Page 29 of Inferno
‘Sophie.’ Millie dropped her voice. ‘I think you have a problem.’
I swallowed another offending quiver and mashed my words together. ‘I know. I’m pretty sure the Marino Mafia family have been following me.’
‘I’m talking about a different kind of problem.’
A single tear slid fast and hard down my cheek. I wiped it away. ‘The switchblade is gone,’ I said. ‘So it’s done.’
She was still staring at the trees. ‘This is not what I meant by closure.’
PART II
CHAPTER ELEVENTHE BLACK HAND
I spent the rest of the afternoon at Millie’s, purposely not talking about what had happened in the cemetery. The switchblade was gone and I was trying to ignore the emptiness it had left behind. We made cookies and watched old movies back to back until guilt at leaving my mother in the general gloominess of our house began to eat away at me. Real life was waiting at home – the shadows on the wall, the screams in the night, the gaping hole where my father should be. I left as evening was falling, dragging myself out of Millie’s distraction bubble. I was experiencing a sudden urge to stretch my legs and work off at least some of the sugar I had packed into my body, so I could at least try and sleep tonight.
The sun was beginning to dip, tingeing the sky with streaksof pink and orange. It wasn’t until I was passing the diner that I became aware of the black Mercedes trailing behind me. The traffic on Main Street had declined and now cars passed by in dregs.
I turned into the lot and stopped walking. The Mercedes parked several spaces away. The engine shut off and the girl with purple hair emerged. She flicked her hair from her face but the bangs held steady, drooping over her eyes. There was a forced casualness about her stance – her arms hung limply by her sides, but her hands were clenched in fists.
She rounded the car and came towards me. I squared my shoulders to appear bigger than I was. We were almost the same height and she was slight, too. She stopped too close to me and I stepped backwards, away from her citrus perfume. It took a moment to find her eyes underneath the bangs and the black kohl powder she had over-rimmed them with.
‘Sophie Gracewell,’ she said, appraising me with unashamed forwardness. Her voice was a lot softer than I expected it to be. It struck me again how young she was – she couldn’t be much older than me. She twirled her hands in front of her as though she was pointing me out to an invisible audience. ‘God, I feel like I’ve been trying to get you on your own for, like, my whole life.’ She smiled broadly, revealing two dimples so pronounced that it suddenly seemed impossible to be intimidated by her. Which was irritatingly misleading.
‘That’s funny,’ I said, not laughing. ‘I feel like I’ve been avoiding you for about that long, too.’
She nodded, her smile faltering as she heaved a sigh. ‘I’ve been freaking you out, I know. I’m sorry.’
Her contrition disarmed me, and, softer than I intended to, I said, ‘There’s a right way and a wrong way to approach someone, you know.’
She started chewing on the corner of her lip, smearing her fuchsia lipstick across her teeth. She was wringing her hands and I realized she was as jittery as I was.
‘I take it you’re a Marino,’ I said.
Her eyes went wide. ‘So you’ve heard of us?’
‘Somewhat.’
‘All good, I’m sure.’ She offered me a bashful smile, all doe-eyed, with those dimples again. There was a small gap between her two front teeth.
‘So my uncle sent you?’
I crunched my palms into fists, feeling the sweat on my fingertips.
She shook her head. ‘I didn’t think you’d have figured it out.’
Poof! There goes the truce.
Thank God I hadn’t mentioned anything about this to Luca.
The girl’s grin betrayed a sense of lightness that was buried beneath the dramatic make-up and severe hair. ‘How did you know that?’
‘I guessed,’ I lied.
She broke off into a chesty laugh. ‘He said you were clever, but I think you had me figured out at the movie theatre. I’m sorry if I scared you. I was trying to get a minute to talk to you by yourself. No one else is supposed to know.’
It was hard to dislike her – as far as Mafia types went, she was surprisingly normal. I might have let my guard drop if I hadn’t known her surname. ‘What’s your name?’ I asked her.‘Can I know that, at least?’ Anything to distract from the pulsingMarinoin my head.
‘Sara.’ She feigned a curtsy and I found myself laughing before clamping my mouth shut. God, she was weird, too. What the hell was she doing running errands for my uncle? She should be out being a teenager.
