Chapter 11 – POSY #6
Frankie doesn’t answer. He grunts as he keeps trying to pull himself away, even though it’s hopeless.
I can’t help the pity. We were good together once.
It’s a blur now, but there were nights at the club, the customary flowers and sweet talk before he figured out how genuinely easy I was.
How he could use his hands, and I’d cry and sulk, but I wouldn’t go anywhere.
“Posy.” Dario’s voice is gentle. It flows across the space. “Where did he hit you?”
My brain can’t make sense of the question.
“At his apartment?”
“In the face? Ribs?”
How can he be asking me this now? That’s a locked box. I got out of it, and I never looked back. Unlike this moment that stretches on and on.
“Posy?”
“My stomach.” If he was sober, he didn’t like to mess up my face.
Dario prods the gun into Frankie’s belly, and he shoots. Just like that. A muffled pop. Frankie screams, clutching his guts. The blubbery shrieks fill the spaces between the silent men.
This has to be the end. It can’t keep going.
“You fucking madman,” Frankie spits.
“Where else?” Dario demands, his eyes glowing. He doesn’t sound cold and detached now. He’s—aroused.
“Where else?” he repeats, and so help me, I’m scared.
“He slapped me.”
Dario whips his gun against Frankie’s face, slamming his head into the floor.
“What else, Posy?” Dario’s gathered Frankie by the collar, holding him up. He’s still alive, still whimpering, but he’s fading. “Posy!” The order rings out.
“He p-punched me when he got drunk.”
“In the face?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s how you got that black eye?”
He remembers? It was so long ago. We didn’t speak back then.
“Yeah.”
I want to look away. I want to crawl inside myself and shut my eyes tight until it’s over. But I don’t.
I watch while Dario digs the muzzle of his gun into the soft skin under Dario’s left eye.
“I’m sorry,” Frankie cries, his gaze searching me out for the first time. “I’m sorry. Make him stop. P-please, Posy.”
“I can’t.” I don’t control Dario Volpe. No one does.
“I’m sorry, goddamn it,” Frankie says.
“Did he say that before? After he hit you?” Dario asks like he’s asking for the time.
I don’t even think before I answer. “No.” He pretended it never happened, and I did, too.
Dario squeezes the trigger, and the left side of Frankie’s head explodes, chunks of skull and brain flying into the air and then raining onto the concrete with moist splats.
I shove a fist into my mouth to stifle the scream, my teeth biting into my knuckles, and all around me, men loom, still and silent, stinking of fear and blood and gunfire.
There’s so much blood. Dark pools. Bodies frozen, arms and legs akimbo, lax and unmoving. I huddle into myself, eyes bugging, swallowing against the puke in my throat.
There are seven dead bodies I can see, and how much time has passed? Two minutes? Three?
I mash my lips against the moan I can’t stop from climbing up my throat. It’s a massacre.
Above me, Dario has come to his feet. Lucca approaches him and slaps him on the back.
“Capo,” Dario says to him with a slight bow, lips curved.
“Consigliere,” Lucca replies.
Nicky and Tomas have risen, too, and there’s a general shuffling and murmuring as the men left alive survey the scene, scrubbing at their necks, glancing warily at the two men in the middle of the ring of blood and bodies.
I can’t move. I’m nothing but a ball of horror, rocking, willing myself to disappear, to turn off like a machine.
“Come on, Posy.” Dario strides over, grabs me, and hoists me to my feet. When I pitch forward, he winds an arm around my middle, pinning me to his side. “You’re fine.”
He bends over and nestles his nose in my hair, inhaling, and then he brushes his temple against mine. For some reason, this seems to relax him.
“Did anyone touch you?” he asks as he urges me to step forward, through a rivulet of blood, toward the hall that leads outside.
My brain is numb. I can’t even make words.
“Joey grabbed her pussy,” Nicky pipes up from behind.
Dario drops a kiss on my forehead, and then he casually turns, aims his gun, and squeezes off a round into Joey’s throat. Joey had been helping drag a body into a pile, and he kind of pitches forward and lands in the heap with a heavy thump.
And I finally run.
I sprint down the corridor, out the door, between the cars, through the glass strewn, weed eaten parking lot, arms pumping. I scramble over the fence where it sags almost parallel to the ground, the barb wire biting at my legs. If there’s shouting, I can’t hear over the blood roaring in my ears.
