Page 62 of Cardinal House

Lemon and rose fills my nose as I try to take deeper, even breaths, to slow my racing heart and to kill my panic. But the men are shouting, and I can’t make out anything at all, peering around Vito’s body, to stare at my Wolf with a gun in his face.

“Wolf!” I cry out, “Wolf!” I scream it this time, an earth shattering sound that has my throat cracking and aching as I repeat it in the same panicked tone again and again. “Wolf!” I struggle against the man’s grip over my back, his fingers digging divots into my spine. “Wolf!” I yank myself out of his hold, stumbling backwards straight into the wall.

The back of my head smacks into the wall, silencing my panic, and I slide down the textured wallpaper as I slump to the ground.

There’s a body sprawled out on a trolley, blood a dark crimson blooming across his chest. There are shouts, orders, instructions, the cloak of death is curling around my shoulders, a cold cape of finality as I stare at the man I can’t fully see. Doctors and nurses a closed circle around him. His brothers watch on from the hall and I’m leaving the room to speak to them. One of them shouts, another scowls, the other, he is cold and kind and calm, all of them covered in blood. I take them into a separate room, and when I go back to the man, death has moved on, and he is breathing once again.

There’s salt in the air, the breeze is too strong to be called as such, it’s a wind, but it’s warm, blowing my hair across my face like little lashes whipping my cheeks. The boy is not much older than me, but we have the same eyes and the same black hair. He passes me a rainbow pinwheel, and then takes my hand in his, stretching it out until our elbows are straight and the wind is whipping it around and around with a trilling sound that makes me bubble with laughter.

A warm hand comes over my shoulder, long fingers curling over the top of my chest. I tilt my head back, a bright smile on my mouth that makes my cheeks ache. But it only grows as I lean further back, tilting my chin with a laugh bursting free of my lips as the young woman beams down at me. Long black hair flapping across her face, her blue eyes like mine, but not quite the same, she smiles, and my chest grows as warm as my skin under the sun’s rays.

“Ti amo, dolce ragazza.”

The corner is dark, cloaked in shadows where I hide. My hand smothering my nose and mouth to hide the noise of my panicked rasps of breath. The smell of my skin makes me gag, my throat tightening and constricting until I have to retch into the cup of my palm. Cigars scent my skin, coating me in the rough, sweet aroma of him.

I ran, but I shouldn’t have.

He’s going to make me regret it.

Unafraid.

I let him take what he wants from me. Only touching my behind, never anything else.

If I’m good, it doesn’t hurt as much.

If I’m still, he doesn’t curl his fingers inside me, ensuring that I bleed.

If I bleed, it’s worse.

My lips are bitten dry, but my eyes are drier.

I don’t cry anymore.

Not for him.

Not for me.

I think of the blue eyes I don’t understand and close my own.

Chapter 28

Luna

There’s a blood-red cardinal perched on the headstone of a Mrs Victoria Henry Jonathan Morris, with the dates eighteen-eleven to eighteen-fifty-six etched into the crumbling sandstone. That’s all there is. I don’t know if she was a mother, a sister, a niece.

That’s what I am.

Confirmed with blood for DNA testing.

Vittorio Gambino’s niece.

My memories are coming back like a fast-forwarded movie reel. Some things are flooding, others trickling, but there’s nothing of him. My real uncle.

After we ruined Thorne and Haisley’s celebration last night, Wolf hasn’t slept much, taking calls on and off all day from Vito, and Thorne and Stryder. I’ve just been out here, breathing in the fresh air I’ve been deprived of for the last twenty-three years.

I remember him too.

Uncle Nolan.

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