Chapter 46
I foughtmy way out of the darkness slowly. Someone was praying over me, and I followed along in my mind, more out of habit than anything. When I blinked my eyes open, Mamma was standing over me, rosary beads in hand.
“Mamma?” Fuck, my body hurt. Maybe I was dead.
She crossed herself. “Grazie a Dio. Rocco!” She kissed all over my face, like I was a tiny boy again. “I’ve been so worried. They said you would wake, but then nothing. You just sleep on and on and on. Let me get the nurse.” She pressed the button on the wall, still thanking God.
A nurse appeared with a smile. “Good to see you awake, Mr. Passero.”
I was in a hospital room—that was obvious—and it was filled with flowers. But no Tally. “Mamma, where’s Tally?”
Mamma frowned. “Who?”
I tried to sit up, and pain raced up and down my body like a whip. “Tally, Mamma. My wife. Where’s my wife?”
It was coming back to me now, like a horror sequence in an action film.
The train.
Her screams.
The roof of the car crumpling in on me.
The nurse pursed her lips in my mother’s direction. “Easy, Mr. Passero. Your wife has just gone home to shower and sleep. She’ll be back soon. She hasn’t left your bedside.”
“She’s okay?”
The nurse smiled. “She’s okay. Banged up, but miraculously uninjured. The other gentleman, Hayes…” She flushed pink. Clearly, Hayes was pretty handsome in that All-American kind of way. “He has a fractured leg and more than a few busted ribs, but he’s also okay. Your wife tells me he’s at home recuperating.”
“Yes, your wife’s other boyfriends are all fine, Tesoro Mio.”
Is it too late to pretend to be in a coma again?
I sighed. “Not now, Mamma.”
Rafa came into the room, pulling up in surprise when he saw me with my eyes open. “About time you woke up from your nap, brother.” He strode over and kissed both of my cheeks. “You scared the shit out of all of us there.”
Sucking in a shaky breath, I just wanted to hold Tally, but it was probably best to get this all out of the way before she came back. “What happened?” I looked down at my body, at my broken hands and my leg in a cast.
It was Rafa who answered. “You got the brunt of the train. You’d taken your seatbelt off, which was probably what saved you, but your big head was what broke Hayes’s ribs. It was also lucky that the airbags had already deployed, because it cushioned you all a little. You broke your left hand and wrist, and your right leg. They said it was lucky that you have such great neck muscles, or you would have snapped your neck. You did have some swelling on the brain, and they put you under to allow it time to heal.” He shook his head. “How you all got out of there alive is nothing short of a miracle.”
Mamma sent up a prayer of thanks again.
“We were waiting. We got rear-ended onto the tracks.” It was hazy. So fucking hazy.
Rafa nodded. “The cops have come by a couple of times, and now that you’re awake, they’re going to want to talk to you. Tally was awake for nearly all of it, so she filled them in on most of the accident. You’ll just have to corroborate.”
“It was an accident?”
His jaw tightened. “They aren’t treating it as such.”
I blinked at him. Maybe my brain was still sluggish. “Are you saying someone tried to kill us?”
He shrugged. “The police are treating it as a malicious event. From what Tally says, the eye witnesses said there was a truck that rear-ended a car three vehicles behind you. They said it didn’t even try to slow or stop. If anything, it sped up. It injured the people in the two cars behind you too, but not quite as badly as you guys.”
I was being dragged back down into the darkness again, and the more I struggled, the harder it was to stay awake.
“Sleep, Rocco. Heal,” Mamma murmured, and just like when I was a baby, her voice sent me off to sleep again.
The next time I woke, it was to raised voices.
“No offense, Mrs. Passero, but I’m sitting beside my husband. Why don’t you go back to the hotel and rest?”
Mamma made a rude noise. “What, so you can finish the job? Kill him for his money? American women…. I’ve seen the late-night shows.”
A sigh reverberated around the room. “Mamma, please. There’s a difference between murder documentaries and real life. Come back to the hotel with me so we can rest.” Rafa sounded exhausted.
