Chapter 3
ANNETTA
My hands drop to my lap.
The words catch in my throat as I say them aloud for the first time.
“She’s dead.”
Dom swerves violently, swinging the car toward a copse of trees. I squeeze my eyes shut.
“That’s not fucking funny,” he says.
I open my eyes. We’re in our lane again.
Did I imagine that?
The muscles in his jaw shift under his thick beard as he works to unclench his teeth.
“Car crash.” My voice is hoarse. I don’t miss the irony as I add, “Three days ago. Hit-and-run.”
I’m already fading, my consciousness falling away from me like sand between my fingers. There’s nothing I can do to stop it, and I don’t want to. I don’t want to feel anything. Better this fog than that pointless rage. I clasp my hands on my lap, the meat of my palms aching from how hard I hit Dom.
“Who knows?” he grits out.
“Mom and Dad. My brothers. Aldo and Junior.”
He strangles the steering wheel. “Aldo knew, and he still took you to Turi’s?”
“Yes.”
A few hours ago, I felt the same sense of injustice.
Now, I just feel like a hollowed-out eggshell.
I’ve barely eaten in the past few days, and all that exertion sapped away the little energy I had.
A headache throbs against my temples. I press my cheek against the cool glass of the car window and my eyelids flutter closed.
Dom’s voice drifts to me like a dream. “I thought you were… never mind.”
I must’ve dozed off because when I open my eyes again, night has fallen.
The outdoor lights illuminate my parents’ walkway, casting long pockets of black shadows in Serafina’s Amsonia.
Dom kills the engine, and we both sit in silence—well, almost silence.
At some point, he turned the radio on to a low volume.
Now it’s just us sitting together and a woman singing let go, let go, let go.
I should be worried about Dad being stuck in that house with the rest of those men, and I am, but it’s distant. I can’t touch it behind the glass.
For the second time today, Dom startles me as he opens my car door. He gives me a pitying smile. “Come on, fiorellina.”
His nickname for Serafina. Little flower.
I swallow around the lump in my throat, and the secret I’ve been guarding deep inside my heart like a live coal, letting it burn me over and over again, spews out. “It’s my fault.”
I didn’t think—I just ran, but why, why did I come back home? I could’ve gone anywhere in the world, taken my curse with me, corrupted a town of strangers, and not my family. Not my sister.
Instead, I was too stupid and scared. I left in a blind panic, looking only behind me, without considering the future consequences. They came anyway, just not to me—to Serafina, when she was mistakenly murdered in my place.
My headache hammers every thought into my brain, driving them into place.
Selfish.
Foolish.
Useless.
The grief swells inside me, pressing against the underside of my skin until it breaks, and I bury my head in my hands with a sob.
I barely notice Dom unbuckling me as I hide my face and my shame from him.
“It’s not your fault,” he declares, like he could say anything less to a grieving woman.
I sob harder.
He’s wrong. It is my fault, and I don’t even have the decency to weep for the loss of the bright, innocent soul that was my sister. I grieve for myself, for the guilt that coats me like a layer of black tar.
Only my parents know. They blame me. And they’re right to.
I curl up in a ball and sob in the passenger seat for a long time while Dom, one of the few good men I know, bears witness to the lowest point in my life.
Never have I been so ugly and worthless.
After a long time, I’m spent again. I crumple against myself like a used tissue paper. Even grief has its limits.
“Serafina?”
Something halfway between a laugh and a sob bubbles out of me. Every single time I hear her name directed at me, it’s a knife to the chest. It’s the least I deserve.
Dom takes my boneless hand in his. I rotate my limbs to the right and tumble out of the car, expecting to fall onto the concrete, but he catches me with an effortless athletic grace. Everything’s so easy for him.
I don’t allow myself the chance to enjoy the sensation of being carried in his arms. I lie in his grasp with all the emotion of a wooden log and close my eyes against the sight of his handsome face. I don’t deserve this.
“What happened?” Mom asks with a slurred edge.
“She’s okay. Barbara’s still at the house.”
Mom scrapes her shoe against the marble before my hand is clutched in hers and I’m buried in a cloud of Pinot Grigio. She squeezes me, but she doesn’t ask any painful questions. That’s not how our relationship works.
Dom carries me upstairs with steady, sure-footed steps to Serafina’s room. Even in private, I must pretend to be her.
For your safety, Mom had said, but her eyes were hard and condemning.
I might’ve lost my sister, but Mom lost her favorite daughter.
