And nearly killed Curse.Curse, who might still be unconscious in that wreckage.In the cold, the rain, the darkness without me.
I chuck Alessandro’s water on the floor, listening to it roll away while he swears loudly.
I don’t want to drink.I don’t deserve to be fucking hydrated.
I left him there.
Did I have any other choice?I couldn’t have overpowered Alessandro.I know that.I rake through my memories mercilessly, trying to see any other possibility that I might have missed.Any other way I could have helped him.
But there’s nothing.I’m not strong.I’m not a hero who can save him like he’s saved me.
It fully hits me then.That whether Curse lives or dies, I will never see him again.
Alessandro shoves the water bottle onto my lap again.
I ignore it, turning away from him.From everything.
“Wake up.We’re here.”
Alessandro’s voice bites at my consciousness.My eyelids scrape my eyes, the insides of my throat wracked by friction.When his hand squeezes my arm, hauling me to my feet, I sway dizzily, my vision swimming.
“You should have drank the fucking water.We’ve been on a plane for ten hours.”With his other hand, he retrieves the forgotten bottle from the seat and pushes it against my chest.“Take it,” he snaps.“You promised me that if I let that Titone fuck live, then you’d do everything in your power to end that marriage and make the one with me successful.That’s only going to work if you don’t pass out and fucking die on me.”
He didn’t seem to give a shit about how conscious I was before.But ultimately, I don’t let the water bottle fall when he lets go of it.My stomach clenches, and my mouth tries to water in response to the nausea there, but nothing happens.
It takes far more energy than it should not to fall down the steps from the plane to the tarmac.Sun drenches me as I go, and I squint against what feels like an onslaught after the grey skies and snow and rain of Quebec and Ontario.It’s only by the time I reach the pavement of the airstrip that I’m acclimatized enough to open my eyes fully.
And just like that, I am six years old again.
It’s only March, not summer like when I was last here.But it looks the same.That exceptional blue sky, the only clouds of which are gathering in a lazy circle above the peak of Mount Etna in the distance.Alessandro keeps his grip on my arm.Maybe worried I’m going to fall over.Maybe worried I’m going to try to run now that he doesn’t have the leverage of Curse’s prone body at the end of the barrel of his gun.When we reach a vehicle that appears to have been left waiting for him, he shoves me roughly into the front passenger seat.
He doesn’t speak as he drives.And that’s just fucking fine with me.He spoke enough back at the car wreck.The fact that he murdered my father, and I didn’t even know, eats at me.He’s been taking things from me without me even realizing.
He’s been taking things from me.Just like his great uncle.
It’s almost as if thinking of Carlo now conjures his house from some traumatized place in my own mind.Because after about an hour of driving, I recognize it, a beautiful beige structure among rolling green hills, idyllic as a postcard.It always struck me as so strange, so wrong, that a place could be that fucking lovely on the outside, no matter what happened within.
Alessandro turns onto the narrow road that leads to the property, and every muscle in me clenches in revolt.
“No,” I stammer.“No way.I can’t stay here.”
It never occurred to me, when I’d tossed out Taormina as a suggestion, that Alessandro would bring me to his dead great uncle’s house.
“Why not?I inherited it when Uncle Carlo died.I’ve been paying the old church caretaker Paulo to look after the place since no one’s been living here.”
Why not?Why not?
Because some of the worst moments of my life happened inside that fucking house.Because it was here that I learned to lock my inner being away behind thick walls of glass, a cage without a door.
I don’t remember ever meeting the church’s caretaker, but I remember the church as it rolls into view now.A tiny, ancient structure with a small graveyard beside it.After the first night here, I ran down the slope to that little church, hoping for salvation, but finding only apathetic sunshine and crumbling stone.My throat had been too stopped up with tears to pray, and when a priest had emerged, casting questioning eyes upon me, I’d fled.
“I can’t stay here,” I say again, a frantic echo.
“I’m not putting you up at some fancy hotel if that’s what you were imagining,” Alessandro retorts.“You should be fucking grateful I’m letting you stay here with me at all and that I’m not shoving you into some prison cell.”
Grateful.For the destruction of my entire fucking life.
We pull up the long drive to the front of the house.It’s just as I remembered it, with its luscious gardens and its black wrought-iron fencing around the house.It’s the kind of fence that has those pointy spikes, like a row of iron arrows that have been planted in the sun-warmed ground.
