Page 98 of Vendetta
I could hear his knees crack as he hunkered down beside me. ‘Don’t be ridiculous, Celine.’
I held on tighter.
‘Come on, Soph.’ He grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me away from Luca’s body in one stiff yank. ‘Turn away.’
I clawed forwards, but he pushed me back, sliding me across the ground until my bare legs were stained with Luca’s blood and I was too far away to stop him. I screamed as he cocked the gun at his head.
There was an almighty pop. It was louder this time, and it seemed to change the particles in the air around me, pushing them against each other in small vibrations. My mother and I screamed, but Luca, who was barely Luca now, remained intact.
Instead, the gun flew out of Jack’s hand, and skidded along the floor past me.
‘Son of a bitch!’ he cursed. His head was lolling, his expression dazed. The bullet had gone right through his hand, and now the tear was pumping blood down his arm. Jack shrunk to the floor, gasping and clutching his crimson fingers. I kicked his gun away. It slid to a stop between two bullet-riddled crates, far from his reach.
At the back of the warehouse, Nic was sprinting towards us, his face spattered with dirt, his clothes soaked with what must have been someone else’s blood. The gun was still in his hand, half raised at my uncle, like he was planning to shoot at him again. I guess he wasn’t kidding about that perfect aim.
‘Both your friends are dead!’ he shouted.
Jack started scrabbling backwards towards the entrance, pulling himself across the floor with his uninjured hand. ‘Sophie!’ he shouted, but he wasn’t focusing; he couldn’t see me. But I could see him; his pale face was awash with terror and his blood was mixing with Luca’s as he dragged himself through it.
Nic stopped running and raised his gun again. ‘Stop!’ he commanded.
‘Nic, don’t!’ I yelled. ‘He’s not armed. Just let him go!’
Nic’s head twitched like there was something buzzing around it. He hesitated. Jack was at the door now; he stuck hisgood hand through and tried to pull himself up. He was almost there.
And then Nic shot him.
My mother and I screamed. Jack slumped against the doorway, and a blood-red star started to swell across the left side of his shirt.
Nic skidded to a stop beside Luca. He didn’t even look at Jack. He stowed his gun and crouched down beside his brother, checking the pulse in his neck. ‘We need to get him to the hospital,’ he said to my mother. She was visibly shaking, but she was still plugging the wound.
I was too numb to move. I was still staring at my uncle and the new, terrified expression in his eyes. He was still alive, and he was looking at me, his body slumped half in and half out of the warehouse. I scanned the entry wound – it was just below his left shoulder. Not quite his heart, although it could easily have been. By all appearances, from where my mother and Nic were huddled, my uncle seemed very much dead, but I could see the alertness in his expression, and the fear in his eyes. Had Nic shot to kill or to wound Jack? And if he knew what I knew then – that the bullet had missed my uncle’s heart, then would he finish the job?
‘Sophie,’ my mother said, her voice heaving. She and Nic had started to hoist Luca between them. ‘Can you help us? We need you to plug the wound while we move him.’
Did Jack deserve my forgiveness? No. Did he deserve to die? That wasn’t my decision to make; it wasn’t anyone’s. I didn’t have any time to think. I stood up without saying anything, sticking my hand out to help, and blocking their view of my uncle’s body as I came towards them. Then we moved quickly,all three of us in tandem, towards the back of the warehouse, away from all the blood. I didn’t turn around to see if Jack was still there.
My mother and Nic carried Luca into the remaining SUV, while I stumbled along beside them, clutching my ribs with one hand and plugging his wound with the other. And then we took off, Luca and I lying side by side in the back seat, my hand pressed tight against his torso as our laboured breathing mingled in the air between us.
As Nic sped through the darkness, lost in hurried conversation with my mother, I drifted away from the pain inside me, and into the darkness that had been creeping up on me all evening.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONETHE HOSPITAL
For the second time this summer, I awoke in a hospital room. Everything around me was strange and discoloured. Cartoonish images danced back and forth in my brain as I lay still, feeling a million miles above the Earth. I pulled my hand up around my chest and felt a subtle pinch as my eyes rolled back in my head.
‘Sophie?’ A tinkling bell infiltrated my bubble.
I rolled my head around and landed on my right cheek, which throbbed dully beneath me, like the pain was just outside of my body, looking in. I tried to groan, but it caught in my throat and wheezed out in pathetic puffs of nothingness.
‘Sweetheart?’ My vision sharpened until my mother’s face loomed just inches from my own. Her eyes were glassy and her face was drawn. ‘How are you feeling?’
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t find the words, and I knew even if I could, I wouldn’t be able to push them out. I scrunched up my face and blinked over and over until my mother’s movements became disjointed.
‘The doctor has given you morphine. You have two broken ribs and a broken nose. Don’t worry if you feel a little strange.’ She reached over to my un-obscured hand and squeezed it tightly. The sensation was little more than a slight tickle.
For every moment I lay there, feeling high and low all at once, memories flashed across my addled brain. I remembered the pain of every Calvino-inflicted blow, the argument with Luca at Felice’s mansion, a long, meandering drive to nowhere. I pulled my hands under the blankets and, dimly, I became aware of the hospital gown I was wearing. Beside me, on the bedside locker, my tank top and cut-offs were folded in a pile. The top of a switchblade peeked out from my front pocket. There were more flickers of confusion and then some-thing real, another disjointed memory. It was Luca’s knife. But why did I have it again? I scrunched my eyes shut and tried to reach inside the darkest parts of my mind.
When I opened them, Nic had appeared inside the room, looking like he hadn’t slept in a very long time; his hair was tousled across his forehead and dark circles had spread out under his eyes. He handed a paper cup of coffee to my mother and sat next to her so that their faces appeared side by side. For a second I could have sworn they were nothing more than floating heads, but then the morphine crest subsided enough for me to register some level of reality.
