For a moment, I feel a memory tugging at my mind, a memory of another time my mother killed to protect me, just as instantly.
Just as instinctively.
Alessandro is pulling me into his arms, checking me over, while my mother comes over and kicks Barbieri’s gun away from his dead hand.
“You’ve always been such a strange boy, Teddy,” she sighs, glancing up at me, but she doesn’t sound angry. She sounds…resigned.
“I’d advise you to speak to your son with more respect in my presence,” Alessandro snaps. But my mother just gives him a sardonic smile.
“All your wildest dreams have come true, Castellani. You won’t need to worry about me for some time. I’ll have to step down while this—” She gestures to Barbieri’s body on the floor. “—is sorted out. But your being here, with Teddy…” Her eyes go hard. “It will only complicate matters. For both of us.”
I can already hear sirens in the distance. The neighbors must have called the police.
“You think you can uncomplicate it?” Alessandro asks.
“The Bureau has been having problems with Barbieri for a while. There’s a way to spin this…as long asyou’renot here.”
“Then we’ll leave,” Alessandro says at once. “Go out the back.”
“If you think you can use my son against me—”
“I am in love with him.” Alessandro’s declaration makes my head spin, and my mother’s eyes widen along with mine. He pulls me to his side, and adds in a soft voice, “My only desire is to protect him.”
I’m still dazed, still staring at the body, but my mother and Alessandro both sound perfectly poised. Perfectly calm.
“What do you have to lose?” I blurt out to her. “I want to go with him, and it’s not likeyouever wanted me in the first place.”
“That’s not…” She begins the denial automatically, but she can’t finish it. “Icouldn’tget too close,” she says at last. “Don’t you understand that? I was trying to protect you.”
She may as well have shot me herself. It was one thing to feel it, suspect it…another thing to hear her say it, fire that truth at me point-blank.
But Alessandro’s arm goes around my waist, lending me his strength. “He no longer needs your protection,” he tells her. “Because he has mine.”
She isn’t looking at either of us, just staring at the corpse on her living room floor. The sirens are getting closer and closer. I can see the gears moving in her mind, the calculations. “This obsession of yours,” she says to me. “I always knew it would end badly.”
I give a sob-laugh. “Myobsession?”
She flinches, and turns to Alessandro. “Very well. Take him. Protect him. Just get out of here while you still can.”
CHAPTER52
TEDDY
Alessandro’s handdescends onto my thigh, warm and comforting, as he pulls into his reserved parking lot underneath his apartment building. He turns off the engine. “Topolino, I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not,” I say at once. “What happened today showed me, for once and for all, that I was right about my mother. She doesn’t love me. Or…can’t.” I don’t know which is worse.
His hand squeezes lightly. “I’m not sure it’s that simple,” he murmurs. “She did save your life.”
“She shot Barbieri because she wanted to save her job. You know she did.”
Alessandro says nothing, just puts his hand at the back of my neck, massaging lightly.
“Am I really so awful?” I ask him, and I can feel a sob starting in my gut, building up, thrusting its way into my throat. “Am I really so difficult to love?”
I can’t stop the tears, but I don’t have to. Alessandro pulls me into his arms, a little awkward in the car, but just as comforting as I need, and lets me cry until I’m cried out.
“No,” he tells me softly, when I’ve finally subsided to sniffling, instead of sobbing. He takes out the handkerchief from his suit pocket and presses it to my face, wiping away my tears. “No,topolino, quite the opposite.”
