Page 21 of Brutal Legacy

“Mrs. Conti, further to our previous conversation, I’m afraid I forgot to pass on an important piece of information. Your father has sent something to you. Have you received it?”

“What? No! Where did he send it?” I immediately worried.

The lawyer read out my old address. I hadn’t lived there in years. I’d stopped being able to afford it long ago.

Shit.

“Did you get it?”

“No, not yet. I’ll see if I can get it,” I said.

The lawyer was quiet a beat, then spoke. “It’s a very important package. I’d recommend retrieving it as soon as possible.”

“Right, I know,” I muttered, distracted as I put my phone on speaker and started trying to look up post offices around my old zip code.

“No, I don’t think you do. It is very important, Mrs. Conti. It could be the difference between life or death for a man like your father.”

I paused, something about the lawyer’s careful wording catching my attention.

“A man like my father?” I repeated.

“A man with many enemies,” the lawyer clarified. “Please call me when you have it. I need to pass on that it is safe.”

He hung up, and I looked up a bus that would take me to my old neighborhood. Great, my father had sent me something so important, I needed to waste my lunch hour tracking it down. Iguessed it wasn’t his fault that I had moved and not given him my new address, but still, it was annoying.

I worked steadilythrough the afternoon and into the early evening. I always took on a lot of commissions and extra jobs. It helped pay off Howel and his never-ending payment plan. I supposed I should be glad he didn’t just kill me, but then again, what good would that do? You couldn’t get money from a corpse, and there was no one to go to after me. The real danger was that he’d hurt me to teach me a lesson and scare me into paying faster.

It’s only a matter of time.

The thought should have scared me more than it did. But the truth was that I was pretty numb. I moved through my days in a haze, shell-shocked in the aftermath of my life. What should have been the happiest time had turned out to be the most painful.

What was there to look forward to?

I wasn’t sure what the answer to that was, but it wasn’t in my nature to give up.

I was a stubborn bitch until the bitter end. I wasn’t built to tap out.

I’d go down swinging, every time.

I commuted home in a dream, and only realized I’d been on autopilot for nearly the entire journey when I found myself walking down my street. It wasn’t too late in the evening, andtraffic was still moving sluggishly down the main road. People were out and about, going to dinner or meeting friends. A family with a baby in a carrier were just getting out of a car. I watched them as they walked up to a much nicer building than mine. Good. I wouldn’t wish my building on anyone, especially not a new family with a little baby to take care of.

I was looking for my keys when I was struck again by the strange sensation that someone was watching me. An itch between my shoulder blades. I glanced along the street. Shadows were gathering in the corners.

I couldn’t see anyone, but the feeling persisted.

I headed upstairs and fought with the door for a few seconds prior to entering my apartment.

I let my heavy bags down with a sigh of relief and glugged some water from the bottle in the fridge. Damn, I was low on groceries.

I only had noodles. Tommaso had abhorred them and scoffed at the thought that such a freeze-dried concoction could be related in any way to real pasta. I’d eaten them more in the year since he’d passed than in all the years that had come before.

Just the thought of my late husband sent my mind spiraling back to Castel Amaro, and I remembered the package that I’d tried to pick up from the post office. Apparently, since no one had been at my old address to receive the package my father sent, it had been taken to a sorting center. The hours were insanely inconvenient, so I hadn’t managed to pick it up today. I’d have to go again.

I turned to the sink and ran water to boil for noodles. God bless the person who’d invented instant ramen. As an Italian,it was a very specific kind of betrayal to my heritage to live on dehydrated noodles, but there was nothing I could do about that right now. Maybe one day.

“Beneath the frozen river, currents still run.”

Even in my memory, his deep voice had me shivering when I remembered how it had stroked across the words.

---