Page 23 of Sweet Poison

He nodded at me and I waved at him. Then I pushed open the front door and walked out into the street just as Pearl’s car turned out of the car park and came towards me.

Natalie was driving. “Jesus, girl. Did a hurricane hit you?” she asked with a big grin.

“Yeah, tore me right up,” I replied, grinning back.

Both Pearl and Kelly laughed.

They would be looking for details, and I would give them enough to keep them happy, but what happened between me and Cole was too private to share.

It was almost sacred.

Chapter 13

Cole

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JVaRloezno

-bella ciao-

I stood hidden behind the drapes and watched the car pull up. I saw her walk towards it, holding her shoes in her hands. Her feet were very pale on the dark asphalt. I spied her open the car door and slip inside. I opened the window a crack and the sound of feminine laughter wafted up in the silence of the night. The door shut, and the car began to move.

My hands were clenched so tight, that the veins in my forearms popped. The need to call out to her was spectacular. But I did nothing. I just stood there and watched the car drive away into the night.

I ran my hand through my hair agitatedly. My mind felt blown.

Restlessly, I pulled back the drapes and opened the window wide. The stars seemed very bright and I was struck by the blanket of stillness and silence that had fallen over the town. At no time could one ever find this quality of quiet in New York.

A racoon crossed the empty street.

Thoughts of Montana filled my head. Her smile, her body, her smell, her laughter. In my mind’s eye, I could still see her: so fucking sexy. Naked as the day she was born and sprawled out on her back, her skin flushed and misted with sweat despite how cool the room had been. Until tonight I’d never met anyone who thought earth was paradise or said a prayer of gratitude when they opened their eyes in the morning.

I’d always thought earth was some sort of hell. I’d never known true happiness. The only time I felt something close to it was when my daughter was born and even that moment was tinged with fear:

They could hurt me now.

My daughter had made me vulnerable.

My real name is Luca Rossi. Son of Enzo Rossi, the cold, detached second in command of the Occhi Morti (Dead Eyes) Mafia syndicate. My mother, Hanna, is a tiny, painfully thin Hungarian woman. I never understood how she came to be with my father. They were as different as night and day and had nothing in common except for me, their only son. Even as a small child, I knew instinctively they should never be together.

I’d never once seen my father be violent to my mother or even mildly admonish her, but my mother was terrified of him. Whatever had happened to frighten her must have happened early in their relationship, but her terror of him was all-encompassing. It dictated her every move. She became a shade paler as soon as his car pulled up onto the driveway.

Once, she wet herself while sitting at the dining table. Urine dripped and trickled down the chair and formed a puddle on the floor, but she sat there and slipped fork after fork of food until my father decided the meal was over and left the table.

When I was young, many a time, I would watch her fill an olive-green suitcase with her clothes and mine, her movements vigorous and hurried, but as soon as she snapped the locks shut, she suddenly would lose courage. Then she would sit on the bed, with me wrapped tightly in her arms, and sob pitifully. Once her tears were spent, she would beg me not to tell anyone about what she had done and I would promise not to.

“My good, good boy,” she would croon sadly, and stroke my head.

With great grief, she would unpack the suitcase and put it away with meticulous exactness in the same position it had been in. Then she would return to her life of capitulation, dread, and unrelieved unhappiness.

She was a wretched figure and as a child, I knew I was the reason she was trapped. Without me, she would have been more nimble and more courageous. So I was fiercely protective of her, even if there was not much I could do to help her. From early on she had insisted that I should learn to protect myself so she sent me to self-defense classes. By the time I was fourteen, I was already the owner of the black belt, but it was of no benefit to her. The harm that was being done to her was not physical or even visible to the casual observer.

To all intents and purposes, my father was a model husband and father. By anybody’s estimation, my mother’s fear of him would be classed as irrational or a construct of her own imagination.

Once, I’d come home from school and found her slumped at the kitchen table with her head in her hands, and I said to her. “Let’s go, Mama. Let’s go where no one can find us.”

“He’ll find us,” she said sadly. As long as I lived, I would never forget the look of utter defeat in her eyes.

Her distress and panic were such that it even changed her physical body. She once told me that at the age of twenty, shortly after giving birth to me, she stopped having periods. When she turned forty-two the unrelenting fear started to affect her mind. At first, it was nothing serious. She would forget to add potatoes or onions to her shopping list, but in a few months her decline became obvious, then rapid and aggressive.

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