Chapter 7
Curse
I swear Aurora is keeping me awake. Alive.
She’s like a candle in the darkness, her flame steady and unwavering.
It’s my own consciousness that gutters all around her.
Blackness creeping in at the edges, creating a halo effect around her silvery head.
Morelli might be the one physically supporting me as we exit the car and head for the front door of what was once Uncle Vinny’s house, but Aurora is the light that guides me.
Elio is beside her, taking crisp steps, a gun in his hand, his head on a constant swivel for threats.
But nothing emerges from the spiked shadows of the trees. This entire property is ringed by high fencing and protected by a wrought-iron gate at the end of the drive. We should be safe here.
For now. But we aren’t staying in Toronto long. As soon as my brain is fully functional again, and I’m capable of protecting her on my own, we’ll be out of here. Somewhere Alessandro Messina won’t know to look for us.
Messina. The name meant nothing to me earlier tonight, but I’m remembering now, slowly, but so fucking surely. The name of the man who married my angel. Whose throat I slit.
Whose son is trying now to take his dead father’s place.
Beside her at the altar.
Beside her in her bed.
“You alright?” Morelli asks in urgent Italian. I must have made some sound of complaint, of refutation, of spine-splitting hatred at the thought of the youngest Messina marrying Aurora.
“No,” I reply, also in Italian. Aurora turns to glance back at me, blue eyes searching and solemn. “But I fucking will be.”
I have to be. She needs me alive. At least for a month after our marriage.
I can go ahead and kick the goddamn bucket after that. She’ll be fully protected by then.
And I highly doubt that she would mourn me.
There are men ready at the door ahead – soldiers I recognize.
Robbie and his younger brother, Leo. They nod deferentially to Elio as he mounts the steps to the door.
But I barely look at them. It’s like my eyes are trying to dig themselves into the back of Aurora’s blonde head. I’m half-surprised she doesn’t bleed.
When Elio opens the door and gestures Aurora inside, Robbie and Leo follow. I know why they’re here – they’re here to keep us alive while I am so pathetically fucking incapacitated. But I don’t want them. Don’t want Morelli. Don’t even want Elio.
I want to drag Aurora into some black corner where there’s only room for the two of us. Trap her there and hoard her. Surround her, encase her, entomb her with my own fucking body until nothing can touch her. Not even the light of day.
And this is exactly why I cannot fucking keep her. Because if there’s anyone who deserves to live in the sunlight – warmth and beauty and sugary fucking sweetness – it’s her.
The house is lightless – windows covered, furniture too.
Zizi hasn’t been here since before Uncle Vinny expired in the driveway.
Elio and Robbie leave to go turn on the water and the power to the house.
Morelli makes sure I can stand on my own before slipping away to get some supplies from Uncle Vinny’s med room in the basement.
“You keep him awake,” he says to Aurora in thickly accented English.
“If he fall down, or fall asleep, you scream loud for me to come.”
Aurora nods, biting at bloodless lip. Morelli gives a grunt of satisfaction, heads towards the elevator, and before he disappears into it, he tells Leo to go back “for the bags.” It takes me way too long to realize Morelli is talking about our bags.
Aurora’s and mine from the train. Somebody must have had the presence of mind to grab them, I guess.
Thank fuck my brother was there to take care of shit while I couldn’t.
To take care of her while I couldn’t.
Except…
He wasn’t really with her for most of tonight, was he?
Severu was.
“What happened?” I ask her. It’s hard to get the words out.
My mouth feels like somebody’s disassembled it, and then put it all back together with everything attached at slightly the wrong angle.
Jaw and tongue and teeth all a few degrees off from where they should be.
I probably look like some fucked-up ventriloquist’s dummy. One of those wooden ones.
One that’s been punched in the face.
“After we…” She hesitates, then swallows, drawing my gaze to the achingly perfect column of her throat. “Afterwards, when I was in the bathroom, the porter brought you water. Do you remember that?”
The fucking porter. He’d slipped to the back of my foggy brain again. Aurora’s words drag him from the depths. Young guy. Dark hair. Italian, maybe.
