Page 56 of Lost in the Moonlight

“The sad thing is,” she said as she turned, leaning on the counter with a look of true grief in her eyes, “if they’d waiteda few days, Dad likely wouldn’t have remembered what had happened. And he could never have testified. The defense would have made mincemeat out of his disease and his bad memory.”

Tears flooded her eyes, and I couldn’t stop myself any longer. I went to her, pulling her into me, trying to give whatever comfort I could.

“He came into the house, screaming for me. I was in bed, but I was awake because it was hard for me to sleep until he got home. When I hit the hallway, he was frantic, eyes wild. I could barely understand what he was saying. Babbling about the attack and them chasing him, screaming at me to hide. At first, I thought it was just him losing it a bit more. There’d been a couple of incidents when he’d been violent without understanding it. So, when he shoved me into the coat closet near the door, my first instincts were to calm him down and call Mom. I’d just started to push the closet door open to try and talk him down when the first bullet hit. They shot out the lock and then slammed into the house.”

She took a deep breath, arms reaching around me, fisting my sweater at the back. Her forehead rested against my chest.

“Danny Vitale emptied a clip in him. Through the crack in the closet door, I saw every single one of the bullets hit him. Saw…”

She didn’t sob. She didn’t cry, but I could feel the tension in her body as she relived it. I understood and wished I could take away the pain. But it was impossible. The moment I’d come to after the crash and seen the gaping hole in the back of Sienna’s head had never gone away. It would never go away.

Willow trembled but kept going with the story. “They must have thought Dad was alone, because they weren’t wearing their masks anymore, and when Danny turned to talk to his brother, I saw his face—the scar on his cheek and the terrifying satisfactionin his brown eyes. He was high on drugs for sure, but I think he was higher on what he’d done… I was petrified he’d see me peeking out. I didn’t breathe. I didn’t move.”

She paused to collect herself, but I felt the tremor that went through her as she held on.

“I thought for sure I’d be next. Then, as if he’d heard or seen something, he took a step toward the closet just as his brother stepped farther into the room where I could see him too. I knew Roci from high school. He was in my PE class.”

She squeezed me tighter again and then looked up. “My phone started vibrating in my pocket. I didn’t know it, but Dad had called Mom as he’d run home, and she was trying to get ahold of one of us. The noise…” She shook her head. “They both turned toward me just as the first sirens could be heard. I dropped to the ground seconds before Roci emptied his clip into the closet door. The only thing that saved my life was this set of old speakers my dad had been meaning to take to the recycling center.”

Absolute fury rolled through me, mixing with her fear. It bled from her to me until I could almost imagine being there, huddled on the floor of a closet as bullets rained around me.Fuck. “As the sirens got closer, they ran, jumping into their truck and roaring off. As soon as they were gone, I flew out of the closet and tried to save Dad.” Willow let go of me and looked down at her hands as if they were covered with his blood. “But I couldn’t save him. There were too many holes.”

I brushed a long strand of moonlight behind her ear, and she looked up at me with eyes that were seeing the past rather than my sunny kitchen. I wanted her here, in the present, where nothing could touch her, but instead, I let her finish. I let her purge it from her soul so it wouldn’t continue to fester.

“The first day I went back to school, I was beat up by one of the Viceroys’ girlfriends. I was told if I testified, I’d be as dead as my dad. We got death threats every day. In the mail. On our computers. Even text messages on our phones after we changed our numbers. They seemed to find us everywhere we stayed, even when we were at our friends’ and coworkers’ houses. They even found us when we stayed in hotels. That was when the Marshals got involved. For the first year or so, the Viceroys didn’t give up, trying everything they could to find me. The Marshals kept us abreast of each effort. The Viceroys hurt people we knew, people Mom worked with.

“They were only kids, seventeen and nineteen years old, but the Viceroys have serious clout amongst the gangs in Chicago. They’d moved up the criminal food chain, bordering on mafia status, while not a single charge had stuck to any member of the group before then. Their brother, Aaron, was a criminal defense attorney, so everyone assumed they had police officers, administrators, and judges in their pockets. But because of me, because I saw them, the authorities got a warrant that allowed them not only to bring Danny and Roci in but also gave them access to locations the police had never entered before. They collected evidence on a host of other illegal activities that they used to make even more arrests and put additional Viceroys in jail.

“Everything hinged on Dad’s case. If the prosecution couldn’t get the murder charges to stick, or if the original warrant was thrown out, everything they’d found when they’d taken Danny and Roci into custody would be inadmissible. I became the cornerstone of not just the murder case but all those other cases.”

My stomach bottomed out.

“When did this all happen?” I asked. “You said you were in high school?”

“Six years ago. I’d just turned seventeen.”

“They’re behind bars now, right? It’s over?” I asked.

She nodded. “It took four years to bring them to trial.”

“Four years!” Disgust wound through me. “You’ve got to be kidding!”

“Chicago has the worst arrest-to-trial rate in the United States, and Aaron made appeal after appeal, trying to get my statement, the warrant, and any evidence thrown out. The prosecutor told us they suspected Aaron was actually the head of the Viceroys, but no one could prove it. His role in the case and the people he bribed were how they got so much information about me. About us.

“For the first two years, I was terrified I’d walk out the door to find a gun in my face. But slowly, after we were here a while and nothing came for us, I started to breathe easier. The Marshals have never lost anyone in active protection. Not a single person in their custody who followed the protocols has been hurt, and that helped. Still helps. When I finally got to testify, when the jury came back with the guilty verdict, the relief I felt…” She paused, head tilted, brows burrowed. “I thought maybe it was over. But Aaron turned and looked at me that day, and there was so much hatred in his eyes. I knew he still wanted me dead.”

“You’re afraid this is him? Out for revenge?” I asked, acid burning through my insides at the mere idea. Willow moved restlessly through my kitchen, touching things, righting things, running a finger over the ivy I’d painted along the cabinets.

“No... Maybe. We got news this week that Roci was stabbed in prison. He died. So maybe Aaron blames me for that too. ButI keep reminding myself that we’ve done nothing to blow our cover. The Marshals won’t let the Vitales find us. That’s why the note has to have been from Poco. No one else can find me.”

She was trying to convince herself as much as me that it was true. The protective instincts that had flared to life from the moment I’d met her raged even stronger until they were a burning inferno.

My dad had plenty of hate groups who’d like to see him dead, but I’d never had one personally hunting me down. Who’d be happy to see my blood splattered. I just knew what it was like to want to switch places with the ones who’d died.

The fact Willow had built a life for herself here, the fact she could smile and create food and art and laugh and joke, was nothing short of a miracle. It made her courageous in ways I couldn’t begin to name.

It made me want to give her a host of new memories so they would bury the dark, ugly ones under an avalanche of beautiful, happy ones.

Chapter Eighteen

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