Page 78 of Convenient Mafia Vows

No mention of the woman who was in the car with him.

My mouth is dry. My palms are sweaty, and the apartment suddenly feels claustrophobic even though there’s only the two of us in a room that could easily accommodate an entire party.

I have to ask. “What happened to the woman?”

“She died.”

She died?He wasn’t with Sienna. This was a separate incident. Two wrecks on the same night, which I guess isn’t so unbelievable especially on a night like New Year’s.

My heart does a double take and starts racing to the tempo of utter relief. Kyle didn’t leave Sienna for dead… Although this thought is accompanied by another icy shudder that travels the length of my spine.

“Did your brothers pull her out of the wreckage?”

He inhales deeply. “She was dead. There wasn’t time. They called the emergency services and got me out of there. We couldn’t afford to have the press get hold of the story.”

“So, they left her there.” My voice is cold.

I’m trying to picture the scene: Kyle lying in the middle of the road, perhaps fading in and out of consciousness; Cash and Bash feeling the passenger’s pulse and trading her life for their brother; Caleb God only knows where. I shouldn’t really blame Kyle, but there’s something cold and heavy puddling in the pitof my stomach at the thought of this family protecting their own rather than saving the life of a young woman.

“I trawled the tabloids after.” Kyle picks the loose skin around his thumbnail. I never noticed the pulpy flesh around his nails before. “I wanted to find out who she was, to pay my respects to her family, to tell them what happened. I hoped… I hoped that maybe we could all gain some closure from it.”

“What was her name?” I grind out the words with clenched jaw.

“I…” Kyle shakes his head. “She told me her name was Ruby Tuesday, but she made it up. She was wearing a costume.” He closes his eyes briefly. “She was Wilma fromThe Flintstones.”

Bile rises in my throat, and I cover my mouth, trying to swallow it. Kyle was trying to find closure for his survivor guilt, while Sienna would never have found him because his brothers covered up his part in the incident.

“She wasn’t dead.”

“Huh?” Kyle furrows his brow. His thumb is bleeding, and he covers it with his other hand as if he can make it go away. Just like his brothers did with the woman they left for dead in the car wreckage five years ago. “H-how do you know this?”

“Because the woman in the car was my best friend, Sienna.” Tears spill from my eyes now, and I don’t wipe them away. “She didn’t die in the crash. After your brothers rescued you, the car caught fire. Sienna suffered burns on seventy-five percent of her body. She has been in and out of hospital ever since, having operations and skin grafts.”

It sounds as if I’m reading from a script, but it’s the only way I can recount Sienna’s horrific story without breaking down.

“Sienna? Your friend, Sienna?” His voice has shrunk, and when I finally force myself to look at him, he seems smaller somehow too. “Is she… Did she ever…”

“If you mean did she ever talk about you, the answer is no. You left her to die in that wreckage.” My voice rises a notch, but I don’t even try to contain it.

“I didn’t. I thought?—”

“It doesn’t matter what you thought.” I cut him off. “Sienna knows that two people went into that car crash, and only one got left behind. That night changed her life, and not in a good way.”

As the enormity of what I’m saying sinks in, Kyle’s shoulders begin to shudder. “I’m sorry. I’m so very sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen.” He hangs his head low, his chin almost touching the counter. “I need to speak to her.”

“She’s missing.” Sienna was almost killed by a member of this family, and now she’s missing because of them too. Or at least, because of my involvement with them. It amounts to the same thing. “She wouldn’t want to speak to you even if she was here. Because of what happened that night, she has never dated anyone else since.”

Kyle is on his feet in a heartbeat, his cheeks damp with tears. “I’ll find her. I’ll do whatever it takes, I’ll scour the city, I’ll scour the entire fucking United States of America to find her, I promise you. And when I do, I’ll make everything right again.”

“How?” I suddenly feel bone-weary, recent events pressing down on me and making my limbs heavy. “By offering her money? That’s what the Murrays do, isn’t it? You buy whatever you want, including people.”

“No, not with money, that’s not what I meant.” He reaches for my hand across the counter, and I snatch it away. “You have to believe me, Victoria.”

“Why should I believe you? Why should I listen to anything you have to say?”

I climb down from the stool. I have to get away from him, from the apartment, the bodyguard waiting in the elevator. I have to get away from all of them. Even Caleb.

Slowly, like the sun peeping out from behind the horizon, it dawns on me that I told Caleb about Sienna. I told him that the guy she was with left her in the wreckage, and I’m almost a hundred percent certain that I told him it happened at New Year’s five years ago.

---