21. Contessa
21
Contessa
Salvatore doesn’t come to bed.
I would have gone to my own bed rather than sleep in his, but I don’t want to be locked away while he’s gone. If I get trapped in that room now, with Ava catatonic and Salvatore off playing war, I might just be forgotten about.
Alone in this huge bed, I toss and turn, scowling into the dark. My thoughts reel. I wonder if he’s already gone. Maybe he marched straight to his car and drove off into the night, with just his gun and his temper. I don’t know if that’s something he would do, but I’m angry enough to fantasize that it is.
There’s no chance at sleep.
Dario and Donny slip into my thoughts. Two men freezing down in the dark, just conscious enough to know that they’re suffering. And Remy, the way he screamed in those last moments before Ava—
Closing my eyes doesn’t block any of it out, and they betray me so easily, drifting toward the doorway as if I expect Salvatore to appear there. Some tiny part of me still hopes I wake up next to him in the morning. That he kisses me awake, showers me with affection in the early dawn. I won’t even go so far as to imagine him apologizing. Just staying with me, here, where he belongs.
As if.
I roll over and put my back to the doorway. Salvatore made his choice, and it wasn’t me.
My hand feels heavier without the engagement ring than it did during those brief hours that I wore it. For just one day, I thought I saw what I could be next to him. The two of us complimenting each other in our own ways. A unit. I saw our future so, so plainly.
A mirage.
Daddy’s little failure.
The words are branded in me, the pain never subsiding.
Maybe Salvatore is right. Maybe I don’t have any business trying to stand next to a man like him, but at least I tried to stand with him.
It was more than he was willing to do for me.
I don’t sleep. I just hurt, all night—an emotion so deep, it aches in my chest. Crying over him makes me feel stupid, but I can’t stop it. The rotten cherry on top of it all.
It’s the longest night before morning light slips into the bedroom. Salvatore does not. He doesn’t even come to see me before he leaves. I don’t remember falling asleep, but when I open my eyes again, some part of me knows that he’s gone.
Either he will come back or he won’t—but it won’t have anything to do with me.
There’s no joy in being able to wander the house without him here. There’s nowhere to go and no one to see.
I find Vera watching a movie with the kids, Nate clutched in her lap. I wonder if she’s let him go even once in the past couple of days. For a few moments, I linger on the threshold. If she’s in her usual mood to talk shit about Salvatore, we might actually have something to bond over, but I don’t know if it’s a bond I want.
She gives me a long, searching look. In a way, we’re mirrors of each other. Exhausted, our hair a mess and shoulders slumped. I wonder if it’s obvious that I’ve been crying all night.
When she whistles lowly, I guess that it is.
“Anything I can do for you, princess?” she asks.
The offer surprises me, but I don’t take her up on it.
“No,” I say. The rasp in my voice surprises me, an embarrassing betrayal. “Can I…?”
“Misery loves company.” She nods toward the seat. “I haven’t thanked you,” she finally admits, running her shaking fingers through Nate’s hair. “Don’t know how you really thank somebody for what you did—”
“You don’t,” I assure her.
Nate seems oblivious to both of us as we talk over his head, engrossed in the movie.
“Is he okay?”
She glances at me, the light flickering over her face.
“Nobody in this house ends up okay,” she says. “That’s just how it is.”
I shake my head. She sounds just like him. As if no one in this house has any choices of their own.
“…I know that look,” she chuckles, reading my expression. “You angry at him?”
“Something like that.”
“Well. It was only a matter of time.” I wince at how unsurprised she sounds, as if Salvatore was always destined to disappoint me eventually. The same way he disappointed her.
Vera orders us coffee. I think, in her own way, she’s trying to make me feel better.
Once we’re caffeinated, and Nate is on his second rewatch, Vera asks if I want to talk about it.
No gossiping.
Who has a rule like that unless they have something to hide? Still, I can’t bring myself to betray him even in that tiny way.
“No,” I whisper, even though I’d like nothing more.
“Suit yourself. But if you change your mind, you know where to find a sympathetic ear.
We all have our regrets and reservations about Sal. Mine is that I stopped Nico from drowning him in the bathtub when he was a baby.”
She lifts her espresso in a mock toast.
I lower my eyes.
I suddenly don’t want to be here, talking about him like this. It doesn’t make me feel any better.
Even if I am angry with him, hearing about how viciously Vera wants Sal dead doesn’t do anything for my broken heart.
“Oh, come on now,” she mutters. My expression must have given me away. “I don’t mean it. The story’s true, but that I regret it is…well, that’s mostly a joke.”
I try to veer away from talking about him.
“Salvatore said Nico is crazy. Well, crazier than him, I guess…”
“Oh, he is. But that wasn’t Nico being crazy. Not yet. That was just a child being a child.
Nico was just old enough to understand that our mother left one day, and that a baby who cried all the time came back instead. Of course Nico hated him.”
“Did you…? Even back then?”
