I don’t let a single one of them past the barrier of my teeth.
Instead, clenching the key so hard it hurts, I turn on the engine and tell her that once we’re past the gates, she’d better obey every fucking thing I say, without question and without hesitation.
“Obey me like your life depends on it,” I growl, finally activating the button that opens the garage door straight ahead of us.The world unfurls like a threat.“Because it does.”
Chapter13
Aurora
Iclose my eyes and try to sleep on the drive, but despite the very early morning wake-up and the lingering fatigue from the morning after pill, rest doesn’t come.There’s a hot buzz in my limbs, a feeling of fizz in my chest.Part of it is the new feeling of vulnerability, now that we’re out of the safehold of the big house combined with the fact that Alessandro hasn’t been found yet.But even more than that is the anticipation of what’s to come.
Today I am marrying Curse Titone.
I wish I didn’t feel anything.I didn’t go into my wedding with Marco feeling like champagne bubbles were bursting in my veins.I’d spent most of that day entirely numb.The only thing that broke me out of that unfeeling emptiness was when he touched me in the bedroom, and my body spasmed in automatic defence, sending him bleeding to the floor.
Why can’t I be numb to Curse?Why can’t any of the walls I build between us truly hold?Even now, I find myself watching him from the corner of my eye, my attention drawn to him with an inevitability that shames me.
Instead of his face, I focus instead on his hands as he deftly steers us through Toronto’s pre-dawn streets.The letters of his mamma’s name dance with the tension he exerts, the frangipani flower inked into his pinky appearing to rustle in unseen wind.
A memory enters me like a bullet, like a breeze, like something that could caress and kill me, all at once.It’s the image of Curse, little Accursio, with his missing-tooth smile and his coal-black hair, clambering like a monkey up the trunk of a frangipani tree.
“Oh, just leave them,” I cried from below, even knowing that he wouldn’t understand me.“Accursio!”
No doubt he heard me, even if he couldn’t decipher my English words, but still, he ignored me.He’d seen me admiring the blooms from the ground, and, without a word, had scrambled into action.I smacked my hands onto my own cheeks, fingernails digging in as he climbed higher and higher.
He had no fear.I had enough for the both of us.
“Please don’t fall,” I shouted.I didn’t want him to pick one of those perfect flowers just for me.And I especially didn’t want him to fall in pursuit of one.“Accursio!Just leave them be!”
But he didn’t leave them be.He stretched his lean body, grasping at one, nearly falling, nearly stopping my heart.I glimpsed his face, dappled by sun between petals and leaves.Intent with focus on the flower just out of reach.
Giving up on climbing, he swung his body in a big arc, snatching a flower at the same moment that he let go of the branch.I screamed and ran to him, but he was completely fine, crouched on the sunlit ground, the frangipani flower clenched in his fist.He stood and offered it to me.
I didn’t feel right taking it.The reason I’d admired the flowers wasn’t because I’d wanted one for myself, but because they’d looked so perfect, just as they were.I believed fervently that Mamma was in heaven.But I also sometimes believed that she could be in perfect places, like this.That heaven could exist in the curve of petals and leave, sun and wood.
And Curse had gone ahead and plucked it for me, like he wasn’t battering down the very walls of paradise to do it.
When I didn’t take it from him, he instead tucked it into my hair, balanced carefully behind my ear.One of the petals came away in the process, drifting down between us before being caught up by the wind and whisked away and out of sight.
Just before it disappeared, I made a wish on it.
“I wish that we could get married one day,” I said aloud, blushing fiercely, even knowing that Curse wouldn’t comprehend the words.
I’d told Curse once that wishes don’t come true.That it was stupid to even make them in the first place.But somehow, this one managed to force itself into being.Even if it wasn’t anything close to what I’d imagined, what I’d hoped.
I think about the way the world seems to have twisted itself over and over, like one of Rosa’streccinefrom this morning, to bring us back to each other.I think of the way that wishes can metastasize, can come back to haunt you in ways you never could have seen coming.I think of that half-crushed frangipani, clutched in Curse’s childish fist.Perhaps that was the first sign that he would take things, break things, when it came to me.That he’d pluck a perfect flower, end the reign of its bloom, just because I’d smiled up at it.
I’d kill an innocent person to marry you.
Those words crash into others, ones from the memory.I don’t know why Curse’s childhood voice suddenly comes back to me now.If someone had asked me a week ago what Curse had said to me after that moment with the frangipani tree, I wouldn’t have had a clue.
But I hear the words now, clear as if they’re being spoken aloud to me, inside this very vehicle.
“What doescome l'ala di un angelomean?”I ask, sitting up so straight and fast that it activates the tension in the seatbelt.I’m terrified that if I didn’t say the words out loud immediately, they’d vanish again.Go back to whatever place they’ve been hiding all these years.
“What?”Curse asks.There’s a darkness in his clipped reply.A warning.
“Just tell me,” I ask.I don’t have a phone to look it up.And neither Robbie nor Leo are in the car to ask.There’s no one else.
