Chapter 3
Curse
The night after Aurora Bianchi’s engagement to Marco Messina was announced, I killed four men.
And I killed them very. Fucking. Slowly.
It didn’t help.
I knew then that I couldn’t let it happen.
Couldn’t let someone else have her. I would run out of throats to slit just trying to soothe myself.
I didn’t tell Elio about my plans. At the time, he was preparing for his own wedding to Deirdre O’Malley, now Deirdre Titone. That was a little over two years ago.
I still haven’t told him. Deirdre is pregnant, and our Uncle Vinny has been dead for more than a year. Elio has other shit on his mind.
That’s why I was in New York alone.
I lingered outside the stately wedding hall.
My fingers twitched with the desire to not let the ceremony happen at all.
But that wasn’t realistic. I’d end up with a belly full of bullets before I even reached her at the end of the aisle.
Marco Messina was one of the biggest bosses in New York.
His guest list would make most men’s hair stand up on end.
Not mine. But still. I wasn’t an idiot. I couldn’t go charging in there on my own. I couldn’t blow the place up, either, like had happened at Elio’s wedding. There was too great a chance Aurora might get hurt.
And Aurora getting hurt was absolutely not a goddamn option.
So there I was, outside, alone, New York’s cool March wind batting at my hair and whistling along the seams of my black leather jacket as I waited for the only girl I’ve ever dreamed about to hurry up and marry someone else.
So that I could take her from him.
I still hadn’t worked out exactly what I wanted to do.
I’d probably have to kill Marco at some point tonight.
I could merely incapacitate him somehow, and take her that way, but then he’d know my face, my voice.
I supposed I could cut out his tongue, his eyes, and remove all his fingers.
That would make it difficult for him to communicate anything at all after the fact.
But that idea made me feel itchy with the incompleteness of it all.
If I left him alive, that could send a real shitstorm north for us to deal with if someone figured it all out.
No. I’d have to kill him.
If I did this right, it would look like a murder and kidnapping without any sort of suspect.
Or, if they suspected someone, it could be any one of his enemies here.
No doubt there would be cameras all over the place.
But my identifying tattoos were all covered by clothing, including dark leather gloves I’d taken from Elio’s infinite stash.
I was already wearing a black mask as well, the medical kind that covers your nose and mouth.
On a camera, I’d be just another Sicilian with black hair in New York.
Kidnapping…
Aurora wouldn’t go with me willingly. I’d already made my peace with that.
The last time Aurora saw me, I was strangling a man in the darkness of an abandoned Montreal warehouse.
No one else was supposed to be there. Uncle Vinny had told me who the mark was that night, a low-level biker who’d fucked around and was about to find out.
As I was squeezing the life out of him, revelling in the silken calm such an act always brings me, she was watching.
I usually have a good sense for detecting people standing behind me.
But not her, for some reason. Not that night.
She was so quiet-footed. Dainty, even. Didn’t make a sound.
There had always been something soft and bird-like about her.
Something that made me want to cup her gently in my hands, dome my tattooed and blood-stained fingers over her.
Fingers that had already taken a dozen lives by the time I was eighteen, standing in that warehouse with her watching.
My fingers weren’t tattooed or blood-stained when we’d first met.
I could barely remember myself from before the fire.
But Cristo santo, I remembered her.
I knew her face at once when I let the body fall to the ground and finally turned to see her standing there.
The industrial lighting from the empty parking lot outside speared through a window, coming down on her like holy fucking light from God.
Her long, pin-straight blonde hair took on a silvery hue, her eyes beautiful, huge, and dark as she stared.
She had on a dress made of some kind of shiny fabric that flowed down her body like water.
Her slender arms were bare. So was the pale column of her throat, the winged lines of her collarbones.
If such a thing as heaven was ever real, then Aurora was its last angel.
“Curse.”
Dio help me. She knew my name.
“You know who I am.”
She looked startled by my reply. Maybe she was surprised to hear perfect English coming from my mouth this time.
“Of course I do,” she said. Then, softly, perhaps more to herself than to me, “Sometimes I can picture your face even more clearly than my own.”
