Chapter 20
Aurora
I beg Alessandro to call an ambulance for Curse, but he refuses.
“I didn’t blow his fucking brains out. That’s all I promised you. He’s still breathing. And now, we go.” When I hesitate, my entire being screaming at the idea of leaving him behind, Alessandro hisses, then aims his gun at me.
“You’re so keen on dying, why don’t we try it now?”
“You need me alive.” I can’t even feel panic, feel fear, with the barrel of the gun pointing my way. The only thing I feel is a ripping at my very core. Like I am leaving half of myself behind.
“Yeah. But you don’t need kneecaps to live, now do you?
” He changes the angle of the gun, aiming it at my legs.
When I show no sign of fear for myself, his gaze narrows.
He takes a swift step forwards, his free hand striking like a snake at my neck.
I jerk away, but the car is behind me. His fingers close around my throat, and he presses the full weight of his body against mine, crushing me back against the wrecked SUV.
I can’t breathe.
Choking, dots dancing before my vision, I claw at his hand. It accomplishes nothing. He appears to me as if possessed by something, a mad, inhuman energy I could never hope to overcome. His eyes are wide, bloodshot, his teeth bared as they clench against each other.
“Fucking Titone whore,” he spits.
Curse said that I wasn’t a whore. He said…He said…
My mind slows, my lungs contracting painfully. Have I closed my eyes? I can’t see Alessandro anymore.
With my last dregs of awareness, I feel him shove his finger between my lips, leaving something behind. Powder? The crushed remains of a pill?
There’s no strength left to spit it out. It’s already dissolving.
And now, I don’t feel fear, or pain, or Alessandro.
I don’t feel anything at all.
I drift in and out, aware of rocking movement. I’m in a vehicle, and someone’s driving, on the road for what feels like days. I think I hear someone asking about why we were in Canada, then a few more muffled words, followed finally by, “Here’s her passport. She’s just sleeping.”
When I fully come-to, I’m already on the plane to Sicily.
It’s a private plane. The one Marco no doubt would have used for our honeymoon. When I blink into wakefulness and see Alessandro with me, I do everything I can to retreat back into unconsciousness. To return to that cottony darkness. The place where nothing mattered and I didn’t miss him.
Curse.
Please, please let him still be alive.
“Don’t go to sleep. Drink this.” Alessandro is seated across from me in a large leather chair. He holds out a water bottle, then shakes it impatiently when I don’t take it.
“You’re going to be dehydrated,” he says, finally giving up on making me take it. He tosses it at me. When it lands in my lap, I somehow barely register it. “We drove all the way back to New York, and then I got you on this fucking flight, without you eating or drinking once.”
“All the way back to New York?”
“State, not city,” he clarifies. “But still, it’s been hours. And now that the opioids are out of your system, you might start sweating and shit.”
“More opioids,” I croak. My mouth tastes like dust. Feels like it, too. “You’re got a real thing for them.”
“It’s effective. Obviously. Got you into that truck, then onto a plane, without a fight.”
And nearly killed Curse. Curse, who might still be unconscious in that wreckage. In the cold, the rain, the darkness without me.
I chuck Alessandro’s water on the floor, listening to it roll away while he swears loudly.
I don’t want to drink. I don’t deserve to be fucking hydrated.
I left him there.
Did I have any other choice? I couldn’t have overpowered Alessandro. I know that. I rake through my memories mercilessly, trying to see any other possibility that I might have missed. Any other way I could have helped him.
But there’s nothing. I’m not strong. I’m not a hero who can save him like he’s saved me.
It fully hits me then. That whether Curse lives or dies, I will never see him again.
Alessandro shoves the water bottle onto my lap again.
I ignore it, turning away from him. From everything.
“Wake up. We’re here.”
Alessandro’s voice bites at my consciousness. My eyelids scrape my eyes, the insides of my throat wracked by friction. When his hand squeezes my arm, hauling me to my feet, I sway dizzily, my vision swimming.
“You should have drank the fucking water. We’ve been on a plane for ten hours.
” With his other hand, he retrieves the forgotten bottle from the seat and pushes it against my chest. “Take it,” he snaps.
