40
She was telling the truth. Sal had been visiting my mom when she had been murdered. I had stayed home to keep on top of business and to take the pressure off of Aunt Rosa. She hated running things when Sal wasn’t around. Sal was the one who had found my moms body lying in a pool of blood by the front gate of my stepfather’s property. He had called me before anyone else, and he sent me a video of what he had found. The images still haunted me, her body barely recognisable, swollen, bruised and sliced apart. He asked me what I wanted to do. I told him I wanted to hunt down the pezzo di merda who had done it, but that wasn’t what he had meant, he wanted to know what I wanted to do with her body.
I’d had no idea what to do, too stunned and full of anger to think, so I left it up to him to decide. Uncle Sal, ex leader of The Brotherhood, was the smartest man I knew. I trusted him with anything. He didn’t think anyone should know the truth about it, he said he wanted people to remember her for how she lived, not how she died. I agreed.
So we hid it all, Sal took her body and made sure no one would ever find it. He hadn’t told me how, and I hadn’t needed, or wanted to know. He told Lorenzo that he had found Selene out by the front gate with a bullet hole in her head, and that he had gone hunting for the person responsible. When he had arrived back, a failure, her body was gone. Sal destroyed the camera footage from the front gate and blamed it on ‘stupid unreliable technology’. Lorenzo hadn’t questioned it; he had just updated his security system and hired a guard for the gate.
Lorenzo had played along, and we’d had no idea. He hadn’t been fooled by any of it, because he was the one responsible. He had vowed to Sal that they would find the person who had taken my mother from this world, and it had all been a lie. We had done him a fucking favour. Covered up his crime and given him an easy opportunity to pin it on whoever he wanted.
Bile rose in my throat, and I swallowed hard as the truth of his betrayal hit me.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I pushed my hands into my hair and pulled, squeezing my eyes closed, praying that when I opened them, I’d have made it all up. That Mallory wouldn’t be sitting on top of me, that I’d have not attacked the son of an innocent man, that my stepfather hadn’t been the one who had taken away the only person I had ever cared about.
When I opened my eyes they landed on her, but she wasn’t looking at me. All colour had drained from her face. Her eyes were wide, her mouth hanging open, and I watched as her heart shattered into a million pieces.
She pushed off of me and flew across the room, a distressed scream falling from her lips. “Toby!”
I sat up, hissing at the pain in my shoulder, and watched her. She fell onto him, tears streaming down her face, blood soaking her hands as she pushed down onto his stomach. His skin was pale and sweaty, his breathing ragged, his eyes glassy. My knife sat between us on the floor. The fucking idiot must have pulled it out.
Without thinking, I rushed to her side, ripped off my shirt and shoved her out of the way. I packed the wound as best I could and yelled at her to call an ambulance.
“What have you done?” she whispered shakily as she stared from her blood-soaked hands to me.
“Ambulance, cara. Now.”
To be continued….