Chapter 35
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Valentino
The door opens behind me.
I don't turn my head. I hear the weight of Enzo's steps, and I hear the two guards by the wall straighten before he says a word.
He walks into my line of sight long enough for me to see the rope in his hands.
Thick as my thumb. Knotted down the length. Old fibers, stiff from use.
Then he passes behind me.
Slow.
He didn't delegate this. A Don with a hundred men in the house, and he brought the rope himself.
I'd respect it if it weren't my back.
"You understand," he says in Italian, "this isn't about whether you were right."
"I understand," I say. "Your son was filth, and the debt stands anyway. We covered this part already."
One of the guards shifts.
Enzo doesn't answer.
Behind me, the rope drags through his hands with a dry rasp.
I decide before he swings.
He doesn't get a sound out of me. Not a grunt. Not a hiss through my teeth. Nothing. He can have my back. He can have my blood. He can take whatever his grief needs from my body.
My voice stays mine.
The first strike cuts from shoulder blade to hip.
Pain comes white and immediate. My jaw locks. My hands grip the arms of the chair until my fingers cramp.
No sound.
I think of my father alive.
Getting out of the car at the end of the day, the way he did every evening when I was a boy. September sun. Dust on his shoes. My mother in the doorway with flour on her hands.
The second strike lands.
I hold his face.
The mustache he refused to shave after everyone told him it made him look old. The tired set of his eyes. The way he'd cuff the back of my head when I mouthed off, then pull me against his side before I could decide if I was in trouble or loved.
The watch on my wrist was on his when they shot him.
My mother cleaned the blood off before she gave it to me. I was twelve. I thought pain had introduced itself properly.
The third strike proves me wrong.
Something tears across my left shoulder. Heat runs down my back toward my belt.
I breathe through my nose.
In.
Out.
Nothing.
Enzo finds his rhythm. He doesn't rush. Each strike gets the full draw, the full force, enough space after it for my body to know what happened before he gives it more.
He knows how to spread the damage.
I go to Bruno.
Bruno in the wheelchair those two years, furious at the chair, the doctors, the stairs, the men who looked at him with pity.
I flew to Chicago and sat beside him anyway because family gets the worst of you and stays.
He cursed at me for breathing too loudly.
I stayed. He threw a glass at the wall once because I asked if he wanted coffee. I made the coffee.
Then he stood again.
He'll be tearing Italy apart by now. Nico too, quieter but worse. My mother will be lighting candles in Chicago. Aria will be pretending she isn't crying.
The thought holds me upright.
The rope hits again.
My vision jumps.
Still no sound.
I go to Chiara.
Not the alley.
The cove.
Sixteen years old, knee-deep in water, yelling at me because I told her the fish were smarter than she was. She threw a shell at my head and missed by a meter. Laughed so hard she had to sit down in the shallows.
Wherever you are, Chiara, I hope there's sun.
Another strike.
My hands go numb.
Enzo's breathing fills the room now. Rougher than before. He is getting tired, or I am running out of places to put the pain.
Maybe both.
So I spend what is left on Amanda.
Amanda in the doorway of the Milan café before any of this, gold and sharp and laughing at me. Amanda dancing to a half-dead radio when she thought no one was watching. Amanda in my shirt. Amanda with blood on her face, screaming at men twice her size because they dared to touch me.
Bella.
The next strike barely reaches me.
Her face does.
Everything else drops away.
Amanda
Francesca's mouth is split at the corner. One eye is deep purple, swollen almost shut.
I still want to hit her.
"You told me to listen," I say. "So talk. Why were you working with Aldo?"
She lifts her chin, and even tied to a chair with dried blood at her hairline, she manages to look like she's deciding whether I deserve the answer.
"Because I wanted to destroy him."
My knees give before I can stop them. I catch the edge of the cot against the wall and sit before I end up on the floor. The shaking comes all at once, like my body waited until now to remember the car, the ropes, Valentino walking away from me.
"Start talking," I tell her. My voice sounds raw from screaming. "And I mean actually talking. If you give me one more polished half-answer, I swear to God, I will slap you."
She smiles. The split in her lip opens again, fresh red at the corner.
"I deserve it."
I keep my hands in my lap and wait.
"I had a sister," she says. "Katya. My mother's first marriage, before Italy. She was eighteen. I was fourteen. She got a contract, a real one. Modeling. The kind of thing everyone in the building celebrates because maybe one girl got lucky enough to get out."
Her throat moves.
"Then she disappeared. No fight. No note. No body. Just gone."
The radiator ticks in the corner.
"I saw her with Aldo once," Francesca says. "Outside the agency. He had his hand on her elbow, and he was making her laugh. I thought he was handsome. I was sixteen, and I didn't understand what I was looking at." Her mouth tightens. "I understand it now."
I don't move.
"I grew up looking for her. Every agency. Every list. Every girl who came back different than she left. I never found a grave. A photograph. Anything."
"So you went to work for the man who took her." The words taste bitter. "That was your revenge? Planning his parties?"
"Getting close to him was the only way in.
" She shifts against the rope and tries to hide the pain.
Badly. "I made myself into the kind of woman that world trusts.
Useful. Elegant. Connected. I learned which girls arrived and which girls left.
I kept records. Names. Dates. Shell companies.
Bank transfers. I wanted the whole thing.
Not just Aldo dead. Exposed. Ruined. Every man who paid him dragged into the light with him. "
"You could've killed him."
"I had chances."
Her gaze drops to the floor.
For the first time, she looks less like Francesca Renaud and more like the girl who lost her sister and never stopped hurting.
"Three times," she says. "I was close enough.
Alone with him. No guards. No witnesses.
I couldn't do it." She breathes out, rough at the edges.
"You can hate a man with everything in you and still not be built to kill him.
I told myself I was waiting for the right moment.
The truth is, all I ever really did was collect evidence and call it courage. "
I stare at her, trying to reconcile the woman in front of me with everything I thought I knew.
"The office," I say. "The night of the gala. You came and got me."
"He told me to." Her jaw tightens. "Someone told him you'd been asking questions at the shoot. The bruised girl. He wanted you brought to him."
"So you brought me."
"I thought it was a warning." She looks at me now, and the truth on her face is worse than a lie would be.
"That is what he did before. He charmed someone.
Frightened them. Made sure they stopped looking.
I thought you would walk out angry and careful.
I didn't know about the drink until you were already swaying. "
"You left me there."
"I went to find Valentino."
That stops me.
The radiator ticks twice before I can speak.
"He asked you where I was. At the bar. You flirted with him and walked away. He told me."
"In front of forty people, yes. I flirted and walked away because four of those people belonged to Aldo and two were watching me." Her voice sharpens for the first time. "I couldn't hand Valentino a map in the middle of the room."
I press my hands flat against my thighs because they've started shaking again, and not from fear this time.
Valentino heard me through the door.
But Francesca pointed him toward it.
That does not make us even. It does not make what she did disappear.
It changes what I think I know.
"And after?" I ask. "After the shooting."
"I walked into that room and Aldo Basile was dead on the floor." She stops, and whatever she felt then pulls across her face before she shuts it down. "Your purse was on the couch. Gold clasp. I took it and left through the kitchen."
My stomach drops.
"A day later, two men came to my house. They didn't ask questions at first. They took me." She tips her ruined face toward me. "Since then, they ask. Who is the blonde American? What she knows? Who she belongs to? I haven't given them anything. Everything they know, they learned somewhere else.”