Chapter 5
Curse
“What does Serpico want?” I grit out as we make our way through Union Station.
Elio’s got my bag, and Morelli is following behind with Aurora’s suitcase.
I’m not carrying anything. It takes everything I’ve got to keep putting one foot in front of the other.
Elio managed to get me off the train car before any staff noticed the fact that I was doped out of my goddamn mind in there.
“Not sure yet,” my brother responds, his eyes ahead, scanning the people milling through the building. “But there’s gotta be something. Men like him don’t tend to do things out of the goodness of their hearts.”
Men like him. Men like us.
Doesn’t matter what he wants. Doesn’t matter what it takes.
If I have to buy her back, I’ll do it.
If I have to kill every soldier in that fucking building to get to her, then I’ll do that, too.
“The Della Torre Camorra clan’s been giving Serpico trouble lately,” Morelli says in hushed tones.
Despite the fact he’s got at least twenty years on Elio, he’s in good shape, and has no trouble striding alongside us even with Aurora’s big suitcase in tow.
“And he knows how much more powerful the Titone famiglia is now that we’ve got Irish firepower behind us. ”
Elio gives a snort at that. Probably an indication that, just because Darragh has married our cousin Valentina, doesn’t mean our alliance is an easy one.
Though Valentina has come back from Dublin more than once to visit, Elio and Darragh haven’t come face-to-face since Darragh busted open my brother’s kidney in that pub basement boxing match.
I’m not sure Elio will ever allow the man who once threatened his wife to exist peaceably alongside us, not to mention the fact that our Uncle Vinny shot Darragh and almost ended his life.
But Morelli has a point. Animosity between the two bosses or not, our families are bound now.
And it makes us even less appealing to have as an enemy.
“Could simply be to curry favour,” Morelli continues. “A show of goodwill, if not coming from the goodness of his heart.”
“An investment,” Elio says succinctly. “Without spending a goddamn dime.”
When we exit the building, the cold air feels like salvation. I gulp it down, urging it to clear my pounding head.
“Wonder where that fuck Messina ended up after Sev grabbed Aurora,” Elio says, his dark eyes so hard and sharp they should punch holes in every person they land on.
Messina. The name means something to me now. It didn’t earlier, when I first came to. But there’s still confusion wrapped around it. Messina can’t be here. He can’t go anywhere at all. Because I fucking killed him.
“Messina’s dead,” I remind my brother. But he gives a tight shake of his head.
“Not Marco. Marco’s son, Alessandro. I saw him with my own two fucking eyes.” He shakes his head again. “I don’t think you’re the only one who wants to marry Aurora Bianchi.”
Alessandro Messina? My mind lurches drunkenly as I try to make sense of what he’s saying. I knew somebody from New York might try to come for her.
I didn’t think it would be her fucking stepson. Even the thought that he’s out there somewhere in this city makes my knuckles ache with tension, a hot, dark, hostile rage building inside me that I know won’t ebb until I’ve drained all the blood out of his fucking body.
“Did he touch her?” I growl.
She doesn’t fucking like when men touch her.
“He threw her in a cab,” Elio says. “Robbie and the others rammed it. That’s when we lost them.
” Ahead, I can see the results of the crash, a black SUV’s front end smashed into the side of the teal-and-orange Toronto taxi it’s T-boned in the middle of the intersection.
Two police cars are parked at the scene, red and blue lights flashing while small crowds gather on the sidewalk to gawk.
“Ignore the cops. I’ve already talked to our people on the force,” Elio says.
“And I’ll write the cabbie a big fat cheque for his trouble tonight.
” He leads us away from the crash to another black vehicle.
He and Morelli chuck the bags into the trunk.
Elio slides into the driver’s seat, Morelli getting into the back.
I fall heavily into the front passenger seat, sweating despite the cold air.
Elio eyes me from the side, then, as he pulls swiftly away from the curb, says, “We’ll go home first. Get another naloxone kit. ”
“No,” I grunt. No fucking way. We’re not driving that far out of our way just for that.
