I shouldn’t have felt so relieved that she changed the subject, but I went along with it anyway. Those three words, drifting around my head, were quickly pushed away for another time.
“La vita va avanti... Life goes on.” I huffed a laugh. “It was my first tattoo and a little reminder to myself to keep my head up.”
She lowered her hand, her smile faint as sympathy settled into her gaze. “How old were you when you had it done?”
“Sixteen.”
Sometimes it was easy to forget how different our backgrounds were. The people I grew up with wouldn’t bat an eye at the fact I was still legally a kid when I got my first tattoos. Lily, however, had dropped her mouth open.
“But the legal age to get a tattoo in New York is eighteen,” she said.
I chuckled and leaned back again, placing my hands behind my head as I gave a nonchalant shrug. “I was an older-lookin' sixteen-year-old.”
A fleeting thought crossed my mind; Lily and I had lived in the same borough throughout our teenage years and never once crossed paths. Or we had and just never realized it.
She was four years younger so teenage me might’ve overlooked her... Except maybe outside a courthouse.
Lily asked, “What did your mom think of it?”
I tucked away my previous thought. “She was disappointed. But she was also relieved it was somethin’ Italian and not some gang sign.”
“And the scar?”
“From Gio.” I lowered my arms. “But not because of the tattoo. His reaction to the tattoo was to smash a beer bottle against the wall beside my head.”
Talking about him still made my skin crawl, but it felt easier sharing it all with Lily. I told her about how my father broke my collarbone pushing me from the back stairs, and how my mother explained to a nurse that I was clumsy and slipped on my own.
I shrugged again when I finished the short version of the story. She didn’t need to know all the traumatic details of that day. Lily had already sat through one retelling of my miserable life. “The scar was once an ugly reminder. Now it’s just a scar.”
Lily crawled forward, tucked herself beneath the sheet, and snuggled down beside me, resting her hand and head against the right side of my chest. I pulled my arm around her, holding her closer. We were in silence for a couple of seconds, but I could almost hear her next question brewing in her head. I didn’t mind though.
“Isn’t this house a reminder of him too?” she asked softly.
“Not really.” I began drawing circles on her back through the fabric of the T-shirt she wore. “Antonio’s renovations helped us forget some of the things that happened here.”
She lifted her head to look up at me. “You mentioned you had to pay off a debt to him.”
“I did.”
“And now?”
I brushed her hair behind her ear, following my own movements with my eyes as the soft lock slipped through my fingers. “I paid off more than what I owed him a couple of years ago.”
“So why keep fighting for him?”
“It’s all I really know. I found comfort in the violence.” I frowned at what I said before adding, “As sick as that sounds...”
“What if you left?”
I half smiled at the optimism that flashed in her eyes. Which made letting her down just a little harder. “I can’t... Antonio doesn’t let his assets go that easy.”
She nodded slowly in understanding. “Right.”
“The only way I could ever get out of fighting for him was if I accepted his offer to become one of his soldiers. Or if I died.”
She pushed herself up from the bed. One palm braced against the mattress, the other at the center of my chest, as she looked at me with determination. And an adorable frustration that made her pout a little. I tried to keep a straight face as I looked at her.
“Okay, one, you aren’t allowed to die,” she stated.
