Chapter 3 #2
Her throat contracted on a hard swallow. She was glancing behind me now, staring at the door I’d just stuffed the body behind, as if she expected him to come springing back out of it, like some kind of gruesome Jack-in-the-box. Her hands were still clutching each other. And shaking.
“First time you ever saw a body?”
“No,” she said, surprising me. “My mamma…”
Of course.
I never saw my mamma’s body. But Aurora would have seen hers. Cancer tended to leave a bit more of a person behind than a gasoline- and vengeance-fuelled fire.
“It’s time to go,” I told her. I couldn’t keep standing here in this place talking to her like we were the kids we’d once been on that beach.
Talking to her like she hadn’t just watched me unzip and step out of the costume of my humanity so I could place my hands around someone’s throat. “Did anyone see you?”
The last thing I fucking needed was Aurora being tied in any way to a crime scene. Not that I ever planned to let this place be discovered as a crime scene. But even the possibility made me feel like my spine was splitting apart.
“No,” she said quickly. “There’s no one out there.”
“Except for you, apparently.”
She pursed her lips and ducked her head.
“Except for me.”
I didn’t need to drag her out of the building.
She went on her own, with me looming behind her.
When the lights outside hit her face, the bright glimmer of that silvery hair shining like a fucking halo in the night, I swore and yanked off my hoodie, shoving it down over her head before she had a chance to recoil from me or complain.
“What are you doing?” she gasped as I yanked the hem all the way down to her hips.
“That hair,” I said, making sure the hood shadowed her face, “is like a goddamn fucking beacon out here.”
I already knew there weren’t cameras to worry about in the dead parking lot.
I’d scoped everything out here myself. But there were cameras in the streets beyond.
And if anyone ever had a reason to check that footage tonight, a beautiful little slip of a rich girl in a fancy dress with hair the colour of spun silver would stand out in this neighbourhood like a swan in a murder of crows.
She didn’t belong here.
She didn’t belong beside me, either.
Even if the zombified heart of little Accursio Giordano said otherwise.
I thought about sticking her in a cab, but didn’t like the idea of watching someone else drive away with her in the backseat. No. I’d have to see her right to the goddamn doorstep. Wherever that doorstep was.
“Where are you staying?”
“It’s only a fifteen-minute walk,” she said, striding ahead, the impossibly slender heels of her shoes clacking. “I can make it on my own.”
I kept careful pace behind her anyway.
“You still haven’t told me what you’re doing here,” I said after a few silent blocks.
I wanted this conversation, this entire interaction, to end. So why the hell were my lips still moving?
“I got straight A’s this year. Papà gave Mamma and me a trip to celebrate the end of the school year. That’s my step-mother,” she clarified quickly. “Her name is Mia.”
“And where is Mia tonight?”
“Fucking one of Papà’s soldiers. The one he sent to escort us,” she said flippantly. It was jarring, hearing her high, melodic voice used to swear. I’d never heard her use that kind of language before.
“Her flavour of the week,” she went on. “Don’t get me wrong, I actually like Mia. She’s nice. She takes me shopping. She’s only twenty. So more like a sister, I guess.”
“Sister or step-mamma, it doesn’t matter,” I growled. “She shouldn’t be letting you wander around out here on your own.”
“I like to wander.” She glanced behind at me, then straight ahead once more. “I like abandoned places. Houses…”
“Warehouses.”
“Yeah…” Her voice trailed off. She slowed, until she allowed herself to fall into step beside me. “I still can’t believe that I found you.”
Found me.
Like she’d been searching for me.
“Papà let me choose the location for this trip,” she blurted. When I caught a glimpse of her profile beneath the slouchy edge of the hood, there was hot colour climbing the curve of her cheek.
She chose to come here.
Because of me.
“I spend most of my time in Ontario these days,” I said. “Toronto.”
“Oh.” She faltered a little, wobbly in her shoes. “I didn’t know that.” She cleared her throat. “That’s fine. I don’t even know why you’re telling me that.”
“Because you just admitted that you came here looking for me.”
“I didn’t!” She crossed her arms, hunching into herself and the hoodie. “I’ve always wanted to visit Canada. It had nothing to do with you.”
Fuck.
It was probably good that she’d seen what she’d seen tonight. Seen me doing what I did best. So she didn’t spend the rest of her fucking life wandering the goddamn world looking for an innocent boy who no longer existed.