“You could overdose again at any moment,” Morelli warns.
“We go straight to her,” I say. Morelli swears under his breath, saying something about how he doesn’t know which Titone brother is more stubborn.
Elio sighs between clenched teeth, then cranks the wheel, spinning us in a tight U-turn that nearly takes out a sedan in the other lane.
Among the blaring anthem of angry car horns, Elio drives directly towards the crash at the intersection.
When we get close, he stops the vehicle in live traffic, leaving the car running and the driver’s side door wide open as he stalks into the intersection.
He doesn’t stop until he’s standing in front of one of the police officers there.
I don’t know what he says, but the officer hurries over to his own parked vehicle, bends to retrieve something from inside, then hands it to Elio.
When my brother returns to the car, after throwing himself into the driver’s seat and slamming the door, he tosses something into my lap then speeds away.
I focus my flickering eyes on another case, just like the one Morelli showed me on the train.
“Cops have always got ’em these days,” Elio says as he drives. “You got any clue how you were drugged in the first place? Can’t imagine Messina could have gotten close enough to you to get any powder on you or stab you with a needle.”
I have no memory of Messina being on the train at all. I didn’t even fucking know he was here until Elio just told me. The only people I saw on the train were Aurora, and…
“The porter,” I say after a pounding moment of hesitation. “A new one came at the end…Gave me water from a cup.”
It’s only as I say the words that I remember that sudden feeling of slippage on the train.
The sensation that time was slowing all around me.
Then a bleary realization, and the resulting panic when I saw Aurora’s cup.
Panic that I couldn’t move the way I wanted.
Panic that all I could do was reach for it, reach for it, and…
And there’s nothing else. The scene gives way to liquid black.
Fuck. I don’t even know if Aurora had a sip or not.
It’s taking too fucking long to figure shit out.
I want to yank my brain from my skull, squeeze it like a sponge, let the memories spill into my own lap so I can try to make some kind of sense of them.
Unfortunately, that would leave me deader than fucking dead. And I need to be alive to get to her.
“We’ll find him,” Elio says. But I’ve already moved on from thoughts of the porter.
“Aurora was conscious when you saw her?” I demand. “Walking?”
“Running,” Elio corrects me. “If any of the drugs were meant for her, I don’t think they got into her system.”
I won’t – can’t – feel relief at that until I see her for myself.
“And even if she was exposed,” Elio continues, “Sev’s got the resources to handle it. He isn’t about to let her die now. Not when he’s promised us her safekeeping.”
I try to hold that slippery thought at the forefront of my rattled mind, but it’s hard. The effort drains me, like there’s some unseen hole in me somewhere, and everything is seeping out, slowly, but so damn surely.
I’m so fucking empty without her.
Elio drives like a bat out of hell, but even so it’s an agonizing eternity to get to Sev’s big stone house in Rosedale. Two men stand in the driveway to meet us. I know one of them is Luca Serpico, Severu’s nephew. I don’t recognize the other man, some nameless Camorra soldier.
“Stay here, Morelli. We might need you on our way out,” Elio says.
He takes the naloxone kit from my lap and tosses it into the backseat.
Morelli catches it out of the air and nods.
Then, Elio is turning to me, asking me something like “You good?” But I don’t quite catch it.
I’m already shoving open the door, climbing shakily out of the vehicle.
“Where is she?” My voice sounds all fucked up to my own ears. Haggard. Like I’m choking on her absence.
“Safe inside,” Luca responds. Elio’s at my side now. I feel his arm press against my own, a wordless gesture of physical support. In case my legs give out or some shit, I guess.
Ain’t gonna happen. Even if my lungs feel like they’re half-filled with fluid.
“Bring her out,” Elio says. “We’ll take her and go.”
“My uncle wants to speak with you first,” Luca says. “Inside.”
