights up with its own unique flame, the tiered plates melting motes of some kind of sauce into the basin.
“It looks pretty, tastes magical, but there’s no alcohol,” he winks at Salvatore, as he sets my drink in front of me. I’m given the virgin alternative of the flamboyant cocktail everyone is served, and ours is the only table that does not have a bottle of wine.
Kay’s eyes lock on me like a turret. Her drilling stare demands to know why I’m not having alcohol. I feign being overly interested in the pretty display in front of us and pretend not to notice.
Salvatore finishing inside me is almost as good as the orgasm itself. Knowing that I’m worth him. Worth carrying his heir. It’s the kind of insane thinking that Salvatore can make feel normal .
Right until someone outside of all of this comes in and stares at me like I’ve gone off the fucking deep end.
I don’t have siblings. Kay is the closest I’ll ever get to that bond, and her approval matters so, so much. But I know she thinks I’m fucking crazy.
As if I’m the one who charged in here with no plan, a gun, and a spicy tube of lipstick. If Kay and I had a baby, maybe it would even out into being a completely normal person.
Salvatore calls Vinny over to trade out his drink—although I never complained, Salvatore hasn’t been willing to drink in front of me when I’m not allowed the same privilege. It is one of the many tiny things that has endeared me to him over the past weeks, the countless little courtesies that I don’t have time to illustrate to Kay.
That Salvatore is not all bad, no more than he is all good.
Maybe I should just point out that my man is very willing to fight the mafia for me.
Kay leans in while he’s distracted, her voice a whisper against my ear.
“Be honest with me. Right now. Do you want us to get you out of this or not?”
I stare ahead.
I know the answer, even if I don’t want to say it. It was easy to tell my father I didn’t need him. I haven’t needed him for a long time. But telling Kay that I think I might find a future here, that Salvatore and I might be good for each other, that I can’t imagine just walking away from him now and never seeing him again…that’s harder to admit.
How much would it tear us apart ?
I dodge her question.
“Who’s us ?”
“Me and your dad.”
My dad?
It’s my turn to stare at Kay.
“Wait…How have you’ve talked to—”
Three sharp cracks break through the air.
My heart leaps into my mouth. Glass shatters. A warm wetness splatters across my face, obscuring half my vision in a dash of red. Vinny collapses behind us. Like someone dropped a doll, all his limbs folding under him. He rattles. I stare, seeing without comprehending, taking it in as if in slow motion.
His head —
I throw myself to the ground, watching my own hands reach out and press against blood, against bone that moves when it shouldn’t.
A shriek brings me back to reality. Ava’s shriek. She’s bolted across the yard, falling across him, just screaming and screaming. She’s not the only one. Tables are turned over in the panic, but Ava’s screams are louder than anything else. Louder than my own thoughts. All that I can hear.
“Tessa!”
The name fills my ears, but it doesn’t land.
I know that voice, but I hardly recognize it saying that name.
“Tessa!”
Suddenly, I am ripped off the ground, away from Vinny and Ava and thrown behind the fountain. Salvatore pins me down behind the base, away from the chaos. He takes my face in his hands, looking me over. I finally see him, hear him, reality clicking into motion as if someone has pressed the fast forward button on my thoughts.
“Vinny—” I gasp, trying to articulate the words, to tell him what I saw. My hands are red and wet. He has to fix it somehow. He has to help Vinny. Gunshots ring out across the estate.
Men’s voices and the barking of dogs overwhelm my senses. “Sal, it’s Vinny, he’s—”
“Follow Marcel,” he orders me, though the words don’t stick. “Do you understand? Follow Marcel!”
He pulls away from me.
“Wait!”
“Watch her!”
I don’t realize who he’s talking to until I see Kay is with us, ducked behind cover, her hand around my arm and holding me back from following him blindly into the firefight.
I peek out from behind the fountain. The unarmed make a break for the house, while those with weapons rush across the yard, exchanging fire. Marcel has Ava around the waist, pulling her away, as she kicks and screams and howls like an animal. He drags her toward the house.
Kay pulls me in the same direction, making a break for it.
In the distance, Salvatore fades from my singular, narrow vision.
In those last moments, I see him with an automatic rifle in his hands, and the furious dogs baying, swirling around his feet. He fades into the glinting light.
Vinny is left on the ground.
The silence of the house makes the chaos of outside feel like a nightmare I’ve woken up from. Marcel barks orders, ushering everyone to a basement, some kind of underground safe room I’ve never seen. It feels like another world. There are mostly women here and a few of the elderly men. Cecilia has been carried down the stairs without her wheelchair and placed on a loveseat.
Marcel bolts the door shut and stands in front of it with his pistol.
Ava has screamed herself silent. Her face stays buried against her knees. I put my hand on her shoulder, but she doesn’t react.