“You promised me that if I let that Titone fuck live, then you’d do everything in your power to end that marriage and make the one with me successful.
That’s only going to work if you don’t pass out and fucking die on me. ”
He didn’t seem to give a shit about how conscious I was before. But ultimately, I don’t let the water bottle fall when he lets go of it. My stomach clenches, and my mouth tries to water in response to the nausea there, but nothing happens.
It takes far more energy than it should not to fall down the steps from the plane to the tarmac.
Sun drenches me as I go, and I squint against what feels like an onslaught after the grey skies and snow and rain of Quebec and Ontario.
It’s only by the time I reach the pavement of the airstrip that I’m acclimatized enough to open my eyes fully.
And just like that, I am six years old again.
It’s only March, not summer like when I was last here.
But it looks the same. That exceptional blue sky, the only clouds of which are gathering in a lazy circle above the peak of Mount Etna in the distance.
Alessandro keeps his grip on my arm. Maybe worried I’m going to fall over.
Maybe worried I’m going to try to run now that he doesn’t have the leverage of Curse’s prone body at the end of the barrel of his gun.
When we reach a vehicle that appears to have been left waiting for him, he shoves me roughly into the front passenger seat.
He doesn’t speak as he drives. And that’s just fucking fine with me. He spoke enough back at the car wreck. The fact that he murdered my father, and I didn’t even know, eats at me. He’s been taking things from me without me even realizing.
He’s been taking things from me. Just like his great uncle.
It’s almost as if thinking of Carlo now conjures his house from some traumatized place in my own mind.
Because after about an hour of driving, I recognize it, a beautiful beige structure among rolling green hills, idyllic as a postcard.
It always struck me as so strange, so wrong, that a place could be that fucking lovely on the outside, no matter what happened within.
Alessandro turns onto the narrow road that leads to the property, and every muscle in me clenches in revolt.
“No,” I stammer. “No way. I can’t stay here.”
It never occurred to me, when I’d tossed out Taormina as a suggestion, that Alessandro would bring me to his dead great uncle’s house.
“Why not? I inherited it when Uncle Carlo died. I’ve been paying the old church caretaker Paulo to look after the place since no one’s been living here.”
Why not? Why not?
Because some of the worst moments of my life happened inside that fucking house. Because it was here that I learned to lock my inner being away behind thick walls of glass, a cage without a door.
I don’t remember ever meeting the church’s caretaker, but I remember the church as it rolls into view now.
A tiny, ancient structure with a small graveyard beside it.
After the first night here, I ran down the slope to that little church, hoping for salvation, but finding only apathetic sunshine and crumbling stone.
My throat had been too stopped up with tears to pray, and when a priest had emerged, casting questioning eyes upon me, I’d fled.
“I can’t stay here,” I say again, a frantic echo.
“I’m not putting you up at some fancy hotel if that’s what you were imagining,” Alessandro retorts. “You should be fucking grateful I’m letting you stay here with me at all and that I’m not shoving you into some prison cell.”
Grateful. For the destruction of my entire fucking life.
We pull up the long drive to the front of the house. It’s just as I remembered it, with its luscious gardens and its black wrought-iron fencing around the house. It’s the kind of fence that has those pointy spikes, like a row of iron arrows that have been planted in the sun-warmed ground.
There’s a man at the front door, holding a scratchy, sparse-looking broom.
He looks like he could be any age between forty-five to eighty.
He’s wiry with corded muscle, and I don’t know how much of the wrinkling on his tan face is due to age or sun exposure.
He’s got a full head of hair, and it’s all grey.
His clothes are well-worn, faded, and dusty.
Alessandro seems to be expecting him. This must be the church caretaker who’s been looking after the place. Paulo.
I wish he’d have just burned it to the ground.
Alessandro hops out of the car, greeting the older man in Italian. Both of their heads swivel to take me in where I sit. Alessandro seems to be confirming something now. Maybe telling the man that I’m his wife.
Being here with yet another Messina suddenly becomes too much.
Shoving the car door open, I bend over and puke onto the stone.
The other man exclaims loudly – a complaint, I’m sure – and Alessandro says something placating in return.
I think I hear the word vino in there somewhere, but I’m too busy heaving to be sure.