Elio doesn’t answer for a moment, no doubt sifting through all the possible dangers.
It’s not often we wander, outnumbered and outgunned, into another boss’s territory this way.
Last time we did it was at the boxing ring in the basement of the pub, when Elio fought Darragh for Deirdre’s safety.
Because Deirdre is his, and he would have walked through anything – boxing rings or bullets – to keep her.
But Aurora isn’t his. She’s mine.
“You don’t have to come in,” I tell him, already moving unsteadily forward.
Luca and the soldier eye me with interest, no doubt wondering what the hell is wrong with me, but I ignore their stares.
There’s only one pair of eyes I need on me right now, and they sure as fuck aren’t the ones in the skulls of these Camorra goons.
Luca and the other man overtake me easily, striding ahead to the door to open it. I glance down at my feet, making sure they’re still on the ground, because I can’t quite tell by feel alone at this point. My vision doubles. No. Wait. Those are Elio’s shoes beside my own.
“Not letting you have all the fun,” my brother mutters, though from his grim tone I don’t think he’s actually expecting any fun here tonight.
He probably wants to get this over with as quickly as possible so he can get himself back to his pregnant wife in one piece.
Fair enough. I want to get this done quickly, too.
Before I have the chance to fucking OD again and she slips right through my fingers.
I’m not expecting her to be waiting immediately inside the door, but I still reel a little bit with the force of her absence. Other people are here instead, more Camorra soldiers in a room ahead, playing pool and sucking on fat brown cigars.
“Filthy fucking smoke,” Elio hisses, his scarred jaw tensing. Then, aimed at the soldiers, he bellows, “Put that shit out. And crack a goddamn window.”
The soldiers stare at us, then send shifting glances to each other.
“You heard the man,” comes a darkly silken voice. “Put them out.”
The smoking soldiers jump to comply as their boss Severu Serpico steps into view.
He’s got on a well-tailored pair of charcoal pants and a black sweater that looks like it’d be more at home in some expensive shop than moulded to the brutal frame of a mob boss.
But even the fancy fucking clothes, the exceptionally fine fabrics and the tailoring fit for a god, can’t take away from the air of cool and calculated violence that clings to this man.
His eyes are the colour of scotch, the kind that burns you all the way down, but there’s not a trace of warmth in them.
Aurora isn’t with him.
“She’s upstairs,” he says, answering a question I must have already asked with my eyes. “My sister is looking after her.”
I know just about fuck-all about Sev’s reclusive sister. From what I hear, Sev keeps her locked up pretty damn tight, and as far as I’m aware, she’s never been seen in public. I can’t say that I blame him after his other sister and father were shot like dogs in the street twenty years ago.
And I certainly can’t say I blame him after everything I’ve done with Aurora. The way I’ve chained her to me – sometimes literally – in order to keep her alive.
But I can blame him for keeping her from me now. I already know that I’m running out of time. Can’t tell if it’s withdrawal from her, or the drugs coming back online in my system, but there is weakness in my limbs, and a poisonous prickling that almost feels like a deadening.
I’m halfway up the stairs before I even know how I’ve made my legs move.
Severu pushes ahead of me, spinning, then walking backwards up the stairs in front of me, moving so naturally that it somehow becomes unnatural.
Uncanny. Like someone’s recorded him walking down the stairs, and is now playing the footage on rewind.
“You’ll forgive me for accompanying you as you reunite with your fiancée,” Severu says, a note of cold implacability in his tone that tells me he doesn’t give a fuck about forgiveness at all. “But I don’t let any men outside of our family into my sister’s room unescorted.”
Elio says something in response, but I don’t really hear it. I’m too busy trying to stay upright, my throat working, my lungs stalling as we reach the top of the stairs. I don’t have it in me to ask which door she’s behind. I’ll just have to rip every one off its hinges until I reach her.
But in the end, I don’t need to. Because one of them flings suddenly open, and like a holy vision from on high, a crack of delirious heaven in my head, she is here.