The last time I heard a gun go off was when I shot my husband. I remember the silence that followed as Martina and I stared at his unconscious body and the growing pool of blood.
This time, the silence is replaced by screams.
Screams that trigger a host of other memories. Nelo, in particular, sounds just like this one older man Lazaro bought to me. My fourth. He was so loud. It was like he thought the louder he was, the less it would hurt.
When my gaze drifts over the hole in Nelo’s hand, I start to retch.
Damiano’s got his gun pressed to Nelo’s head. “Get her out of here,” he snaps at Ras.
Ras makes a move toward me, but I shake my head. He needs to stay here. Vito is still curled in fetal position, whimpering on the floor with remnants of the stew stuck to his face, but the pain will fade eventually. Damiano shouldn’t be here alone with the two of them.
“I’m fine,” I say to Ras and get the hell out of the kitchen.
I don’t stop moving until I’m back in my room. For once, I wish I could lock the door from the inside. The broken plates from earlier are still scattered all over the floor, and when I step on a shard, a sharp pain shoots through my foot. Crap.
I sink down to the floor and cradle my foot in my lap. The piece of glass is lodged inside, but I can tell it’s just a shallow cut.
The same can’t be said about Nelo.
What is Damiano going to do?
He said they were here sniffing around on behalf of the don, and if their clan is anything like the Garzolos, shooting one of the don’s men is a big no-no. Given what I now know about the relationship between Damiano and Sal, this could be all the excuse Sal needs to deal with his Damiano problem once and for all. So much for avoiding an escalation.
He just jeopardized his entire plan for…me.
He stood up for me.
It might be the first time anyone in the mafia has actually given a shit about my discomfort. Shouldn’t it feel good that he cared enough about me to do what he did?
But it doesn’t feel good. My stomach roils.
I’m starting to believe Damiano really could offer me protection, but that protection would be wasted on me, wouldn’t it?
Noises of a commotion break out below. It sounds like Damiano is kicking his guests out. I consider going down there for a moment but quickly decide to stay put. I’d only get in their way.
I should take the glass out, but I don’t want to see more red. If someone ever wrote the story of my life, it would be written in blood. Sometimes when I close my eyes, all I can see is me bathed in it. Did I feel empathy for Nelo when he screamed just now? Or did I do that thing again? The one I’d gotten so good at down in that damp basement…
The noises cease, only to be replaced with rapid footsteps. My fingers tense around my foot just as the bedroom door swings open and Damiano barges inside.
He finds me sitting on the floor and releases a heaving breath. “Vale.”
“Hi.” My voice is a whisper.
He kneels beside me and lets his gaze fall to the sole of my foot. His heavy breaths make his shoulders fall up and down as his brows pinch together. “You hurt yourself. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“No.” I hunch over, hiding my injury from him.
He frowns at the movement and then sighs. “I wish you didn’t have to see that. It must have been a shock. There was a lot of blood.”
My body jerks.
I turn away from Damiano, but he won’t let me move far from him. A hand curls around my shoulder. “Talk to me.”
“It wasn’t a lot.”
It takes him a heartbeat to catch on. “Of blood?”
“It wasn’t a lot. You must’ve missed the radial artery. If you’d hit it, he would have bled out all over your kitchen floor. Then again, if you went through it completely, the body may have sucked it up and stopped the flow.”
The air in the room compresses to a point. “How do you know all this?” he asks slowly.
I look at my right hand, the one that would always hold the knife. Keeping a secret doesn’t become easier over time. The weight of it accumulates, until you’re faced with a choice—crumble beneath it or let it go.
I don’t want to crumble.
“I learned a bunch of anatomy after it started,” I say. “I thought maybe I could find ways to kill them quickly, so that they wouldn’t feel so much pain. It worked for a few. I learned all the arteries, and I’d nick the closest one in whatever area he told me to cut. He caught on and told me the next time they died too early, he’d do to me what I was meant to do to them.”
“Lazaro?” Damiano asks, his voice so low it feels like a tremor inside my heart.
“I often thought the thing he got off on the most was watching me decide. Would I follow his commands? Would I abandon my empathy for other people? No, not even abandon, just push it aside, turn it down to zero. It was interesting to him, I think, because he always gave me the illusion of a choice. I could tell him no. But it was just that, an illusion. If I didn’t kill whoever he brought to me, he’d kill someone I loved, like Lorna, our housekeeper. At the end of the day, blood would be spilled.”
