Chapter Sixteen Guinevere #2
He had to use both hands to clamp me close. “Stop this,” he hissed.
I tipped my head back to cry, “Help!”
The two men and a few more who had joined our group surged forward to manhandle Philippe off me.
A voice over the PA system announced the train was about to depart, so I pushed off Philippe, leaving him to the crowd of Good Samaritans, and sprinted onto the train just as the doors started to close.
I watched in horror as Philippe broke away from the group by punching one man in the throat and dived into the closest train car. From my angle, I couldn’t tell if he made it or not, but I decided not to wait around to find out.
I moved down the aisle of the train away from where he might have gotten on, making my way to the end car.
It was first class only, but luckily I had my ticket, sweat-damp and crinkled in one fist. I took the steps to the lower level and found a place in the nearly empty car at the very back.
Slumping low in my seat, I trained my eyes on the door to the car.
I wasn’t sure what I would do if Philippe showed up other than try to hide, but I didn’t want to be taken by surprise.
“Waiting for someone?”
I jerked, my head slamming against the window as I recoiled. A shaky laugh escaped my mouth at the sight of an elegantly dressed woman sitting by the window across the aisle from me. She was handsome, with a strong jaw and thick brows over liquid brown eyes.
“Not really,” I said, even though it wasn’t much of an answer. “Just relieved to be going home. I thought I was going to miss the train.”
She smiled at me, a closed-lip expression that was more considering than it was warm.
“You do not sound as if you should be able to call Italy home.”
I had become incredibly fluent in Italian, but I knew my accent continued to give me away. “I’m from the US. Originally,” I tacked on, because it felt good to tell a stranger this was where I was going to stay.
“And how do you like my country?” she asked, shifting her body to angle toward me, settling in for a longer conversation.
I was exhausted, so weary my head swam. I hadn’t had enough water to drink today, and it was starting to affect me. But politeness was so deeply ingrained in me, I did not even think of ignoring her.
“I like it enough to now call it my home,” I confessed with a small smile, eyes flickering back to the entrance to the car. “It’s as Robert Browning said: ‘Open my heart and you will see Graved inside of it, “Italy.”’”
“Poetic,” the stranger said. “But I understand the sentiment. The country and its foibles have taken much from me, yet I could never part from it. Not even when others in my family have left it behind for good.”
“I tried.” I shrugged. “But somehow, here I am again.”
“Somehow,” she mused before getting up to cross the aisle and take the seat facing mine. “Perhaps you should tell me the story.”
I arched a brow at her, unconsciously mimicking one of Raffa’s expressions. “Do you often ask people for their life stories?”
She lifted one shoulder and opened her gloved palms. “It is why I deign to take the train.”
That startled a laugh out of me.
“Let me guess,” she said in that low, smooth voice. “It involves a man.”
“Doesn’t it always?” I asked dryly.
“Yes,” she agreed. “Though not always one’s lover.”
“It sounds like you have a story too.”
“I do.” She looked out the window at the smeared Italian countryside rushing by. “Would you like to hear it?”
“Sure,” I said, because I would.
It was that insatiable curiosity that had always gotten me into trouble. Happily, I seemed to be out of harm’s way for the moment, though my gaze kept vigilant watch on the door for Philippe.
“I was born into a family of men with only a fragile mother to keep me company. She tried to raise me to be a good, sweet girl, but the influence of my four brothers and my father kept me from staying in the kitchen, attached to her apron strings. My younger brother was my best friend because, unlike the other boys, he always invited me to play. We were inseparable until he turned eighteen. Then my father took him from me and turned him into something neither of us liked very much.”
Her eyes were glazed by distant memories, her lip firm but caught between her teeth as if she was afraid it might tremble.
“I hardly saw him for the next five years. Only on the night I was planning to run away with my lover to get married did he appear in the doorway of my hotel room in Rome. My boyfriend was beside him, a gun pressed to his head. My brother shoved him into the room on his knees and closed the door behind him. He told me our father had sent him to remind me of my one duty as a girl in the family. Marry for the advantage of the family, not for love.”
What kind of family, I thought as my heart picked up speed, had rules like that?
The family.
La mafia.
A chill settled over me like an icy cloak.