She shrugs.
“I wouldn’t say I hated him. Not then. But in dad’s eyes, Sal was never innocent. He treated him like a killer from day one, and he sure as hell never forgave him. Kids pick up on things like that. You don’t stand with the black sheep.”
It’s hard to imagine Sal as the black sheep of the family, when I have only ever seen him as its leader. I wonder if that’s why he tries so hard, why he won’t compromise even for me. Because he was never really made for it.
I feign an interest in the movie that I don’t really feel and let the conversation die. I don’t hear anything about Salvatore all day. The exhaustion finally catches up with me, and I go to bed early, hoping to sleep through the hours until Salvatore is back.
Footsteps snap me out of sleep. I sit up, phantom gunshots ringing in my ears from some half-forgotten dream. My heart flies to my throat, eyes searching the dark. A shadow steps into the doorway.
“Sal?” I call out.
“No,” says a familiar voice. The overhead light turns on. The sudden change blinds me, trading one kind of darkness for another as I squint through the pain. Noctus stands in the doorway, the collar of his shirt stained with blood. “You need to come with me, Contessa. Sal’s orders.”
“What?” I ask, bewildered, still half stunned by sleep. “Why? Where’s Sal?”
“I don’t know, they’re getting him to a hospital.”
A hospital ?
“I don’t know how much time we have—”
“Noctus, what happened?” I beg, but he pushes me forward in a panicked rush.
“Come on, move, move ,” he urges, pushing me along. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
I scramble to match his frantic pace. Panic numbs me from the inside out, stealing all my body heat as I stumble down the halls in nothing but a lacey nightgown and bare feet.
It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be real. For as much as I argued with Sal and told him it was dangerous, I never really thought he wouldn’t come back.
I never wanted to be right this way.
Oh God, I would be wrong a thousand times over—
My heart beats against the back of my teeth, my stomach suspended in fear.
“Noctus, what’s—”
“Come on,” he urges, guiding me to the front door where an idling car waits, haphazardly parked near the steps. He opens the back door for me and I pile inside, my pulse hammering. He slings himself into the driver’s seat.
“How bad is it?” I ask him.
“We just need to go,” he says, refusing to answer me as he throws the car into gear. In the backseat, I don’t know what to do with myself. Every ugly scenario plays itself through my head.
What if the last thing I ever did to Salvatore was give back his engagement ring and call him unworthy?
“Noctus, fucking talk to me! Tell me what happened!”
“What do you think happened?” He asks, his teeth clenched. Now that we’re on the main roads, he’s doing close to 90, weaving in and out of the 3 A.M. traffic, with his phone in one hand. He makes a call. I hold my breath, just to hear the soft ring on the other end of the line.
No one answers.
The tears start falling hard at the thought of Salvatore not being able to answer. Fear has a fist around my throat. I can barely breathe.
I have to keep it together. I have to. I’m no use to him if I’m hysterical.
“Let me try.” I reach for the phone, desperate to get in contact with him. Noctus ignores me, his attention on the road. “Noctus, please .”
He tosses the phone into the passenger’s seat, out of my reach.
We’ve slowed too much, joining with the leisurely city traffic even with the roads sparse at this hour. I itch for us to cut around the cars, to drive the way he had been before. The city crawls by.
“Noctus, come on—” I beg, scooting up.
“Sit back,” he tells me sharply. The tension in his voice makes me jump. He sniffs sharply, clenching and unclenching his hands on the wheel.
“I knew he had you all fucked up in the head, but I didn’t know he’d done this much work on you.”
“What are you talking about—”
“What is he to you? Sal? Like, what do you actually think your relationship with him is?”
The question doesn’t make sense. I blink through the tears, trying to understand what he’s asking.
“He’s—” my thoughts skip, hit the word fiancé for a second, but I don’t want to give him that label. It’s not enough. “He’s my husband.”
Noctus shakes his head.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathes. It breaks into a laugh. “You know, he had you slung over his shoulder like a bag of trash the first time I saw you. And now you’re crying like a baby for him.”
“Because I care about him—”
“Because he trained you like a fucking dog.” The words clap through my thoughts, sending me reeling. I stare at his profile, trying to make sense of what he’s saying, the sudden switch in his attitude. We wait at an eternal red light, like purgatory.
“Guess that’s not your fault, though. He’ll only show you what you wanna see. That’s how he works. He’ll feed you anything you want as long as you do what he asks. Guess I shouldn’t blame you too much. Hell, I fell for his bullshit, too.” His hand knocks angrily against the steering wheel. “But not anymore. Not either of us.”
The silence rocks the car as I try to piece together what he’s talking about.
“Noctus, where is he?” I ask, on the verge of breaking down in a panic.
He rolls his eyes and curses under his breath.
“Well, let’s see. It’s almost 3, so if I had to guess, right now, your husband is probably balls deep in some plastic-tittied stripper. He likes Violet, but he’ll settle for one of the others if she’s not working.
