Page 46 of Mafiosa
‘Don’t act like you wouldn’t want to see the pyramids.’
‘Of course I would,’ he said leaning in until he was distractingly close. ‘Maybe in this version, I could come with you…’
I tried to ignore the scent of his aftershave, the warmth of his body heat as he pressed against me. ‘You’d probably get motion sickness on the way there.’
‘You’dprobably get sunburnt.’
‘Andyou’dspend all the time reading lame poetry. OrThe Iliadfor the fiftieth time.’
‘Look at you, knowing the name of an actual book. I’m impressed.’
I punched him in the arm. ‘You’re evicted from my dream.’
He laughed again but there was something else in it this time, a sense of empathy, of understanding. ‘Oh well,’ he said, leaning back down, away from me. ‘It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.’
I laid my head beside his. The excitement had drained away again, and the blanket of reality floated down to cover us. Our sighs weaved together, into the air above us.
‘I killed a man tonight, Sophie,’ Luca said into the silence.
The meaning was implicit. There was no other life, there was only this one. And his die had already been cast.
‘I feel heavy,’ he said quietly. ‘I feel heavy inside.’
‘I know,’ I said softly. ‘I’m sorry.’ Iwassorry. I was sorry that I had failed to do it; that he had had to take that burden from me, and that he was sad, right down in his bones,because of it.
I felt for his hand. He spread his fingers and laced them through mine.
Overhead, a star streaked a line of bright white across the sky. ‘Look,’ I said. ‘A shooting star.’
‘Mmm,’ said Luca, the sound rumbling in his chest. Another flash, this time over to the left. ‘There’s another,’ he said, clasping my hand a little tighter in his own and pointing with his other hand.
‘Do you wish on them?’ I asked.
‘Not in a long time,’ he said. ‘When I was young, Evelina and I would lie out here all the time and look at the stars. She taught me the constellations. Told me the stories behind them. We used to wish on them.’
‘She sounds amazing.’
‘She was.’ His voice changed, a sense of reverence in his words. ‘She used to talk about it all the time – this sense of possibility. You couldn’t see it, or touch it, but you had to chase it. She told me to chase it, no matter what…’ He trailed off, and I felt the sadness rise up around us like a lake. I was determined to keep us afloat.
‘Let’s wish tonight, then,’ I said softly. ‘In her memory.’
‘OK,’ he said, after a beat. ‘Let’s wish.’
‘OK,’ I said, smiling too, as more stars began to burst overhead.
We stayed like that for a long time, watching the sky as it lit up in silver streaks.
I wished on every shooting star, and all my wishes were for him.
CHAPTER TWENTYTHE CLICK
By Sunday morning, Libero Marino’s ‘gangland’ murder was all over the newspapers. His brother, Marco, had released a chilling statement on behalf of the family. They were coming out for their revenge, and they wanted the world to know it. They wantedusto know it. Millie rang to tell me it was trending on Twitter. I feigned surprise and withheld the truth until she hung up.
The news was out there butEvelinaremained, happily, police-free. I knew we had covered our tracks, but I still couldn’t figure out how the boys were escaping interrogations. Everyone knew the bloody history between the Falcones and the Marinos. At first, I thought that perhaps the police were just monumentally bad at their jobs, but it became clear that when two Mafia clans are at war, it makesmore sense to turn a blind eye and let the criminals take care of each other. That was what Paulie told me. As long as innocents weren’t being killed, we were doing the city’s job for them.
I had been staring at Libero’s face in my mind all night, and I decided that eating some cereal at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning would be preferable to trying to ignore the mental chant ofTraitor! Traitor! Traitor! Failure! Failure! Failure!
And that god-awful question that pulsed uneasily in my mind:How are you going to shoot Jack? How are you going to avenge your mother?
