Chapter 18 Antonella
ANTONELLA
PLAYLIST: TROUBLE – CAMYLIO
When I open my eyes, I am still where I was last night. In a place so dark that there will be no way back. I thought I wanted it. I thought I could—all the things I thought and didn’t think at all.
I feel so broken that I might never be whole again.
Rosalia lies next to me, and I look at her. She has her eyes open, staring at me.
“I thought I wanted it,” I whisper.
“I know,” she says silently. It is the first time I see some sort of warmth in her eyes.
I have to get up. I have to leave this behind me. I have to get back before the entire organisation implodes.
So I push myself up.
I walk upstairs like a robot.
Take my dress and put it on. I have my hand on the door handle.
My eyes wander to her.
She stands in her trousers and a blouse, messily put on, in the arch connecting the entrance and the living room.
“Antonella,” she says, longing in her voice.
“Don’t,” I say. “You won’t do that to me ever again.” And with that, I open the door.
I only see it from the corner of my eye, a blonde mane, a gun pointing at me, and there is nothing I can do. I stumble back, but the bullet hits me. I look down. Blood runs. But there is no pain.
I look back up.
Adria.
Another shot, but instead of me, it hits Adria in the head.
She drops dead in front of me.
I look at Rosalia, and she has a gun in her hand.
We look at each other.
She killed Adria.
Not me.
She killed her family.
To save me.
And with that, I sink to the ground.
When I wake, I stare at a very bright neon light.
“Urgh,” I say.
“Welcome back to the living,” says the voice of Salvatore.
I squint my eyes to focus and see two people around me.
“How are you feeling?” he asks, and I have no answer to the question. It would be too complicated to explain.
“How did I get here?”
“That is a question we’d like to have the answer to, too,” he says. “What the fuck happened, Antonella?”
“Adria happened.”
“Giuseppe’s daughter?”
“How many Adrias do you know?” I ask, stretching my joints.
Salvatore and Rosario look expectantly at me.
“Adria worked with Rosalia, at least I thought so. But as it happens, Rosalia was the one who saved me. Adria shot me. Rosalia killed Adria,” I say in a staccato voice.
“Why would Rosalia save you?”
“Can you ask me something I know?” I ask him back.
Salvatore sighs.
“What?” I ask.
“What? You ask what?” he shouts. “Fucking mess is what. I have been managing, but fucking shit, Antonella, you can’t pull shit like that.”
I tilt my head slightly.
“Look at you, all worked up,” I say. “Could it be you care for your baby sister?” I add in a smug tone.
“You’re family,” he says harshly. “We take care of family.”
“We do,” I say and grab his hand. “I’m alive. It takes a bit more than that to kill me.”
He grunts and grabs my hand back.
I glance at our hands.
It is the first time I truly realise I have a brother.
I belong here.
I have family here.
Family that catches me when I fall.
I am allowed to leave the hospital two weeks later, with a still-hurting chest.
Two weeks that have almost killed me with boredom, and most of all with my own thoughts.
What happened with Rosalia and me—it still lingers with me.
She saved me.
She chose me over Adria.
She chose her family over me.
She stopped, although she told me she would never stop.
She stayed while she could have gone.
She kissed me, although she hates me.
She comforted me, while all she wanted was to hurt me.
And against all logic, against all I stand for, all I have said, I am seeing the person who is behind the facade.
“Why are we driving to the masseria?” I ask when I realise we’re leaving Palermo behind us.
“Don’t you know?” asks Salvatore.
“Know what?”
“Adria, she burned down the house.”
“She what?”
“It burned down the night we were in the club, after Rosalia took you,” he says.
“What a bitch,” slips from my lips. While I know it is not fair, and I shouldn’t say it, because Adria was, in the end, only an abused, neglected child.
Salvatore chuckles.
I don’t want to be back at the masseria. I hate that place. It reminds me of things I don’t want to be reminded of.
When the masseria comes into view, my mood darkens. The place is somehow a reflection of all the things that happened to me. It was the place where I was forced to become someone else and, in the process, lost who I was.