You know, she kind of looks like you. Between me and you, princess, I think he has a type.”
The words whip against my expectations. For a few seconds, I’m too stunned and confused to even be hurt by them.
“You know why Sal always uses the strip clubs for our overnight safe houses? I’ll let you guess, but here’s a clue— it’s not cause they’re actually safe.”
I stare into the seat in front of me, unable to process what he’s telling me. The whiplash has me sick and reeling, my throat still thick with fear, my heart in a vice.
“Shut up,” I snap, refusing to hear it, pushing the thought away like it might strangle me if it gets a hold of me. “You’re lying.”
“Wouldn’t waste my breath on lying to you. Just figured you’d want to stop embarrassing yourself—”
“What are you talking about? Is Salvatore hurt or not?” I demand, sick of him running his mouth while saying nothing.
“Jesus Christ— no , he’s not hurt. Salvatore Mori doesn’t get hurt. He leaves that to everybody around him.”
There’s no time to feel relieved. A different fear rises up in me.
If Sal isn’t hurt, then what is this? Whose blood is on his shirt? Where is he taking me?
The city drifts by, the ride is leisurely and calm, all of his earlier urgency eerily missing.
I glance down at myself, feeling for the first time how defenseless I am.
“Noctus…”
His wild eyes glance up into the rear-view mirror.
“What is this?” I breathe, the fear tightening in my throat. “What are you doing?”
He doesn’t answer.
My hand closes quietly around the door handle. It doesn’t open. I throw my weight against it again and again, but the door doesn’t budge.
“Knock it off,” he snaps.
I freeze. Noctus steadies the wheel with one hand and grips a pistol in his other. I feel the threat of it like a weight on my chest, the way his finger curls dangerously near the trigger, half-distracted by the road.
“…Just tell me what this is. What do you want?”
“I want you to shut up and sit still. You could even say I’m helping you. I’m doing for you what somebody should have done for me. For Lance. I’m getting you the fuck away from him—”
“ No —”
“And then I’m gonna sit back, kick my feet up, and watch him kill himself trying to get you back.”
“Noctus, you don’t want to do this. He’ll kill you. He’ll find out, you know he will.
Please, take me back,” I whisper. “I won’t tell him. I swear. No one will ever know this happened, you have my word—”
My begging is cut short as the car veers into an underground parking garage.
“Your word’s cheap,” he says. “Your body isn’t.”
We’re swallowed by the dark, the headlights beaming through a vast, empty lot. We descend into the dark.
Several stories down, the car rounds into a lit garage, where a single dark SUV sits parked in the middle of the vacant lot. The concrete pillars spaced throughout the garage are flanked by men with dark suits and padded vests, using the pillars as cover and tracking the car’s slow motions with sleek assault rifles.
My family.
“Noctus, no —”
“Shut up.”
I don’t know how much I am worth. Salvatore never told me my father’s price, and whatever Noctus is paid, it isn’t in cash. With a pistol to my skull, he drags me out of the backseat. We move under the scrutiny of seven different guns. Fear crushes my lungs. The exchange is tense as I am handed over. He has no leverage once I am out of his hands, but to my surprise, he leaves with a handshake and a passport in hand.
I am calmly ransomed off. A tidy business deal.
When Noctus pulls away, my feet fly after him. I rush after the car as if I can hitchhike my way back to Salvatore. One of my father’s men catches me around the waist. He hauls me, kicking and screaming, back toward the car, while I choke on my own tears.
“Tessa!”
The voice snaps me out of my fit. My gaze lifts, vision swimming behind a blurry haze.
“Tessa, it’s okay—it’s us .” I am pulled into familiar arms. The smell of his aftershave triggers some deep-seated memory. “We’ve got you.”
Uncle Emil.
I am too overwhelmed to react at first, not even knowing how to greet him. I simply lean into his arms and cry—I cry about everything all at once, feeling so bitter and betrayed and powerless. Again .
“We need to move,” someone says, impatiently. Eyes and guns are still trained on the spot where Noctus left. I don’t want to go.
“Come on,” my uncle urges me, “it’s over now, Tessa. You’re going home to your dad.”
He steers me toward the car. In the backseat, I am wedged in the middle between him and his son. The men pile into the car, every seat filled. I feel the stares on me—familiar faces full of pity.
My uncle tries to comfort me as we drive. He reassures me that everything is fine now. He strokes my hair as he lies to me and tells me that I’m free.
I’m not listening to him. I stare past him, out the window. My crying and hyperventilating have stopped, my cheeks stiff with dried tears. Bobby Helms is singing in my head. In my mind’s eye, I am alone in the back of a Range Rover, and my hands and feet are tied. I am sprawled on the lap of a mob boss, smoking his cigarettes and telling him about my past.
I have been here twice before.
…I cannot be kidnapped three times in a row and learn nothing .
I close my eyes.
I sit in the back seat, and I make a plan.