I blinked my eyes open to see Tally, her face battered and bruised, standing toe-to-toe with my mother. Actually, Mamma was a full four inches shorter than Tally, but she made up for it in… personality.
“Tally,” I mumbled, and every face in the room snapped toward me.
Tally dodged my mother and was at my bedside in an instant. “Rocco.” She leaned forward and kissed me softly. “I was so fucking worried,” she swore softly, probably so my mother couldn’t hear. “Your mom scares the shit out of me.”
I chuckled, because if I was honest, Mamma scared the shit out of me too. “You’re really okay? Hayes?”
She nodded, her eyes wet with tears. “We’re all fine.”
I tried to lift my hand to cup her cheek, but winced. That’s when I remembered how fucked I was. “But not perfect?”
This time, she did cry. She laid her head on my chest and just wept.
“Stellina, my love, don’t cry. It’ll be okay. I’ll heal.”
Rafa, who was a sucker for women’s tears too—maybe it was hereditary—rubbed her back while Mamma huffed. “He’ll be fine. We got the best surgeon in to repair his hands and wrist. His leg is pinned, and with a little rehab, it’ll be fine too.”
Well, that’s good to know. I breathed a sigh of relief that my career wasn’t over, though when I’d woken up and Tally hadn’t been in the room, my career had been the last thing on my mind.
She shook her head, not lifting her face from my chest. “You don’t understand. It’s my fault.”
I looked up at Rafa, who shrugged. “What do you mean, Tally?”
She met my gaze, guilt sitting in heavy, dark circles under her eyes. “The cops, they said that the truck had been stolen earlier in the day from around our area. That the truck followed down the motorway behind us. That it had rammed us onto the train tracks, in front of a train, on purpose.”
My mind whirled about what she was saying. Was it a deranged stalker? An angry fan? A jilted ex? Who would do such a thing?
And even as I thought it, as I took in Tally’s devastated face, I knew. “No. He wouldn’t.”
I didn’t know the man, not like Tally and Hayes did, but I knew his reputation. He was a shark, and he liked to color a little outside of the lines, but to resort to murder? Unlikely.
She was nodding, as she pulled back to stand up. “The detectives are fairly certain he did. The detective told me he believed Brick Willtot hired some kid, promised him a seat in NASCAR and more money than this kid had ever seen, and told him all he’d have to do was ram us into a wall, or off a bridge, or into traffic or something. An accident—that’s what he wanted. The kid ad-libbed a little when he saw the train, and panicked, rear-ending a car at the back, causing a chain reaction that led to us on the tracks.”
She swallowed hard. “That’s what the kid told the police after they picked him up. Brick is categorically denying ever meeting the guy, or knowing him at all.”
I shook my head, feeling like I’d woken up in the twilight zone. My brain was sluggish, and my heart was thundering so fast, it felt like it would fly right out of my chest. She was backing away now, back toward the door.
“Stellina, come back here,” I ordered, as my chest got tight. But she continued backwards.
She shook her head. “No. Until Brick is behind bars, I’m going to tell the world that we’re getting a divorce. He won’t have a reason to come after you then.” She licked her lips. “I’m going to take Bobbi-June away for a little while, until the cops figure everything out.”
“Tally, no.”
“Not forever, I promise. We aren’t really breaking up. I love you.” She choked out the words on a sob. “But you almost died, Rocco. You almost died because of me, Hayes almost died because of me, and this time, Brick would be right—it would be all my fault.” She let out a pained gasp. “As soon as the detectives tell me they have enough to arrest him, I’ll come back, I promise.”
She ducked out of the room, and I threw a helpless look at Rafa. “Go after her. Talk some sense into her or something!”
My brother gave me a curt nod and disappeared into the hallway behind my wife. She wouldn’t be my ex-wife ever.
“Maybe this is for the best, Tesoro Mio.”
I growled in my mother’s direction. “She’s the love of my life, Mamma. Learn to live with it or go home.” I closed my eyes, like I could block out the pain that had nothing to do with my damaged body. “I’m tired. I’m going to sleep.”
I closed my eyes, but Tally leaving just played over and over in my mind.