“What the hell are you talking about, Nico?” he says. “It’s too early for this shit.”
His tone is a mix of exasperation and annoyance—pretty much the standard mixture whenever we speak. Even though I am one of his top advisors. He’d just started to trust me more lately and here I am, throwing all of it away.
“I’m serious,” I say. “Alice… she’s really suffering while this guy breathes and I won’t be able to watch that for much longer. I just thought you should know what’s gonna happen. So it doesn’t come as a surprise.”
“Oh, thank you very much.”
He also doesn’t do sarcasm very well, although he is better at it than most people from the West Coast.
“So now you know.”
“This is something Alice asked you to do?” he asks.
I lean against the headboard of the bed, imagining I can feel Alice just on the other side of it, sleeping in her own bed.
“No, she didn’t ask me to do it,” I admit. “In fact, she told me not to. But she needs me to do it. Like I said, she won’t know any peace until its done and the bastard is gone.”
He sighs again, and I think I can hear the balcony door on his end sliding shut.
“You really have it bad for this Alice, don’t you?” he asks and chuckles. “Didn’t think you were the type.”
I smile too. “I didn’t either. But here we are. She won’t let me do more than kiss her, but I’d still do anything for her. Is this what love is?”
He laughs. “Yeah, it probably is.”
I was asking sarcastically, because I do know what love is, but of course he didn’t pick up on it.
“But I’ll tell you something about women for free,” he adds. “Don’t do anything they tell you not to do. There’s always hell to pay if you do. The same goes for doing some things they do ask you to do. So, I really don’t know how much this advice is worth.”
“Yeah, it’s really not worth much. In the end you just gotta do what you think is right and live with the consequences,” I say. “But you’d be fine with the priest killing part?”
He sighs again. “I already told you before you left, do what you gotta do, Nico. If you think it’s necessary… Do you need me to send you some backup?”
So much for Matteo talking me off this ledge. Not that I actually wanted him to. He needed to know about my plans and I told him.
I can hear his girlfriend Gianna asking him something in the background and he tells her he’ll be right there.
“We’re good for now,” I tell him. “I’ll call if anything changes.”
He tells me to do that then ends the call. And I have half a mind to just drive over to the church and get it done.
But Matteo’s advice wasn’t as worthless as all that.
The thing Alice and me are starting is too fragile to betray her trust just because I have no patience. Even if I’d be doing it in her own best interest. For now, I need to play this her way.
But not for very much longer.
23
Alice
Nico and I have been cooped up in my motel room for three days, taking turns watching the footage from the cameras we planted. Nothing’s been happening—nothing untoward anyway.
I’m starting to doubt all I think I know about Gael. Maybe I was the only one he molested. Maybe I really was hisspecial girl, as he called me. I hate that a part of me was actually proud of that as it occurred to me. The way little Bianca had been proud. Until she found out exactly what being his special girl meant.
“But that’s not a bad thing. If he stopped doing it, I mean,” Nico says.
We’ve been discussing this possibility all day today.
