Kidnapping…
Aurora wouldn’t go with me willingly. I’d already made my peace with that.
The last time Aurora saw me, I was strangling a man in the darkness of an abandoned Montreal warehouse. No one else was supposed to be there. Uncle Vinny had told me who the mark was that night, a low-level biker who’d fucked around and was about to find out. As I was squeezing the life out of him, revelling in the silken calm such an act always brings me, she was watching.
I usually have a good sense for detecting people standing behind me.
But not her, for some reason. Not that night. She was so quiet-footed. Dainty, even. Didn’t make a sound. There had always been something soft and bird-like about her. Something that made me want to cup her gently in my hands, dome my tattooed and blood-stained fingers over her. Fingers that had already taken a dozen lives by the time I was eighteen, standing in that warehouse with her watching.
My fingers weren’t tattooed or blood-stained when we’d first met.
I could barely remember myself from before the fire.
But Cristo santo, I remembered her.
I knew her face at once when I let the body fall to the ground and finally turned to see her standing there.
The industrial lighting from the empty parking lot outside speared through a window, coming down on her like holy fucking light from God. Her long, pin-straight blonde hair took on a silvery hue, her eyes beautiful, huge, and dark as she stared. She had on a dress made of some kind of shiny fabric that flowed down her body like water. Her slender arms were bare. So was the pale column of her throat, the winged lines of her collarbones.
If such a thing as heaven was ever real, then Aurora was its last angel.
“Curse.”
Dio help me. She knew my name.
“You know who I am.”
She looked startled by my reply. Maybe she was surprised to hear perfect English coming from my mouth this time.
“Of course I do,” she said. Then, softly, perhaps more to herself than to me, “Sometimes I can picture your face even more clearly than my own.”
The face of an eight-year-old child, she meant. The face of the Sicilian boy who’d once treasured things like frangipani flowers and kisses from his mamma.
That boy, sweet little Accursio Giordano, did not exist anymore. He died the night my unconscious body was dragged by my burning, screaming brother from the flames of our fucking past. The night our uncle gave us the Titone name.
And yet, she knew me anyway.
Her eyes went to the body on the floor. Her face was nearly as pale as her hair.
Her papà was in this life. A powerful figure in Buffalo. She knew what men like him did.
What men like me did.
But I doubted it was ever this up-close and personal. I doubted she was ever in the room with a dead body, smelling the grim piss and shit of it all.
“What are you doing here, Aurora?”
She took a breath so sharp I wondered if it cut her windpipe on the way down. “So you recognize me, too.”
Recognize her. I’d thought of her fucking daily for ten years straight. That kind, quiet girl who’d just lost her mamma, who’d landed like a wounded sparrow in Sicily that summer. Her face was burned into my mind the way all those marks were burned into Elio’s flesh.
Maybe she was my own kind of scar.
“That doesn’t answer my question.”
“Why am I in Montreal?” she asked. “Or why am I in this abandoned building with you and a dead man?” Her hands caught each other in front of her ribcage, twisting together. “What…What’s going to happen to him?” The next question came out as a whisper. “What’s going to happen to me?”
My blood stilled in my veins.