I race through the field, tall grass whipping against my skin, and I stumble, but my forward motion propels me on, and my lungs scream, and my thighs burn, but I can’t stop.
And then, when I’m almost to the river, I can’t go on anymore. The stitch in my side is becoming a cramp, and I’m jogging, and then I’m only stumbling and trying to suck down air.
I have to keep going. I can’t stop. If I stop, it’ll all catch up to me.
I’m too beat to even react when I realize I’m not alone.
Dario is right behind me. He lopes forward, grabs me, lifts me off my feet.
I flail, my hand connecting with his iron jaw, my foot nailing his shin.
He hisses, tightening his arms, and I fight harder with everything I have.
My skull glances off his, and my nose prickles with the impact. My ears ring.
Mindless panic beats in my veins like a drum. I scream, “Let me go.”
And he kind of throws me from him, not violently. Almost—carefully.
He raises his hands in surrender.
“Okay. Okay.” He’s panting, but nowhere near as winded as I am. He rolls his shoulders and catches his breath, cracking his neck and pacing like he’s having a nice post-workout stretch. He eyes me warily.
Somehow, I landed on my feet. My gaze darts wildly from the field to the river to the overpass in the distance. I’m cornered.
“Don’t jump in the fucking river, Posy. It’s disgusting. We’ll catch tetanus.”
You can’t catch tetanus from swimming. I don’t think. I wheeze, lungs burning. I can’t go any further.
We stand a little while as I suck down air. He hovers a few feet away. Not too close, but close enough.
“Can we go back now?” he finally asks.
“No.” It’s all I can manage. I’m leaning over, bracing myself on my thighs. Sweat trickles in my eyes.
“All right.” He checks his watch. “We probably have a few more minutes until the bodies are handled.”
My stomach lurches at the reminder. I glance up. He shrugs.
“It was—that was—that was a bloodbath .” My voice breaks.
He widens his eyes, as if encouraging me to go ahead and make my point. A hysterical giggle flies from my lips. He’s utterly unaffected by what just happened. By what he did .
“So Lucca’s capo now? And you’re his consigliere?”
Dario nods.
“And everyone’s fine with that?”
He shrugs. “Or dead, yeah.”
“This was a setup. You knew.”
“The broad strokes,” he allows. “Not the specifics.”
“You used me as bait.”
“You were already marked. I killed two birds with one stone.”
“Two?”
He actually smirks. “Maybe more than two.”
“I could have been killed.”
“I had Tomas covering your front and Nicky on your back.”
“It was a goddamn pinball machine of gunfire in there, Dario.”
He scrubs the back of his neck, exasperated. “It was the only way. You can’t run forever. You can’t hide. No one can hurt you now.” His lips curve, a look of satisfaction crossing his dark angel’s face.
“And you feel nothing? Another day at the office?” I can hear the hysteria creeping into my voice.
“Oh, no, Posy. This is a good day.” He grins. An actual, honest to God grin. “I’ve waited a long time to kill Frankie Bianco.”
“Because he sent that video.” Of course. Psychopath that he is, Dario still has his pride.
“Because of the video,” Dario concurs. “And because he’s fucked you. And he slapped you around.”
“You knew about that?” He never mentioned it. Not once.
He rolls his eyes. “You were always ‘running into doors’ and shit when you dated that asshole. Everyone knew he was using you as a punching bag.”
My face flames and a sour taste fills my mouth.
Dario isn’t the only one with pride. I tell myself it was no big deal.
I got out. That’s what counts. I can’t look too closely at why I stayed so long.
I push it all back into a cobwebby corner of my memory.
If revenge helps, I have it now. Dario gave it to me.
What was it he said after he cut out Ivano’s tongue? I do it for you, Posy. You belong to me. You’re a very dangerous woman now.
Chills race down my spine.
“You noticed me back then?” I thought I wasn’t on his radar until I came onto him in the club.
“I’ve always noticed you.”
“Why didn’t you talk to me?”
He raises an eyebrow. Fair enough. I did all the heavy lifting when we first got together. He doesn’t exactly have game.
“But you noticed me.” Even after everything that happened today, I can’t stretch my brain to wrap around the idea.