Bits and pieces, taken from me, stripped and crushed into a different person. A person who is something between an empty void and a hollow shell. Broken in pieces, mended with cracks, held together by sheer will and forcing duty.
My gaze wanders outside.
I stare into the endless countryside around the house. It represents exactly how I feel. A masseria, alone in the middle of nothing. Isolated, fenced in, triste.
“It won’t be for long,” says Salvatore.
“Whatever,” I say, lost in thought.
We enter the masseria, and Salvatore aims to help me out of the car.
“There is no need for it,” I snap at him. “It’s not that bad.”
“You will follow the doctor’s orders,” he says, “And take it slow, very slow.”
“The doctors can fuck themselves,” I say as we walk inside. I don’t know why I am like this. I am a kind person.
Sophie was, says the voice in my head.
I am not Sophie anymore.
I attempt to walk into the study.
“Absolutely not,” says Salvatore and puts his hand on my hand on the handle to stop me from opening the door. “You will lie down and rest.”
“I certainly won’t,” I say. “You said it yourself, things need to be taken care of.”
“Not today. I will take care of everything, like I did in the past weeks.”
I groan.
“Fine,” I say and walk to the next door, my bedroom, and slam the door in his face after me. Not without gasping in from the pain in my chest.
I close my eyes and breathe in and out a couple of times.
My hand wanders to the wound. I have been lucky, extremely lucky, because the bullet was stopped by my rib cage bone; it splintered just a bit, and only one nasty splinter punctured my lung and caused it to collapse.
I still can’t breathe properly, it hurts like shit, and every time I breathe in, my chest feels compressed, adding to the overall feeling that a truck ran over my ribcage.
I once got a bad hit in training and broke a rib; it was equally painful.
“You’re alive,” says a voice suddenly in front of me, and I nearly die. My eyes fly open, adrenaline pumping into my system.
Rosalia.
In here.
I am lost for words.
I look at her.
She stands only a couple of steps away.
A black blouse with lace sleeves, high waist pants with a golden chain belt. Her dark hair is pulled back tightly in a low bun. Her lips red, the golden cross dangling from her neck.
“What are you doing here?” I breathe out.
“I do not know,” she says, in a voice that bears a tormented soul and looks away.
Silence follows. Silence that is only disturbed by the singing of a bird outside. A nightingale.
“You risked a lot coming here,” I say.
“I did,” she says.
“You killed Adria to save me,” I say.
“I did,” she says, and her eyes find mine.
Goosebumps prick my skin the moment our eyes meet.
I wait for her to say something, but she doesn’t.
“Why are you here?” I ask. I already know the answer. But I need to hear it.
“Because of you,” she breathes out.
I want to get lost in those three words, but I can’t. Because I haven’t forgotten. There’s nothing that’ll come off it. The entire universe is against it.
“You shouldn’t have come,” I say.
“I know,” she says, “And yet, I am here.”
“You can’t be here!” I say louder than I want. “There is no point! We can’t! We can’t be—after everything, not in this world. Not in a world where being with a woman is against the rules. Not in a world where you are the one I have to hunt, and I am the one you have to kill.”
“Don’t you think I know all that?” she says. “But I cannot stay away!” she says and closes the distance between us. “I cannot stay away because you haunt my mind, torment my soul and stole my heart.”
Her palms grasp my cheeks.
Just like she did that night.
The night she stopped.
Although she told me she wouldn’t.
She broke her word.
For me.
She killed Adria.
For me.
One infinite moment where we gaze into each other’s eyes.
The world around us disappears.
My hands wander onto her chest.
The chest that heaves up and down underneath my fingers.
My lips find hers.
Against all rationality.
The moment they meet, my core burns in a longing I have never felt before.
She pulls me close, carefully, even softly, and yet, demanding.
Our tongues explore each other.
Even this close, we are not close enough.
I want to become one with her.
Dissolve in this feeling.
The feeling of becoming nobody in a world where I have to be everybody.
There is no past.
No future.
Just the present.
Her touch.
Her lips.