Behind the woman, the train car doors hissed open mechanically and revealed Philippe. He looked tousled, panting hard with a wildness to his expression as he searched the car until his gaze landed on me.
And then he relaxed visibly, shoulders collapsing, his tread heavy like that of the man at the end of a marathon who sees the end in sight.
I watched him like a fawn caught in a snare as he came closer and the woman kept talking.
“He was going to kill him,” she continued.
“I thought for sure by the look in his eye that my lover would die and so, maybe, would I for disobeying our father. And then something strange happened.” She leaned forward, snatching my hand in a cold, fierce grip.
“He knocked Said out, sat in the chair before the vanity, and started to drink my wine. Then, he told me that if he killed the person I loved for being the wrong kind of fit for the family, then he would have to kill the mother of his unborn child. Something he was not willing to do.”
Her gaze was so intense on mine that the ink of her irises seemed to spread to encapsulate my entire scope of vision.
Such a dark eye, thick lashed and large like mine.
Like my father’s.
My heart was beating so hard now that it ached in my chest. My fingers and toes tingled, and the hair on the back of my arms stood up, my entire body primed like the air before an electrical storm.
“You see,” she murmured, “he had fallen in love with the daughter of an Albanian gangster, and our father did not believe in mudding our blood with that of foreigners. It was why he did not like Said. It was why, if he had known about Mariano and Elizabeta, he would have killed them and the baby. So do you know what my brother did?”
I parted my lips when she paused long enough that it was clear she expected an answer, but my tongue was adhered to the roof of my dry mouth. There was an audible noise as I peeled it off my palate and swallowed so hard my throat clicked.
“He ran away with Elizabeta to America,” I croaked.
“He ran away with Elizabeta to America,” she echoed.
“Very good. He left Said alive but had him smuggled out of the country, never to see me again. He sent me back to my father with the promise that I would never breathe a word of his existence again to anyone. As far as my family was concerned, he died taking out Said. And in twenty-eight years, I have never breathed a word of that story to anyone until now.”
She paused as Philippe took the seat beside her, his gun held against one thigh. My gaze flicked to it and then back to the woman who was undoubtedly my aunt.
“I think he would understand me telling his daughter, though, don’t you?” she asked, releasing my hand to sit back in her chair. The way she did it made her seem like a queen on her throne and not a woman on a swaying train in a blue polyester seat.
“Because you are my aunt,” I said and the words dropped like stones between us.
“Because I am your aunt,” she agreed. “In fact, you were named after me.”
I looked to Philippe, who sat placidly beside her as if he had done so dozens of times before.
“You asked Philippe to bring me to you,” I said, thinking through everything aloud. “Is the Mafia so antiquated you didn’t think a phone call would do?”
Her mouth ticked up, then fell flat. “I think a reunion warrants more than a phone call.”
“This doesn’t feel like a reunion,” I said honestly. “It feels more like a kidnapping.”
“Semantics,” she offered with a little shrug. “It is what you make of it.”
“And if I wanted to get off this train at the next stop without you?”
“Well.” She sighed as Philippe lifted the gun in his lap to train it on me. In the back of the mostly deserted train car, no one could see the threat. “Sometimes family fights.”
“I could scream,” I pointed out, because there were a few people at the other end of the car who would notice and help a young woman in distress.
Philippe glowered, but my aunt raised a hand and leaned forward again to grab my hand.
I tried to snatch it away, but she was too fast, and her grip was shockingly strong for a middle-aged woman.
Philippe followed some unspoken cue and reached into her black purse to hand her a needle very much like the kind I used to administer my medicine each day.
“No,” I said with a gasp as she held my hand flat to the table and Philippe approached with the syringe. “No!” I shouted.
The needle pierced my hand a moment later, a cool rush of liquid as it was emptied into my bloodstream. Almost immediately, I could feel the effects tingling through me, slowing my pulse, dragging my thoughts sideways off a linear path.
“Excuse my niece,” my aunt said as my body lost its structure and I sank back against the window in my seat. “She talks in her sleep.”
I wanted to argue that my eyes weren’t even closed, but I found they were. And then when I went to open my mouth, I found it was sewn shut, my tongue heavy as lead.
I have to scream, I thought just before I fell back into blackness, where thought no longer existed.