“When I came back from the bathroom, you were slumped over the table. I thought…I thought you were just sleeping.” When she blinks, I see glimmering moisture, beading her pale lashes and threatening to surge down her cheeks. Then, the choked whisper of, “I’m so sorry.”
I stare at her, uncomprehending. Not understanding how this perfect fucking creature, this woman who’s always been more heaven than human, could have anything to apologize to me for.
My astonishment must register on my drug-numb face, because she swipes furiously at her eyes and starts rapidly explaining herself, as if she somehow owes me that.
“I can’t believe I thought you were asleep,” she cries.
“Elio called your phone and when I picked up, he knew something was wrong right away. I was just too stupid to realize it. I was standing there being mad that you were sleeping. Mad that my water had spilled. Meanwhile, my water was probably drugged, just like yours!” She shoves the heels of her hands hard against her own eyes. “You could have died because of me!”
“No.”
That’s all I say. One single word to shut her up.
I’m not going to stand here and listen to her self-flagellate for my failings.
I don’t even know why she does it. Pretty sure she’s halfway to fucking hating me.
Pretty sure she told me she was looking forward to never seeing me again on that train tonight.
And yet here she is, crying her precious fucking tears, the tears that slaughter me, and apologizing.
There’s this ever-present guilt in her. This sense that she’s unworthy, that she’s a burden, that she’s slowly bleeding poison from some unseen wound inside. I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know what it means. All I know is that I do not fucking like it.
“No,” I say again. And then, because she seems to need more than a monosyllabic reply from me, I add, “I wouldn’t have died because of you, Aurora.”
Thing is, I would die for her. Without a moment’s hesitation.
I know it as plainly as I know the letters of my own mamma’s name, tattooed into my skin.
I don’t kid myself thinking that I might have something like a soul, but all the rest of it – the blood, the bones, the heart – I’d lay at her feet like an offering without her ever having to ask it of me.
Even if I know she’d never ask it of me.
Even if she doesn’t think she’s worth it.
“Can’t die yet,” I go on. “Gotta marry you first.”
The words seem to startle her out of her bout of tears. She lowers her hands, her eyes wet and red, her cheeks pale, damp, salt-stained. Even exhausted she’s flawless, a fact so confounding it’s nearly infuriating.
“Why?” she asks shakily.
I can’t get my head around her question.
She knows why – at least, she knows what I have told her.
She knows that I’ll marry her so that I can take Buffalo, transfer it all away from her, and give it to my brother.
I made that perfectly fucking clear to her when we were in Montreal.
So clear that it finally seemed to shake whatever childhood hold I had on her, finally seemed to make her see me for what I was.
But then she goes on. “On the train…On the phone…Elio said-”
She’s interrupted by Leo returning with the bags and, a second later, Morelli reappearing by stepping through the elevator doors.
“Enough about the train for now,” I say as Morelli grasps my arm.
I shake him off, though, feeling like I’ve got my feet mostly under me for the moment.
Whether I’ve got control over my guts will be another question.
Nausea writhes as my muscles quake. It feels like somebody’s taken a meat tenderizer to every inch of me.
All I can think as Morelli directs us to the palatial living room on the main floor is about what would have happened if I hadn’t managed to knock over Aurora’s water while clinging to my last, looping shreds of consciousness.
She’s so much smaller than I am. I imagine her, pale and still on the train instead of me, and finally lose the battle against my own stomach.
With a muffled grunt, I turn from the others, grabbing at some big, expensive vase on a side table and puking into it.
“What’s happening?” Aurora asks anxiously. “What’s wrong?”
She’s probably asking Morelli and not me, but I answer anyway.
“Nothing much,” I rasp after spitting into the mess. “Just thinking about a catastrophe.”
Wordlessly, Leo drops the bags and takes the vase from me, like he’s some kind of big, tattooed chamber maid. I blink, a groggy slide of skin over my eyes, and then he’s gone.
“A catastrophe?” Aurora presses as Morelli grasps at either side of my jaw, examining my face closely.
She doesn’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. Of course she doesn’t. I’ve just been drugged within an inch of my putrid fucking life. I’m probably incoherent as shit.
But her being drugged like that, her potentially dying...