I keep seeing Vinny drop again and again. As if I imagine it enough times, I might be able to change it somehow, to go back and get control of the way it happened. The world is wrapped in static and cotton, but that memory is sharp and clear, the only thing that feels real.
Vinny.
Kay’s grip on my wrist aches it’s so tight. It grounds me like an anchor, keeping me from flying off into that horrible sight playing on repeat behind my eyelids.
“We gotta get out of here, Tessa,” she’s whispering fervently, over and over. “We’ve gotta get out of here. Me and you. Fuck this. We gotta get out.”
Suddenly, a voice from the back of the room speaks up.
“Where’s Nate?”
I turn slowly, a stab of panic breaking through the fog.
Vera wanders in circles, around and around the room, looking every which way in a daze.
“Where’s Nate?”
My heart skips a beat as the world slides into focus again. I turn to look around the room, realizing that Lana is standing still and pale among the others, but Nate is nowhere to be seen.
Vera grows more inconsolable by the minute, her distraught questions turning to frantic, panicked screams as she can’t find him.
I break away from Kay and head up the stairs. Marcel stands between me and the doorway.
“Let me out,” I tell him.
“Contessa, you know I can’t do that.”
“Marcel, I’m the one person who can go out there and not get shot. Now let me out.”
He shakes his head.
“You could still be killed; you could run off with your family—”
Vera screams again, drowning out his logic with ear-piercing panic.
“Open this door, Marcel. That’s an order.”
We lock eyes, dread written over his face.
“Goddammit, you’re just as crazy as he is,” Marcel snarls, rending open the heavy door.
I step into the main house as if it’s a dream, everything about it wrong somehow. Glass glitters on the marble floor, the kitchen windows shot open. The empty house feels like a giant skeleton, and I crawl through its bones as I yell for Nate.
I run as quickly as I can, looking under couches and chairs, daring to peek through windows. I don’t have the first clue where he would be.
“Nate!” I call out, desperation straining my voice. Every time I swallow, it tastes like pennies.
I do a double-take in the dining room, my shoes skittering on the polished floor.
Two bright light-up sneakers flash below the long curtains, a figure shaped suspiciously like a six-year-old behind them. I gasp with relief.
“Nate,” I whisper to him. “Nate, come here, honey. Your mom—”
Footsteps crunch on glass behind me.
Two strong arms lock around my head before I can scream, a gloved hand clamping over my mouth.
“Tessa, it’s me. It’s me—”
The voice is familiar, but my instincts sink my teeth into his hand. Even through the leather, I make him yell and drop me. I spin around, face to face with a giant of a man, his hair shaved close and expression twisted with anger.
Dario wasn’t quite so big and menacing the last time I remember seeing him when we were still in high school. He has a gun in his hand and pain in his eyes. He swears under his breath and presses a button on the radio clipped into his vest.
“I’ve got her,” he says to some faceless entity on the other end. “Contessa, come on. We don’t have much time.”
I back up when he reaches for my hand.
“What are you doing here?” I ask, not understanding. He shouldn’t be here.
“Tessa,” he implores. When I don’t respond, his grip on the gun adjusts. “What the fuck are you doing? Come on, Tessa! Don’t make me point this at you.”
I ignore the gun in his hand as we stare each other down.
“And then do what with it?” I ask, not feeling the fear that I should.
His jaw clenches.
“Contessa, I’m trying to help you—” he levels the gun on me, “but that can happen one of two ways. If they have you so fucked up that you don’t even remember me anymore, there’s nothing to bring back—”
It’s a bluff.
I back up, ignoring the threat.
Dario takes a slow, half-step forward, reaching out as if I’m a wild animal that he can tame.
“Tess…”
He lunges all at once. He gets his hand around my arm as I scream and kick against him. Suddenly, something snaps against his head, staggering him. He reels away from me, stumbling over his own feet. Behind him, Salvatore seamlessly rights the gun in his hands again and puts three bullets into the man’s chest.
The shots are deafening, the world on mute. Dario tries to get up and fails.
Salvatore collapses on top of him, cracking his fist across Dario’s face. He lifts him up just to punch him into the ground again. The limp body flops beneath him, not resisting anymore, eating hit after hit, until that familiar face starts to rearrange. Slowly, he loses the definition of who he was. The boy who showed me how to shoot off firecrackers, when I was afraid of them, who always shared his dessert with me at Christmas when my father was intent on keeping me thin and desirable—he disappears beneath black and blue skin, swollen eyes, his nose crushed into a pulp.
It doesn’t feel real.
He shouldn’t be here , my mind keeps saying. Why is he here?
“Sal,” I yell, barely able to hear myself over the ringing in my head.
He doesn’t stop, cracks Dario’s face to the side with another hit. His teeth are bared like an animal, all rage.
