Hand-carved from wood, it was the perfect replica of a coffin. Roses had been whittled in eerie detail.
It was only my imagination, but it seemed like I could smell the preservatives used to keep the roses fresh.
The icy hand of something unreal but formidable slid over the back of my neck.
Scarlett’s initials were carved underneath the spray in elegant, scripted letters.
SFR.
Luca tapped the box once, then slid it across to me. “Open,” he said in Italian.
All of my brothers came in closer, and though my attention was focused on the threat, I noticed how his eyes never missed the fact that we moved together.
After I opened the box, and I could tame the rage, I took it in with clear eyes.
Same modus operandi.
Red velvet-lined box, fresh red rose buried deep inside, petals wilted and already starting to reek of the saccharine smell of decomposition. It had been strangled by a rosary, Giulio Cesare’s personal touch. The toe tag wrapped at the bottom of the stem had been filled in with Scarlett’s information. A specific date added for emphasis.
August Eleventh.
My birthday.
The day I was born; the day I’d die.
My brothers all averted their eyes out of respect, as my trembling hand removed the picture from the underside of the lid. The picture I kept of Scarlett from my private collection—the one I had kept next to me while I wrote her the poem, taken in the Mediterranean Sea.
Eyes closed, face turned to heaven, breasts out of the water, body as languorous as a jellyfish floating along with the current. The sun had been hot, and the only proof in the black and white photo was the silver shimmer across the surface of the water, and how her face seemed to be soaking it in.
He’d seen this picture.
He’d stolen it from me.
From our home.
The place where my wife cooked in her kitchen and our daughter slept in her bed, where we took walks in our groves and swam in our pool—his unclean hands had invaded the safety of our sanctuary. Hands that had touched my pictures, eyes that had seen my wife bared only to me and the sea, and a mind that would never forget her vulnerable truth.
He had captured something of mine, holding it hostage; something he knew I couldn’t release unless I set it free by means of death.
If the snap of madness could be heard, it rang unearthly in the space between my ears, the kind of white noise that drove a man insane.
Romeo said something, his voice weaving in and out of the shrill voice of insanity—he called out for someone to get Scarlett.
Her name registered in my mind as something familiar, something safe, a soft hum to the screams of violence.
Incandescente; she burns through my darkness.
The snap from the other side of the table ceased all movement in the room.
No one entered.
No one exited.
His orders.
He’d handle this—the savage son that no one could control. Except for one woman, but she could wait. He’d draw this out, get what he wanted.
In the bedroom, she was welcome to control my marionette strings.