“He made you kill people?”
“First he made me torture them. Cut off their fingers and toes. Mark their flesh with words. Skin them alive. He liked doing it himself but for some reason he liked watching me do it more.”
Damiano’s skin loses all its color.
My memories of those nights are blurry. I know what I did, but my brain has tried to hide the details away.
I run my hand down the side of my neck. “To do such a thing to a person, you have to stop viewing them as a person. You have to dehumanize them so that they become a bag of bones and meat. Not real. Not people with lives and families, flawed as they may be. You have to pretend they’re just a physical object that can’t feel real pain. To be capable of that kind of disassociation is an awful thing. It makes you disassociate from yourself as well.
“Very quickly, I stopped feeling like I was human. I stopped seeing my family. It felt really important to me not to see them, even if I couldn’t really explain why at the time. In retrospect, it was because I was afraid of a few things. I was afraid I’d hurt them. I didn’t know how or why I’d do it, but it felt like a real possibility. And I was afraid they’d see the truth about me. They’d look me in the eye and see I had no soul left. I didn’t want them to know that, even if it was the truth.”
He drags his hand from my shoulder to my wrist. “Vale…”
I meet his shattered gaze. “He made me do awful things. He sat the very first man he brought to me down on a chair the wrong way around. He tied his wrists to his ankles so that he was immobile. The man had this fleshy back covered with marks and tattoos. Lazaro said he liked one of the tattoos and wanted me to give it to him. I didn’t understand. He explained he wanted me to cut it out for him.
“It didn’t really compute. I stared at him while the man in the chair started to beg. This big, burly guy you wouldn’t want to get into a fist fight with begged Lazaro—and me—not to cut out his tattoo. I said to Lazaro I couldn’t do that. I thought maybe my new husband had a dark sense of humor that I really didn’t understand, but he gave me a knife and very calmly told me to be careful, that he liked the tattoo, and he wanted to admire it while holding it in his hand.”
It’s hard to force the words out, but I have to. I have to tell Damiano everything, because if I stop, I know I won’t ever find the strength to do it again. “I went into shock. I think I laughed. I told him I wouldn’t do it, but he wouldn’t take no for an answer. ‘Do it, or I’ll hurt you, Valentina,’ he said. I told him he was my husband. He couldn’t hurt me. He laughed at that and said he was the only one who could hurt me. I started to cry, and he took me by the hand and pulled me into an embrace, comforting me. When I calmed down, he said I was a good person, that he could see I’d protect someone at my own expense, so he’d make the choice easier for me. He said if I didn’t do as he asked, he’d do the same thing to Lorna. And as he said it, he pressed the cold blade of the knife to my back, to the same spot where this man had his tattoo. I took the knife. It felt like it was the only option at that point. In my wildest nightmares, I hadn’t expected anything like that. We’d just gotten married.”
I’m shaking so hard I start stumbling over my words. Damiano moves so that he’s crouching on the floor right in front of me, and the glass crunches beneath his dress shoes. “He was a mad man,” he concludes. “He put you in an impossible position. This is difficult for you. You don’t need to tell me mo—”
“I need to tell you everything,” I say. If I don’t get all of this poison out, I’ll choke on it. “I asked Lazaro who the man with the tattoo was. Lazaro said he was someone who stole one of my father’s shipments and killed three of our men. That made me feel a little better, but as soon as I got close to him and he started to scream again, it wasn’t enough. That’s when I told myself he wasn’t a real person. He was just meat. I cut out the tattoo. Lazaro took the piece of flesh and admired it for a long time. After a while, he praised me. Said I did well for my first time.
“The next man came a week or more later, I can’t remember. Time lost meaning after that first night. I didn’t get out of bed for anything other than to use the bathroom and to get food from the kitchen when Lorna wasn’t around to bring it to me. I told myself I wanted to die, but I was lying. If I’d wanted to die, I wouldn’t have obeyed him for two months. I wanted to live, and I wanted Lorna to live too. Before she came with me to Lazaro’s, she’d worked for my family for over a decade. She was fifty-five, with two grandchildren she talked about all the time, and she was good person who took care of me while I was nearly catatonic.” I wonder where she is now. I pray she’s okay.
“The longer I stayed with Lazaro, the more resigned I became to my fate. It took…” I take a deep breath. “It took Martina showing up to finally make me snap.”