The only thing Salvatore has left to break are his own knuckles, but he keeps going, like he won’t stop until there’s nothing left of him.
A few feet away, Nate peeks out from behind the curtain, his face ghostly, terrified tears streaming down his cheeks, both hands clamped over his little ears.
I put my hand between Salvatore’s shoulder blades.
“Please,” I whisper.
He snaps out of it all at once, as if shaken from a trance. Blood bubbles from Dario’s busted lips, the only sign of life left in him. Slowly, Sal pulls himself off the floor, looking me over head to toe, his breathing ragged and hands bloody as he touches me, as if to make sure I’m still in one piece.
“Tessa. . .”
For the first time, he hears Nate sobbing. Realization dawns. He steps toward him, but the boy bumps back into the wall and cries harder. I see the flash of hurt in Salvatore’s expression, there one moment and then gone the next. I scoop Nate up into my arms instead. He shakes like a leaf.
“I had to find him—”
He doesn’t make me explain myself, dragging me along by the arm as he ushers us to the basement again. I glance over my shoulder once. Dario has not moved.
Marcel opens the door at the sound of his voice, and Nate kicks his way out of my arms the second he sees his mother. He bolts for Vera.
“You don’t come out of here until we clear the property,” Salvatore orders.
“Wait—” I cry, so urgently, he actually stops. I suddenly don’t know what to say.
“…Be careful,” is what I decide on. It doesn’t feel like enough.
Salvatore doesn’t seem to know what to say, either. I don’t make him spend time figuring it out. I retreat back down the steps, and the heavy door shuts between us. Kay is on me in a heartbeat, accosting me in the same breath that she clings to me, demanding to know what those gunshots were.
I have no energy to explain, no desire to vocalize what I just saw. One of my own cousins—beaten to death because of me. I sit down on the floor in her arms.
The best I can do is apologize for ever bringing her here.
My ears ring, my thoughts drowned out. The adrenaline is fading, crashing, leaving me sick and reeling. The room smells like fear. Even Nate went silent after a while—cried himself unconscious. I don’t know how long it takes for Salvatore to come back. Minutes. Hours. Days.
I watch the door with an empty expression, only waiting. The simplest and yet most difficult thing to do. I have not seen Ava’s face once. Even when Marcel goes to speak with her, she does not look up.
Ava has nothing to wait for.
The less I have to preoccupy my thoughts, the more I see it again and again. The way Vinny just dropped . The empty look on his face. He worked in a kitchen. Had he ever even held anything more dangerous than a chef knife? My stomach turns.
When the door opens again, Salvatore enters first. My legs are asleep, though I don’t notice until I try to get to him. He slings me up into his arms, holding me like a child with my arms around his neck.
Relief washes over me as I have him in my arms again, holding him like somehow I’m the one who can protect him.
The room fills with the sound of reunions and frantic questions.
Salvatore sets me down, the relief in his face vanishing into stone as he steps into the middle of the room. I catch Kay’s stare, looking me over as if she’s never seen me before. I avoid it and turn my attention to Salvatore.
“Everyone.” His strong voice brings the room to a simmering hush. “For those of you who weren’t outside at the onset of the attack—Gio Lovera sent 4 men at us. To our home. He’s not getting any of them back. But we took our own injuries, and we lost two—”
I hear Ava’s gathering cry before Salvatore even says it.
For only a heartbeat, I see his throat work without words.
“Lance and Vincent—”
Ava’s crying fills the room again. I saw what happened to him, just the same as her, but hearing it spoken as truth brings the pain a second time, as if he can be killed twice. Marcel clutches Ava to him, trying to soothe her. Her voice is too shot to scream, the pain soundless as she sobs against his shoulder.
Her pain eats at me like a hole in my chest.
“I need everyone to stay vigilant and stay armed. Patrols will be walking the property around the clock. In an hour, I want every soldier and above in a war room with me. We’re not playing defense anymore. Gio answers this with blood.”
Salvatore steps toward me, sliding his arm around my shoulder to lead me up the staircase.
“Wait—” Kay says, trying to follow.
“Frankie is taking you home,” Salvatore tells her, his tone leaving no room for argument.
“Wait, Tessa—”
Kaydence moves toward me suddenly, desperate to get to me. I break away from Salvatore as we get each other in a fierce hug.
“I can’t just leave you here,” she says.
“Yes, you can,” I say. “You have to. Just know I’m okay.”
She looks me over, again and again, as if she doesn’t know what to say. She finally whispers a strained,
“Jesus Christ…”
For the first time, I get a sense of myself, of what she might see there. My eye is crusted and bloodied, my hands stained. My hair feels matted against one side of my face. I glance down at my own hands, really noticing them for the first time. This whole time, it’s felt like I was outside of my body in a way, puppeteering it. I finally have a flash of self-awareness.
I am covered in a dead man’s blood, telling Kaydence that I’m okay.
