Chapter 12 Dom #2
He continues when Turi doesn’t react. “Yeah, so I remembered your face. I called Mikey and told him where you were headed.”
“Annetta,” Turi says as he approaches Rodney.
Rodney’s chest rises in quick succession, his focus split between Turi and the pliers in his hand.
Turi snatches Rodney by his hair and exposes his face to us. “Do you recognize him?”
“N-no.” Even as it trembles, Annetta’s voice carries across the small room.
“No,” Turi echoes. “Neither did your brother. Or Checkers. Or Mark. Or Russell. None of you noticed a man making a call to a hitman with your name at the top of his list. And none of you noticed you were being followed.”
Annetta trembles against my arm.
Turi smacks the pliers against his palm once.
“It took quite a bit of effort to get this out of you. I’m glad you finally told me the truth, but I already told you what would happen if you lied to me.”
On cue, Barbara steps behind Rodney and squeezes his face to hold him still.
I wrap my arm around Annetta and shove her behind me so she won’t see, but I can’t protect her from the screams. They echo off the basement walls as Turi tears the man’s tongue from his mouth with a set of slip-joint pliers.
He drops it into a bucket with a splat, and the pliers clatter in afterward.
He takes a knife and stabs Rodney through the base of the skull.
When the screams silence, the only sound left is the click, click of Barbara’s lighter as he lights up his cigar.
“Annetta,” Turi says in a perfectly calm, quiet voice. He picks up a shop rag and wipes his hands clean before dropping that into the bucket too. “I want to hear from you, and no one else. Why do the Chiarellis want you dead?”
She shifts around me slowly. Her eyes are trained to the ground, and she’s shivering, even in my coat. In the softest voice imaginable, she answers, “I killed Frederico.”
Barbara’s cigar burns a bright red on his inhale.
“Why did you kill your ex-husband?” Turi asks.
“I saw him in bed with someone else.” Annetta swallows. “An underage girl.”
I jerk my head toward her. The fuck? A fucking girl?
“Could you have been mistaken?” Turi asks.
“No,” she says, and her voice cracks on the word. “They’d been bringing girls to the house for years. I just believed the lies they told me. I didn’t want to know the truth.”
“How did you kill him?”
“We were on his boat on the lake. I let him get drunk, and I pushed him overboard.”
“You saw the dead body?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
Annetta’s voice is a thin whisper. “He can’t swim. I watched him drown.”
“Then you drove home, the Chiarellis called a hit on you, and Mikey killed the wrong sister. Is that right?”
“Yes, sir.”
Turi broods on this for a moment. His weird amber eyes are flat in the basement’s dim light. “That’s good you told me. Honesty is an essential trait to have in our family, don’t you think?”
“Yes, sir.”
“It’s good we understand each other.” Turi exhales and glances at his watch. “You’re my advisor’s valued daughter and my right-hand man’s wife. Your enemies are my enemies. Is that right, Annetta?”
Sweat trickles down her temple, despite her shivering, and her nails dig into my wrist. She doesn’t look at the man in the chair.
“Yes, Don Salvatore.”
Turi’s gaze ticks to me. “It goes without saying that we don’t need anyone else finding out who she is before I can nail down the Chiarellis.”
I nod.
“Get your wife home.”
After a long, shitty day, the tentative light outside my living room windows tells me another is about to start.
We had to stop by Dr. Macaluso’s house to get stitches.
Annetta sat in his living room with her arms crossed, staring forward and not moving a muscle the entire time.
She didn’t speak, even while I explained to her that the person in the elevator had been my house cleaner and the man on the street was one of our own men.
She doesn’t speak now either, turning on her heel after she removes her shoes and going upstairs.
Exhausted, I follow her.
I head to my guest room, take a half-assed shower with my stitches sticking out of the water, and try to pass out in bed.
But as much as I toss and turn, I eventually find myself staring up at the ceiling with Annetta’s terrified face playing in a loop as that unfamiliar feeling of guilt wriggles around in my chest. It weaves through my internal organs like a fucking parasite I can’t get rid of.
Annetta deserves better.
She’s been forced into so many roles in her young life—a wife, a killer, a widow, a liar—and she didn’t ask for any of this.
I remember coming to her parents’ for dinner and hearing how she’d be late because she was volunteering or helping with cleanup after Serafina’s ballet recital or babysitting Joey’s kids.
At the time, it made me feel good to be near someone who wasn’t a fucking blister on society’s foot like all the other soulless fucks I work with.
Annetta didn’t deserve Turi scaring her like that. She didn’t deserve to be married to her piece-of-shit ex-husband or to have to make such difficult decisions while she was with him. She never deserved what happened to her sister.
And she sure as hell deserves better than me, some old criminal bastard who’s never home.
She’s fought hard in her short, shitty life. She should get to live a real life now, not be stuck in hiding. What she needs is a therapist, maybe a dog, and a nice vanilla boyfriend who takes her on vacation to Niagara Falls.
My jaw’s already clenching at the mental image.
I shouldn’t have let her kiss me at the cemetery.
I shouldn’t have let her kiss me before that.
But we just kept circling each other, didn’t we? Like celestial bodies, or carrion birds.
A knock at the door startles me from my thoughts. I reach for my jeans on the nightstand, but the door swings open and Annetta slips in.
In the darkness, I can just make out that she’s wearing an old, black T-shirt of mine.
Neither of us says a word as she takes one step, then another, and another until she’s on the other side of my bed. She burrows under the covers and huddles along one side of the mattress.
I don’t think, and I sure as hell don’t say a damn thing as I roll closer and wrap an arm around her shoulders. She flips toward me, buries her head against my chest, and we fall asleep, holding each other as the day breaks.