Dom brushes aside the canopy to lay me on Serafina’s bed and steps back to let Mom take off my shoes. The mattress envelops me like tepid bathwater. I wish they’d let the canopy fall into place and let me sleep for a hundred years.
“I’ll bring you some broth,” Mom says.
A weight tips the mattress, and I open my eyes, turning toward Dom. He’s kneeling on the floor with his arms on the edge of the bed like he’s about to pray.
There’s no one up there to listen, I want to tell him. I tried.
My prayers, my reaching for the smallest scrap of my sister’s… what? Her soul? Her consciousness? My clawing against the void for the most minute assurance she’s somewhere peaceful was met with a resounding, yawning nothingness.
Dom covers my hand with his. A week ago, his hand on mine and his massive body kneeling at my bed would’ve shot pleasure into my veins, but right now, it makes me nauseous.
His dark eyebrows pulled up in the center and the soft line of his lips forming a pitying expression doesn’t suit him at all, but the dried blood on his neck, strangely, does.
“It’s going to be okay,” he says in a low rumble as his thumb strokes against mine. Shame and desire spiral through my body.
I turn to hide the way he’s affecting me, but even that’s a lie I tell myself, because I leave my hand tucked under his. I can’t admit how badly I want him here, sitting at my bedside, tending to me, stoking my stupid little crush on the older man who’s always been like a part of my family.
“You won’t have to marry Aldo,” he says.
Too tired to lift my head, I roll my face back toward him and wait.
The rough pad of his thumb scratches lightly against my knuckle as he strokes my hand in long movements. A vicious flash of jealousy toward my sister shocks me.
Did he touch her like this?
It doesn’t matter.
It doesn’t matter. I don’t get to be jealous of a dead girl.
“Turi’s going to take care of him.”
I want to smile, but the connection between my brain and muscles is so weak that my face doesn’t even twitch. Dom is na?ve for a man in his late thirties.
What does it matter if Aldo dies? I’ll just be married to Junior or any one of my dad’s associates. My parents didn’t send us to ballet and pilates and piano classes, pay for our nose jobs, and fly us out to Venice and Florence and Tuscany in the summers so we could be single.
Dom may promise me the world now, but he’ll fade away from my life again like he’s done for the past three years. His loyalty isn’t to me—it’s to Dad, to the Family.
“Did you really mean what you said?” It surprises me to hear my own voice, raspy from my screaming.
“Mean what?”
Even though I know better, part of me wants to believe the lie he’ll tell me, to give myself one thing in my life I can hold on to. “That you’d protect me?”
He fixes me with a focused stare, the dark brown of his eyes glowing from the light of the bedside lamp. “With my last breath.”
I exhale and turn to stare at the ceiling.
I can tell by the staggered steps on the carpet that Mom’s returned. She takes Dom’s place at the edge of the bed, and he walks away.
“You have to drink something,” she says.
As she pushes me into a sitting position, I catch Carlo just outside my door.
I haven’t seen him since I returned home, but the record of his grieving is written all over his face.
His tired, bloodshot eyes meet mine for a moment before he turns his gaze to Dom.
My lanky, tattooed, leather-jacketed older brother looks like a child in a Halloween costume next to the other man. They measure each other for a moment.
Dom takes one step forward and wraps him in a bear hug, and my devil-may-care brother, who I haven’t seen cry since he was a little boy, hugs Dom back and sobs.
I wake up in the darkness, my heart pounding.
The gauzy canopy surrounding me reminds me where I am, why I’m here, and not in my bedroom in Tampa.
Why Serafina is in the ground at Graceland Cemetery and not in her bed.
I clutch the blankets at my neck. The house is completely silent. No—I can hear noise downstairs.
Is Dad back? A split in the canopy shows the softly glowing display of the wall clock reading almost three in the morning.
Something’s buzzing in the room. I squeeze my eyes shut, fear wrapping around me like a python.
The noise stops.
I relax into my mattress a little. Then it starts again, and I recognize it. I want to let it die, like a wasp under a glass cup, but the moment the buzzing stops, it starts back up again.
It’s a monstrous effort to move my body, shift it until I’ve rolled off my sister’s bed, even to look in the direction of the sound.
Too exhausted to stand, I slide against the nearest wall until I can open the top drawer of Serafina’s vanity. My phone was destroyed days ago. It’s Serafina’s phone I find inside.
Unknown number.
I slide my thumb across the screen and press the cool piece of glass against my ear.
At first, silence.
A woman exhales on the other side.
I swallow. “Hello?”
“I know what you did.”
The caller hangs up.
The phone falls from my hand.