“Go, Miss Lowry,” Salvatore says. It’s not a request.
Frankie guides Kay away, though she looks back at me until she reaches the top of the staircase and disappears. We are ripped away from each other a second time.
“Keep your eyes down,” Salvatore orders me. I don’t know why, but I’m in no mood to be rebellious. I follow him up the stairs, his arm around my shoulders, holding me close to him.
Without meaning to, I glance up to the foyer, trying to get a final glimpse of Kay—beyond the front door, several sheets are spread out over the shape of bodies. Red stains pool on the fabric.
I stop in my tracks.
It could be anyone under those sheets. My family. Sal’s.
I hear Salvatore curse softly. Suddenly, I am whisked into his arms.
“Tessa,” Salvatore says sharply, dragging my gaze back to look at him. “You look at me. Nothing else.”
I stare at him, nodding mutely. He carries me up the stairs, two at a time.
“Keep looking at me.”
I don’t know what I’m supposed to see. What ugliness could have happened up here, on our floor? But I stare at him and only him.
“Vinny—”
He hushes me, keeping my eyes trained on nothing but his face. We reach the threshold of his bathroom.
“Close your eyes.”
Salvatore sets me on the edge of the tub. I hear the water running to my left as he turns on the walk-in shower. My throat feels tight. In the dark, all I can see is Vinny.
“Can I look?” I ask, growing desperate.
“No.”
Salvatore eases me under the spray of the shower. He rubs his hands over mine. He checks under my nails and the inside of my ears. He lathers something in my hair. It finally dawns on me what Salvatore is protecting me from—my own reflection. My stomach twists. I open my eyes slowly. At our feet, the water swirls around the drain, soapy bubbles muddied red.
I gradually lift my eyes, trying to prove that I can stomach the sight.
There are worse things in my head than anything in this shower.
Until he picks a little piece of bone out of my matted hair.
My stomach lurches, throat tightening as I reel. I stumble away from him. The threat of vomiting heaves in my stomach, but I fight it down. For the first time since it happened, tears finally stream down my cheeks. The force of it all hits me at once. Salvatore grabs me and crushes me to him in his arms. I sob into his wet shirt, the both of us soaked, fully clothed, blood swirling around our feet.
He presses me to him like he is an anchor, and I am the little ship caught in the storm.
“He—”
I can barely speak, but it feels like I have to. I have to purge it somehow, or it’s going to keep building and building behind my eyelids.
“He was right there, and then he—”
“I know,” Salvatore mutters, his hands running through my hair.
“He made this awful sound—”
“They do that sometimes. Tessa, he was already gone. He didn’t feel a thing. I promise you. The last thing he knew, he was happy. And that’s better than most of us get.”
The words drag another sob out of me.
“And Ava .”
For that, Salvatore has nothing comforting to offer. There is nothing to be said.
“I told him to leave me alone,” I sob, still unable to comprehend the why behind it all. There was no point. This didn’t have to happen. “I told him I’d made my choice—”
Salvatore hushes me, assuring me that it isn’t my fault, until my throat is too tired to cry and the water has run off with all my tears.
I hide myself against his chest. We end up sitting together on the floor of the shower, the adrenaline washing off slowly, clothes plastered to our bodies and droplets of water pouring off the ends of our hair.
Disaster is written all over both of us.
“They knew we would be out there,” Salvatore finally says, speaking to some unfixed point on the wall.
I twist my fingers into his soaked shirt.
I know what he sees there, the map of how it all happened now laid out in the streaks of condensation running down the glass.
Kay spoke to my father. She must have told him about the engagement party; she must have thought they were all on the same side just trying to bring me home. Kay couldn’t have known what my father planned. I saw how stunned she was in the aftermath, how terrified—
But she did show up with a gun.
If they hadn’t searched her, when would she have used it? Right there at the gate? In the middle of the party? Or was she waiting for the perfect moment, when the world erupted into chaos, and all eyes turned to the men attacking—
I can’t bear to talk about it.
I swallow the truth, burying it somewhere inside me.
One act of kindness. One tiny allowance to make me happy. Vinny’s dead.
It could have just as easily been Sal.
The water turns frigid.
Salvatore reaches to turn off the shower, but I stop him, catching him in a kiss. I can’t let this moment end. I want to stay right here with him, because I know when we leave, we’ll be separated again. I don’t know if my lips can say all the things I want them to. That I was afraid for him. That I am glad he’s okay. That it’s my fault and not his. That I am so, so, so sorry.
Salvatore stays with me, kissing me in return as the cold-water chills us to the bone, driving us deeper into each other’s arms. It hurts in my heart.
Maybe my father is an idiot for trying to get me back. If he were smart, he would let me stay right here. I am his most profound tactical advantage.
Like a cancer, I am making Salvatore Mori weaker.