“What the fuck?!” shouts Antonella at me.
“You need to leave, fast,” I shout back.
“I’m not leaving,” she says, building herself up.
“You will,” I say, “Or you will be dead.”
“What is your fucking problem?” she asks, and I am boiling over. I hate disobedience from the bottom of my cold heart.
“My problem is that Adria is coming to kill you,” I shout at her.
“Adria?” she asks, as if she were completely brainless.
“Are you too stupid to understand?” I shout over the music at her.
A smirk of arrogance appears on her face, the belief that she is untouchable. She is high on power. And I regret even coming.
“I have people everywhere here; let her come.”
“Yeah? Where are they now? If I were Adria, you would’ve already dropped dead.”
She stares at me.
“Adria will kill without asking,” I say. “Leave now, or I will make you.”
I see it in her eyes, the flicker and the reason why I hate brats.
“Make me,” she says in an arrogance I’d like to hit her for.
Men are appearing around us, guns drawn. People move out of the way. Some don’t even realise what is happening. And I do what I have to do because there is only one way out: holding a gun to her head.
“Move,” I say, “No one touches me. Tell them to stand down, or I will pull the trigger.”
She looks at me, and I know why I don’t allow disobedience. Kat, Adria, her. None of it would have happened if they had listened. And I am done with all of them for not following my orders.
A bullet cuts through the air and brushes her cheek.
She ducks, and chaos breaks loose. The men aim for Adria, wherever she is, somewhere to my right.
“Move, now!” I shout.
She walks through the people, tells two of her men to stay back, and I walk behind her with the gun pressed into her.
“We take the back entrance,” I tell her.
We reach the door.
A big bear of a man in front of it.
“Apri la porta,” says Antonella in Sicilian to the man, without even a hint of her foreign nature. And I cannot help but wonder if she still played us all.
My ears ring as we step outside into the many alleyways of Palermo.
“Walk,” I say.
“You won’t get away with it,” she says. “They will come for me.”
“Shut up and walk,” I tell her.
