Chapter 28
Madelene
I keep catching him glancing at me. I can tell that he wants to have a conversation with me, but I don’t know if he’s avoiding it because he knows I’ll ask as many questions as he will or if he doesn’t really want to know the truth.
The silence over the last fifteen hours has been familiar, but also excruciating.
When I was at the Severino compound, I didn’t speak much.
I tried my best to never draw attention to myself.
With Hollis, he seemed to like the quiet.
I’m certain the noise of the television is what made him spend so much time out on the back porch.
He also needed to get away from me since I wouldn’t leave.
I shake my head, staring at a spot on the wall.
I refuse to think of the man. He didn’t try to stop me when I left with Elio.
He hasn’t barged into this motel room and demanded that I leave with him.
Whatever connection I imagined us having was clearly one-sided.
He’s probably ecstatic to see me gone. He can go back to his normal life now.
“Is this how it’s going to be?” I ask, speaking for the first time since Elio offered me dinner last night.
His eyes are slow to turn in my direction, as if he’s enthralled by the television show despite the thing being muted.
He has had no problem just existing in the same space as me since bringing me here yesterday.
Despite me feeling like he has a million things to say, he’s remained aggravatingly silent.
“What’s your plan?” I ask, pretty certain he’ll never answer me.
He insisted that I come along with him, but now he seems as regretful of it as Hollis did after getting me back to that tiny house of his.
He blinks in my direction, as if he can’t believe I’m here, as if I’m the ghost and not him.
“I don’t know,” he finally says. “But whatever it was it’s all fucked up now.”
Elio was always the planner. He’s the one that was able to get Marcello to stop and think every once in a while.
Elio was the voice of reason, and sometimes it got him into trouble with the Severino boys.
They wanted to be wild and crazy. They wanted to have their fun without thinking of the consequences.
Even with their age difference, Alessio fed his little brother’s need for chaos, and reprimanded Elio often for ruining the fun when he’d speak up about the trouble what they were doing would bring.
“What do you know about me?”
“Everything,” he says without hesitation.
This information destroys me, and I have no hope of holding back the tears burning my eyes.
They tumble down my cheeks. No matter how many times I swipe at them, they refuse to stop flowing.
I never felt a sense of betrayal where the Severinos were concerned.
They owed me no loyalty, but the man sitting across from me vowed to keep me safe.
He was the one to chase the monsters from the shadows in my room at night.
He was the one to sneak around the corner first when we wanted a snack after being refused at bedtime.
He was always the one willing to put himself in the line of danger if it meant I would be spared.
I had so many questions. I had figured he had a good reason for being gone. Maybe his absence somehow ensured I was mostly safe. Alessio hasn’t killed me after all. He hasn’t raped me. His confession makes none of it matter.
“Everything?” I repeat, turning the word over and over in my head, really letting it sink inside of me.
I don’t understand the way he’s looking at me. I could be anyone to him right now. I could be a cashier at the store, or the bus driver getting him across town. I’m inconsequential.
“You did nothing,” I whisper, my head shaking as if I still can’t believe he’s sitting on the other bed a mere five feet from me. “The man I knew wouldn’t let me suffer that way.”
He’s calm, eerily so, as he watches my face.
“I haven’t been that man in a very long time,” he says, his voice flat, as if he’s void of emotion completely. “I wasn’t that man long before my car went over the bridge.”
I knew he’d changed. I knew passing the test to become part of the Severino family cost him a lot. I never thought he’d turn against everyone to save himself.
“Do you have any idea what you’ve done? The heartache you caused? The pain we’ve all been through?” I sob, once again trying to clear my face of tears with the backs of my hands. “Dad is going to be so disappointed in you!”
“Your father is dead.”
I freeze, blinking at him.
“He was taken and tortured three days after you were taken.” He doesn’t pull his eyes from mine, doesn’t seem to care what he’s just told me, before continuing. “While you were hiding out with your boyfriend, your father was dying. The cops found him floating in Lake Michigan a week ago.”
I know he isn’t lying. He isn’t trying to upset me or scare me. There’s nothing but truth in his words, each one of them a strike at me. It reeks of blame and accusation without somehow having any fire behind it at all.
I always wondered how I would feel with my father’s passing.
I knew it could never affect me the way my mother’s death did, but he was more a figurehead to the family rather than someone present in our lives.
He was devoted to family, but the wrong one.
He lived his life to impress Lucian, and I imagine he died still thinking he had a chance to get in the other man’s good graces.
Pain strikes me, but not in the way I think it would a normal person.
I’ve endured so much for the sake of loyalty.
I was mentally, physically, and sexually abused for almost the past four years in an effort to postpone my father’s death because dedication to blood is paramount for us, only for it to be futile.
For some reason, my tears begin to dry, a sense of relief washing over me. They no longer have anything to hold against me. I’m not sure that the threat to my father’s life, after spending time with Hollis, would’ve been enough to pull me back in, but now I don’t have to worry about it.
All of my pain is because of my father. My mother has some blame in all of this as well, but I don’t want to think about what her involvement means any longer.
None of it matters. The darkness and pain I endured are over.
I just want to be free. I don’t want the money. Alessio can have all of it. Elio can return as head of the family and take it. Where it ends up, I don’t care.
“You don’t seem upset,” I say, wondering if he’s masking his grief, seriously doesn’t give a shit, or if he’s just had longer to come to terms with our father’s death.
“I’m not,” he says, his voice just as calm and flat as it was when he gave me the news.
His phone buzzes on the bedside table. He frowns after picking it up and reading whatever message is on there.
I glare at him when he stands.
“Are we not going to talk about why you faked your own death?”
“No,” he says, tucking his phone into the front pocket of his jeans. “Elio Lombardi is dead.”
“Please,” I beg, wanting to go back ten years and change the course of everyone’s lives. Hell, if I could roll back time, I’d go back even further and somehow stop Alessio from hurting Ellie because it led Hollis down a path that will only get him killed.
He pulls his wallet from his back pocket, pulling out a wad of cash and throwing it on the bed I’m sitting on. “The room is paid up for the week. If you don’t hear from me in three days, I’m dead.”
Without another word or even gathering up his things from the room, he walks out.
Stunned, all I can do is stare at the door.