“You’re the person,” he says like it’s an explanation.
“What do you mean?”
He scans the river, and when he speaks, he’s as casual as if he’s talking about the weather. “You know the difference between a psychopath and a sociopath?”
“I have no idea.”
“People talk about levels of aggression, mimicry, those sorts of things. But if you read about it, ultimately, it comes down to whether you can care about another person. Until I met you, I was a psychopath. And then I was a sociopath.”
“That’s better?”
He laughs. “I think it’s more a distinction without a difference.”
“So you care about me?”
“I’d die for you. Kill for you.”
“You love me?”
“I don’t know what that is.”
“It’s like floating.” That’s how it was with him at the beginning. Everything was perfect. Magical. Right .
“Then, no, I don’t love you.”
My heart, still thumping double time from my mad dash through the overgrown lot, crunches in my chest. Why? I’m not floating anymore. I haven’t since the day he made me watch the video in his office.
My head’s not in the clouds. Blood is soaked into my canvas shoes. I’m complicit. I’m Dario Volpe’s willing whore.
And what do I care if he can’t love me? I’ve been in love a dozen times. This is deeper than that. I feel closer to him than any person alive. He trickles through my veins. He’s seeped into my bones.
He stands there, wary of me, hovering—close but not too close—because I’m the center of his world. He’s proved that. I know it like I know my name.
He belongs to me. His ugliness. His twisted brain. His heartlessness, and his savagery. It’s all mine. It’s not love, either, but it’s what I feel.
Dario’s waiting, expectant. What for?
“Sometimes, I guess, love is more like the person is yours,” I say. “No matter if they feel the same way or not. They belong to you. And that’s that.”
Dario inhales and nods in recognition. “Then I love you, Posy. Does that make you happy?”
The question is genuine. Almost vulnerable.
I open my mouth to deny it, but the words won’t come. So I take a step forward, closing the distance between us. I stare up at his bearded jaw, his sharp cheekbones. His perfect face. There’s doubt there. A dark longing that if you squint and tilt your head just so—looks like hope.
I slip my small hand into his much larger, colder one.
“I’ll never break your heart again,” he vows. “You can trust me. It can be like it was before.”
I squeeze his hand. “I don’t think so, Dario.”
“Then it can be different. It can be anything you want.”
“Because I’m your one person.” I can’t help but say it again. It melts in my mouth and surges into my bloodstream, a hit, a rush, a miracle.
I’m sure it’s wrong to want a love like this, but I am greedy to my soul, and I’m going to take it and never, never let it go.
Dario tightens his grip on my hand and draws me back toward the factory. I follow, and I guess I was wrong, because my feet don’t quite touch the ground.
“I belong to you?” I ask as we trek back through the tall grass that we trampled flat.
“Yes.”
He rushes me, and I have to trot to keep up. He picks me up in his arms like a bride to get back over the collapsed fence that cut my calf.
Dario’s face is impassive again, his mouth turned down.
“And you belong to me?” I press, gazing up, letting him carry me to one of the idling cars.
“Yes.” It’s clear his mind is on something else—the murder scene we fled, no doubt—but there’s no impatience in his tone.
“And you would kill for me? And die for me?”
“Yes.” He drops me to my feet without warning so he can open the car door for me. The impact jolts me back into reality a little.
“And I’m supposed to trust you?”
He guides me into the back seat, reaching across my chest to buckle me in. His forearm grazes my breasts, and heat springs to life in my belly.
He shrugs and taps the back of the driver’s headrest. It’s Nicky.
“Yeah, boss,” he says.
“Home,” Dario orders.
We pull away, and Dario unbuttons his dress shirt. I’m vaguely aware that my teeth are chattering, and my hands are fluttering as if I’ve been electrocuted. Dario prods me until I let him thread my arms through the sleeves.
“You’re in shock,” he says.
“I’m in shock?” I repeat.
“Yes. And yes, you’re supposed to trust me. And yes to all the other questions.” He leans over, nestles his nose behind my ears, and draws in a jagged breath. “For you, always yes.”
“Always?”
“Yes,” he exhales, gently cupping my neck and pressing his lips to mine, softly, as if I’m the only woman in the world for him, and all his words are true.