The truth feels like a hideous sculpture made of gore, flesh, and blood. It holds our attention for a while. I can tell Damiano’s thinking. He’s probably coming up with appropriate ways to make me pay for my sins. He’s not like Lazaro. He doesn’t worship violence, but for me, he might make an exception now that he knows what I might have done to Martina.
When his arms wrap around me, I go completely still. He tucks one arm under my knees, the other around my back, and lifts me off the ground.
“Let’s get you cleaned up,” he says gruffly. “I have a first aid kit in my bathroom.”
He carries me out of my room and down the hall until we reach what must be his room. Inside, it’s cool and dark. The blinds have been drawn. His bed is unmade and messy, the blue sheet tangled as if he wrestled with it all night. The housekeeper obviously hasn’t been in here this morning. Maybe he doesn’t like having people in his space, and yet he’s brought me in here.
The bathroom lights flick on, and Damiano lowers me to the cold marble counter by the sink. His black hair falls over his forehead as he bends down to look for something in the drawers, and when he straightens back up with a plastic white box in his hand, he won’t look me in the eyes. He can no longer even stand the sight of me. That’s the reaction I expected, but for some reason, it still wounds me. His inability to look at me is somehow more awful than any murderous intent he might have.
I wring my hands while he washes his in the sink.
“Lift your foot,” he says and opens up his palm to take it.
His touch is gentle as he cleans my injury. When he removes the shard, I pretend I don’t feel the sharp sting, but the alcohol-soaked cotton ball he presses to it afterward drags a hiss out of me.
“It’s not deep,” he murmurs. “You won’t need stitches. That was the worst of it.”
He doesn’t sound like someone who’s preparing to commit murder, but he won’t ever want me under his roof with his sister now that he knows what I’m capable of.
When he puts a bandage over the cut, I can’t take it anymore. “I know who I am. I’m a monster. The worst of the worst. I should have told you all this earlier. What Nelo did was nothing. I deserve far worse.”
The growl that tears out of his throat stills my heartbeat. His hand wraps around the back of my neck, and he pulls my face to his, his gaze finally pinning my own. “You are never going to say that again, all right? You’re not a monster. You’re a fucking survivor. You survived something that most hardened made men wouldn’t be able to come back from, and you put your neck on the line to save my sister. There’s only one monster in the story you told me—your husband. He will pay for what he did to you, Valentina. My God, he will pay a high price.”
He presses his face into my neck, and I stop breathing.
“And so will everyone who failed to be there for you,” he whispers against my skin. “Where the fuck was your father when Lazaro was forcing you to do all those things? Did he know?”
“He did,” I say. “My father and mother both know Lazaro was not normal. I was raised to obey my husband and to go along with his will. When I begged them for help, they told me it wouldn’t be right for them to interfere in my marriage.”
“And your siblings?”
“They had no idea. I couldn’t tell them. You’re the only person that knows the full extent of it.”
He takes a deep inhale and pulls back to meet my gaze. “This is why you don’t want to go home.”
Tears flood my eyes. I try to blink them away, but they spill down my cheeks instead. “I still don’t know if Lazaro is alive. If he is, Papà will hand me right back to him. I got away from him once, but I know I won’t be able to twice. And if Lazaro is dead, there’s a good chance I’ll be forced to get remarried to someone who might be a different kind of monster. I can’t do that, Damiano. You might have me locked up here, but being back in New York would put me in a much worse prison.”
His rough hand cups my cheek. He’s looking at me with the kind of sympathy I thought men like him weren’t capable of feeling. “I won’t keep you here anymore. You’re free to leave if you want.”
I bow my head as a strange emptiness appears in my chest. He’s letting me go. Isn’t that what I wanted? I should be relieved at getting my freedom back.
But when I lift my gaze to his, I realize that freedom doesn’t live beyond the walls of this house. It lives in the understanding reflected in his eyes.
He reaches for my hand. “But I don’t want you to leave. Stay with me, Vale. Stay with me, and you’ll never have to fight another battle again. I’ll fight them for you. I’ll protect you. I’ll avenge you.”
I lean into his touch. Forgiveness is a tricky thing. I’ve tried to forgive myself many times after I got to Ibiza, but my attempts always seemed like throwing a bunch of seeds over dry, infertile soil and expecting them to sprout. They never did.
Damiano’s words feel like rain.
They soak the dusty earth and reach all the way down to the place where my soul has been hiding.
One day, we may have a flower yet.