There’s not much in the stomach to eject. When I’m done, I’m actually glad I’ve taken Alessandro’s stupid water bottle. Because now I have something to rinse my mouth with. I do so, spitting, then take a queasy sip.
I’m not allowed to remain in the shelter of the vehicle long.
After a couple of minutes chatting at the front door, Alessandro returns for me, yanking me from the car and dragging me to the building.
I cringe upon entering, then allow myself the smallest breath of relief when Alessandro marches me past the tiny, first-floor room I slept in as a child.
If he’d insisted I sleep there, I’m certain that I would have somehow managed to crawl out of my own skin in response.
Unlike Curse in Toronto and then the other house in Springwater, once Alessandro releases my arm, he doesn’t seem to give a shit where I go or what I do.
He knows there’s nowhere for me to run. And if I break my end of the bargain and leave him, there will be nothing stopping him from sending an assassin of his own to kill Curse after all.
I watch Alessandro’s back as he moves away from me, his phone against his ear.
I burn with the desire to take it from him.
To call Elio, call anyone, and make sure that Curse is alright.
He was on such a lonely, tree-lined road.
Would anyone have even found him? My forehead aches with the strain of mental math.
How many hours has it been? Twelve? Twenty?
I take another sip of water, realizing that if I’m going to have any semblance of my wits about me, I will need to drink more of it after all.
I’m currently standing in the sitting room area. Large glass doors stand straight ahead, leading out into the back of the property. Unsure what else to do, I go through them.
It’s not summer-hot yet, but my outfit is too heavy nonetheless.
I kick off my boots, then remove my socks, feeling the grains of tiny stones and the sun’s warmth sink into my soles.
There are more glorious gardens back here, all contained by those pointy, interconnected spires of fencing.
Beyond the fencing, the property slopes down, lush and green, then rises again to the hill that houses the church. It’s the only building nearby.
The church is only about three hundred feet away, and Paulo has already returned to his post there, taking his scraggly broom with him. He’s outside, brushing at old gravestones. Spying a shovel leaning against a low, crumbling wall beside the church, I wonder if Paulo is the gravedigger as well.
Is Carlo’s body there?
My guts threaten to expel the little water I’ve had, but I swallow back the urge. It’s been years since Carlo died. Even if he’s there – which he might not be – he’d be nothing but bones by now.
But suddenly, I have to know.
My feet move swiftly over stone and through gardens until I encounter the small gate in the fence at the very back.
I push it open, then continue down the grassy hill, sweat prickling along my lower back and beneath my arms. From beneath the shade of his hand over his eyes, Paulo sees me coming, and he calls something to me in Italian.
Though I can tell it’s a question, I can’t find any meaning in it.
“Carlo Messina?” I ask him. At the very least, Paulo should know that name. He nods, then aims his broom at the largest, newest gravestone. It’s closer to me than I was prepared for. My body quakes, like I’m six, in that bed, and I can hear him on the stairs.
He’s nothing but bones. He’s nothing.
I can’t convince my nervous system of that fact. My body wants me to run.
But I’m not going to. I’ve come this fucking far.
Other headstones peel away from me on all sides as I make my way to Carlo Messina’s grave.
I stop short of standing on top of where I think his body would be – because that would just be too close – instead pausing about seven feet away from the stone.
I can’t read the Italian on it. Which is probably a good thing.
I don’t need to read about how beloved he was – what a faithful husband, uncle, and friend.
I consider spitting on the grave. But Carlo isn’t even worth that fucking much. Especially when I’m dehydrated, and I’ve already vomited and started sweating. I’m not even going to waste my goddamn saliva on him.
And suddenly, as warningless as the sun disappearing behind a cloud, my fear is gone, replaced with bitter anger. Anger over the fact that an entity who is nothing now but bones in the dirt could have caused me so much harm. Ruined so much for me.
I don’t realize I’m crying until Paulo approaches cautiously, waving a faded-looking handkerchief at me. I blink down at it, dumbfounded. I’d promised myself not to waste my spit, but here I am shedding tears.
But these tears aren’t for Carlo.
They’re for me.
And Curse.
And everything that’s fallen the fuck apart.