The face of an eight-year-old child, she meant. The face of the Sicilian boy who’d once treasured things like frangipani flowers and kisses from his mamma.
That boy, sweet little Accursio Giordano, did not exist anymore. He died the night my unconscious body was dragged by my burning, screaming brother from the flames of our fucking past. The night our uncle gave us the Titone name.
And yet, she knew me anyway.
Her eyes went to the body on the floor. Her face was nearly as pale as her hair.
Her papà was in this life. A powerful figure in Buffalo. She knew what men like him did.
What men like me did.
But I doubted it was ever this up-close and personal. I doubted she was ever in the room with a dead body, smelling the grim piss and shit of it all.
“What are you doing here, Aurora?”
She took a breath so sharp I wondered if it cut her windpipe on the way down. “So you recognize me, too.”
Recognize her. I’d thought of her fucking daily for ten years straight. That kind, quiet girl who’d just lost her mamma, who’d landed like a wounded sparrow in Sicily that summer. Her face was burned into my mind the way all those marks were burned into Elio’s flesh.
Maybe she was my own kind of scar.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Why am I in Montreal?” she asked. “Or why am I in this abandoned building with you and a dead man?” Her hands caught each other in front of her ribcage, twisting together. “What…What’s going to happen to him?” The next question came out as a whisper. “What’s going to happen to me?”
My blood stilled in my veins.
“Are you asking,” I said slowly, “if I’m going to kill you now? For what you just saw?”
She nodded jerkily, keeping her gaze firmly glued to my own, trying to project some kind of boldness. But there was no missing the rapid rise and fall of her ribs, the shuddering rhythm of her breath.
She was afraid.
Of me.
I glanced down at the corpse. Even in front of her, I couldn’t feel anything like guilt or shame or remorse. Those sorts of feelings were as lost to me as the sound of my mamma’s voice, and she’d been dead for ten long years.
Eighteen years old, and I’d killed more than a dozen men without batting an eye.
I’d killed more than dozen men and enjoyed it.
Sometimes being my uncle’s favourite assassin was the only thing that made me feel anything at all. The only thing that gave me purpose.
I’d had another purpose, once. Saving Aurora. Pulling her from the water. Taking care of her. Showing her all the sweet and secret places of my childhood.
I had to get her the fuck away from me.
“You can’t be here.” My voice was hard and cold. She flinched, as if she physically felt the words. As if they hurt.
I didn’t like seeing her flinch. I didn’t like seeing her in this dirty, empty building where men got strangled in the darkness. She should always be in warm, bright places. Sun-drenched balconies, gardens with flowers. Granita shops that smelled of sugar and lemon.
“Does that mean you’ll let me go?”
Let her go.
A part of me snapped its jaws inside and said, fuck no. Not because I was going to kill her, but because I wanted to keep her.
That part of me wanted to bring her back to Taormina, just to see if it could ever be the same.
Even though I knew it never would.
“I’m going to take you home.”
I had to. The instinct to protect her was just as strong now as it had been on that beach ten years ago, when I’d seen her white-blonde head slip beneath the waves.
She shouldn’t have been out here on her own in the first fucking place.
Sending her back out onto those darkened streets now would be like sending her out into the churning water.
Churning water with sharks in it.
I wasn’t the only monster in Montreal.
“To…To your place?” she asked.
“No.” I bent down, grasping the biker’s corpse beneath the pits. “I’m taking you back to wherever you’re staying.”
I dragged the body away to a far corner. There was a smaller room over there, just bigger than a closet. I stuffed him in and shut the door. I’d have to come back to deal with him later. I didn’t like leaving messes behind this way. But Aurora was the priority right now.
When I turned around once more, I almost expected her to be gone.
Because she was always gone when I woke up.
I half-wondered if she’d ever even been there to begin with.
Maybe I’d hallucinated her, the way a man might hallucinate an oasis in the desert.
Something exquisite and untouchable. Always on the horizon. Never really here.
But there she remained, in her pretty shoes and beautiful dress in this foul fucking place.
Her big eyes still on me. With the lack of light, they were midnight-dark.
But I perfectly recalled their actual colour.
That brilliant, silver-flecked aqua. The precise shade of the sunlit sea that almost killed her once.