The front door is solid and opaque.I won’t be able to see the Titones approach until it opens.I’ll be stuck here, staring at the unyielding wooden surface of it, while Severu and his men circle me like vultures in the background.Having a quiet room without these men that I don’t know at my back, able to watch the road through the window, seems suddenly vastly preferable.
“OK,” I whisper.
Fiametta gives my hand another small squeeze, then leads me to the glossy steps of the staircase.Once we’ve ascended, she brings me down a long hallway to a door that’s been left ajar.
“Don’t listen to him,” she says as she pulls me through, then shuts it.
“Pardon?”
“My brother,” she clarifies.“That horrid dog comment.”She leans back against the door she’s just shut and shakes her head.“He doesn’t understand things like romantic attachments.Whatever part of the brain comes up with all those nice, fuzzy, oxytocin-drenched feelings, well, he hasn’t got it.He’s not quite mammalian in here.”She taps her temple.“He’s more like her than anything else.”She lowers her finger from her head, then flicks it, seeming to indicate something – or someone – behind me.
I turn, and in the soft light of the room, I don’t see anyone at all.I do, however, notice a huge glass enclosure, at least seven feet long and four feet high, set up on a table that spans most of the left side of the room.Among a profusion of what looks like brown mulch, something large moves inside.My shredded nerves spasm, and I give a startled gasp.
“She won’t bother you,” Fiametta says quickly, soothingly, like a mother to a worried child, even though she’s got to be at least five years younger than me.“Cordelia is quite calm as long as you handle her properly.And she can’t get out of there on her own.”
“She’s huge,” I breathe, trying to make sense of the twisting brownish-red body among the mulch.
“Yes, she is.Nearly two metres long,” Fiametta says with something close to affectionate pride.“And she’s old, too.Almost twenty-five, now!She was my sister Matilda’s.Matilda died twenty years ago.When I was just a baby.”She crosses the room to the enclosure and gazes through the glass.“Sometimes I think a little bit of Matilda’s soul went into her.Maybe half of it.Yes.Half,” she says, seemingly more to herself than to me now.“Half of it into Cordelia, half into Luca.”
“Luca?”
“My nephew.The guy who was with you and Sev downstairs,” she says, straightening up.“Matilda was pregnant with him at the time.She died the day he was born.”
So Luca is also Severu’s nephew, then.Not his son.Turning my attention away from the serpent in the glass and the snaking branches of the Serpico family tree, I try to locate the window Fiametta promised me, taking in the rest of the room as I do so.The bedroom’s décor is very much in line with Fiametta’s personal appearance, everything old and romantic and gothic.It’s only now that I realize the room isn’t lit by a lamp, but by candles.
“Over here,” Fiametta says, guessing my intentions.She strides past a solid-wood four-poster bed to the other side of the room, across from Cordelia’s enclosure.Tugging aside heavy crimson curtains, she reveals a large window with a sort of bench built into the low sill of it, creating a little nook.There are a few velvet cushions there, convincing me that Fiametta must sit here to read sometimes.Maybe this was where she was trying to get throughThe Castle of Otrantobefore she came storming downstairs to complain about the noise.
“Go ahead,” she says, indicating the bench with a small but sincere smile.Then, the next words so practical and mercenary they seem completely at odds with her delicate warmth, she adds, “Don’t worry.It’s bullet-proof glass.”
Chapter5
Curse
“What does Serpico want?”I grit out as we make our way through Union Station.Elio’s got my bag, and Morelli is following behind with Aurora’s suitcase.I’m not carrying anything.It takes everything I’ve got to keep putting one foot in front of the other.Elio managed to get me off the train car before any staff noticed the fact that I was doped out of my goddamn mind in there.
“Not sure yet,” my brother responds, his eyes ahead, scanning the people milling through the building.“But there’s gotta be something.Men like him don’t tend to do things out of the goodness of their hearts.”
Men like him.Men like us.
Doesn’t matter what he wants.Doesn’t matter what it takes.
If I have to buy her back, I’ll do it.
If I have to kill every soldier in that fucking building to get to her, then I’ll do that, too.
“The Della Torre Camorra clan’s been giving Serpico trouble lately,” Morelli says in hushed tones.Despite the fact he’s got at least twenty years on Elio, he’s in good shape, and has no trouble striding alongside us even with Aurora’s big suitcase in tow.“And he knows how much more powerful the Titone famiglia is now that we’ve got Irish firepower behind us.”
Elio gives a snort at that.Probably an indication that, just because Darragh has married our cousin Valentina, doesn’t mean our alliance is an easy one.Though Valentina has come back from Dublin more than once to visit, Elio and Darragh haven’t come face-to-face since Darragh busted open my brother’s kidney in that pub basement boxing match.I’m not sure Elio will ever allow the man who once threatened his wife to exist peaceably alongside us, not to mention the fact that our Uncle Vinny shot Darragh and almost ended his life.But Morelli has a point.Animosity between the two bosses or not, our families are bound now.And it makes us even less appealing to have as an enemy.
“Could simply be to curry favour,” Morelli continues.“A show of goodwill, if not coming from the goodness of his heart.”
“An investment,” Elio says succinctly.“Without spending a goddamn dime.”
When we exit the building, the cold air feels like salvation.I gulp it down, urging it to clear my pounding head.
“Wonder where that fuck Messina ended up after Sev grabbed Aurora,” Elio says, his dark eyes so hard and sharp they should punch holes in every person they land on.
Messina.The name means something to me now.It didn’t earlier, when I first came to.But there’s still confusion wrapped around it.Messina can’t be here.He can’t go anywhere at all.Because I fucking killed him.