The rest of the walk was spent in silence. Fifteen minutes, my ass. It was close to forty by the time we reached the pretty townhouse she and Mia were staying at.
“You got the key?”
If she didn’t, I could always pick the lock. But she narrowed her eyes at me, like I’d offended her.
“Of course I do. I’m not some idiotic fucking airhead.
” From beneath the hoodie, she pulled out a small, sparkly pouch that must have been tucked beneath a strap or hidden in the pocket of her dress.
As she fished out a key from the pouch, a tiny notebook and a pen fell to the ground. I scooped them up.
She gasped. “Don’t look at that!”
“Your diary?”
“Worse,” she said with a wan grimace. “Poetry.” She lifted and then let her hands drop in a sort of helpless gesture. The key glinted. “Whenever I find an abandoned place, I write about it, OK? Sometimes just a line or two. I’m pretty sure it’s all terrible.”
“Are you going to write about tonight?”
“No.” Her face looked briefly stricken, then smoothed of all emotion. “No, Curse. I’m not going to write anything. Or say anything. To anyone.”
“Because you’re still afraid that I might kill you?”
She paused to finger the edge of the hood grazing her cheek. “No,” she murmured. “I’m not. Even if I should be.” Her eyes were luminous with questions when they met mine once more. Questions and the haunting ache of memories. “Should I be?”
“Keep the hoodie,” I said by way of reply.
She blinked, and suddenly her eyes were shiny and wet.
“I missed you,” she choked out. “For years. I…I thought…”
“Cristo Santo, don’t cry, Aurora,” I groaned. I wanted to claw my way out of my fucking skin at the sight of her tears. “And don’t miss me, either. Don’t look for me. Don’t even think about me. I’m not the boy you knew anymore. I couldn’t be him even if I tried. Not even for you.”
She wiped her face with the back of the hand that still held the key. “I know. But-”
“But nothing,” I said. “I can’t be what you need.”
I didn’t even know what that was. Trying to figure out what this beautiful, teary-eyed girl who wrote poems about empty buildings needed would be like trying to unravel one of the great mysteries of the universe.
She was so far outside of the scope of my understanding it made my jaw hurt from clenching.
Maybe I could have known what a girl like her needed, once. Maybe I had even been it, for that short stretch in Sicily.
I’d fucking hated losing her.
“Here,” I hissed, suddenly angry and without a goddamn clue as to why.
I’d been about to give her back her little notebook, but instead I tore it open to a blank page, scrawling violently across the paper with her pen.
When I was finished, I shoved the two items into her hands, simultaneously pulling the key from her grasp and unlocking the door for her.
“I don’t understand,” she said as I wrenched the door open. “Is this your phone number?”
I chucked the key into the foyer, the metal clinking across tile as it slid along the floor. Then, I clamped my hand down on her slender shoulder. Even through the fabric of the hoodie, I could feel the tender joinings of her bones. So fucking fragile.
I didn’t want to break her.
I pushed her through the door instead.
She shoved the notebook into the gap between the door and the frame, preventing me from closing it. She held it open to the page I’d just written on, brandishing it like a lawyer with evidence at a trial.
“Answer me,” she said, giving the notebook a meaningful shake. “Is this your phone number?”
“Yes.” My gaze swallowed hers. “And don’t you ever fucking use it, either.”
“Then why-”
“Consider it your own personal curse,” I gritted out.
I gripped the door, ready to slam it. “Death is the only thing I’m good for, Aurora.
So if you ever call this number, it won’t be because you need a friend.
It won’t be because you need little Accursio Giordano to come and save you.
It’ll be because you need somebody dead.
You got that? Because that’s all I have to give you. ”
Understanding so clear and raw it almost looked like grief dawned on her tear-streaked face. Even after watching me kill a man, she’d still held out some kind of foolish hope that the boy she’d searched for lived on in me.
I’d just murdered the last bit of that hope in her.
One final tear slipped down the soft line of her cheek. She didn’t say another word.
And in the end, I didn’t have to slam the door on her. She closed it and locked it herself.
I knew she’d never call me.
For twelve years, I kept the same number anyway.
And then, after Aurora and her groom had left the wedding hall in New York, and after I’d followed them back to his house, my phone rang.
I picked up but did not speak.
“Curse?”
I knew her voice at once.
And I knew that she’d been crying.
“I need you,” she whispered.
I was inside in two minutes flat.