“You know what these are?” Boris asks. He’s not looking at me. He’s picked up the photos and is flipping through them like he’s thumbing through a scrapbook, casual and almost fond.
I don’t answer.
He snorts. “Proof your mother couldn’t keep her legs closed or her loyalties straight.”
Heat creeps up my neck, but I bite my lip.
He finds the one of my mother kissing the dark-haired man. Tips it toward me. “That’s Santino. Andretti consigliere. Your mother was fucking him for the better part of a year.”
The name roots me to the floor. Santino. I’ve heard my father say that name. Heard him brag about having him killed. A message to the Andrettis, he called it. A necessary correction.
“She was going to leave.” Boris sets the photo down and picks up another. “Had the whole thing planned. New city, new life, take the baby and run off with her Italian boyfriend.” He makes a sound in his throat, something between a laugh and a grunt. “Stupid woman.”
My palms are slick. I press them flat against my thighs and hold them there.
“My father knew,” I say. Not a question.
Boris doesn’t answer. He flips to the next photo in the stack and holds it where I can’t look away.
My mother on pavement. A dark hole through the front of her head. Eyes open.
“That answer your question, sweetheart?” Boris grins. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen on a human face.
I double over and retch. Nothing comes up but bile, hot and acid at the back of my throat, and Boris laughs while I’m still choking on it.
“Your father gave the order. I did the rest.”
I force myself upright. My eyes are watering and my mouth tastes like acid and I can still see the photo even though I’m not looking at it anymore.
A sob rises into my throat so violently I have to swallow it back like I’m choking on broken glass. I will not give Boris that. I will not let him stand there and watch me come apart for his entertainment.
It takes everything in me not to lunge at him. This man killed my mother. He’s standing in her husband’s office bragging about it, and he’s smiling, and I want to tear his face apart with my bare hands—but he’d snap me in half before I landed a single hit.
“Funny thing,” he says. “How history works. Your mother tried to run off with an Andretti, and here you are, thinking you can do the same damn thing.”
The air leaves my lungs.
He knows.
“Oh, don’t look so surprised.” Boris tilts his head, studying me like I’m something pinned to a board. “You think your father doesn’t have eyes everywhere?”
The blood leaves my face before Boris even finishes.
“Your brother came back from that little beach visit talking about how you had textbooks lying around. Playing student.” Boris shakes his head slowly, almost amused. “Made your father nervous. A daughter with ideas is a dangerous thing.”
I want to break something. Specifically, my brother’s nose.
“So we put a camera in your room.”
I freeze. I think of every night in that room. Every text to Luca. They were watching it all?
Boris picks at something under his thumbnail. “Found the phone pretty quick after that.”
The walls of the office seem to press inward. Every precaution, every secret I thought I’d kept—none of it mattered. I was a rat in a maze thinking she’d found the exit.
“That little hotel meetup wasn’t exactly subtle, sweetheart,” Boris continues, tossing the photos onto the desk. “Made it almost too easy to set the hook.”
Cold floods my body.
