The room around me starts to tremble.
There’s no holding it in this time.
Flinch. Gasp.
It sets off an inferno of rage.
I move as fast as lightning. My bowl and the entirety of its steaming hot contents end up in Vito’s face. He shrieks from the burn. Good. I hope he goes blind.
Nelo jumps, reaching for his gun. Suddenly, Ras is there, pushing Vale out of the way and knocking Nelo’s gun out of his grasp.
I jerk Nelo by his wrist and slam the hand that touched Vale on the island. The dark scab stares up at me for a moment before I cover it with the barrel of my gun.
“I really thought you’d learned your lesson the first time you insulted her.”
His wild eyes meet mine. “You’re fucking crazy. What the fuck-”
Flinch. Gasp.
I pull the trigger.
VALENTINA
The last time I heard a gun go off was when I shot my husband. I remember the silence that followed as Martina and I stared at his unconscious body and the growing pool of blood.
This time, the silence is replaced by screams.
Screams that trigger a host of other memories. Nelo, in particular, sounds just like this one older man Lazaro bought to me. My fourth. He was so loud. It was like he thought the louder he was, the less it would hurt.
When my gaze drifts over the hole in Nelo’s hand, I start to retch.
Damiano’s got his gun pressed to Nelo’s head. “Get her out of here,” he snaps at Ras.
Ras makes a move toward me, but I shake my head. He needs to stay here. Vito is still curled in fetal position, whimpering on the floor with remnants of the stew stuck to his face, but the pain will fade eventually. Damiano shouldn’t be here alone with the two of them.
“I’m fine,” I say to Ras and get the hell out of the kitchen.
I don’t stop moving until I’m back in my room. For once, I wish I could lock the door from the inside. The broken plates from earlier are still scattered all over the floor, and when I step on a shard, a sharp pain shoots through my foot. Crap.
I sink down to the floor and cradle my foot in my lap. The piece of glass is lodged inside, but I can tell it’s just a shallow cut.
The same can’t be said about Nelo.
What is Damiano going to do?
He said they were here sniffing around on behalf of the don, and if their clan is anything like the Garzolos, shooting one of the don’s men is a big no-no. Given what I now know about the relationship between Damiano and Sal, this could be all the excuse Sal needs to deal with his Damiano problem once and for all. So much for avoiding an escalation.
He just jeopardized his entire plan for…me.
He stood up for me.
It might be the first time anyone in the mafia has actually given a shit about my discomfort. Shouldn’t it feel good that he cared enough about me to do what he did?
But it doesn’t feel good. My stomach roils.
I’m starting to believe Damiano really could offer me protection, but that protection would be wasted on me, wouldn’t it?
Noises of a commotion break out below. It sounds like Damiano is kicking his guests out. I consider going down there for a moment but quickly decide to stay put. I’d only get in their way.
I should take the glass out, but I don’t want to see more red. If someone ever wrote the story of my life, it would be written in blood. Sometimes when I close my eyes, all I can see is me bathed in it. Did I feel empathy for Nelo when he screamed just now? Or did I do that thing again? The one I’d gotten so good at down in that damp basement…
The noises cease, only to be replaced with rapid footsteps. My fingers tense around my foot just as the bedroom door swings open and Damiano barges inside.
He finds me sitting on the floor and releases a heaving breath. “Vale.”
“Hi.” My voice is a whisper.
He kneels beside me and lets his gaze fall to the sole of my foot. His heavy breaths make his shoulders fall up and down as his brows pinch together. “You hurt yourself. Let’s get you cleaned up.”
“No.” I hunch over, hiding my injury from him.
He frowns at the movement and then sighs. “I wish you didn’t have to see that. It must have been a shock. There was a lot of blood.”
My body jerks.
I turn away from Damiano, but he won’t let me move far from him. A hand curls around my shoulder. “Talk to me.”
“It wasn’t a lot.”
It takes him a heartbeat to catch on. “Of blood?”
“It wasn’t a lot. You must’ve missed the radial artery. If you’d hit it, he would have bled out all over your kitchen floor. Then again, if you went through it completely, the body may have sucked it up and stopped the flow.”
The air in the room compresses to a point. “How do you know all this?” he asks slowly.
I look at my right hand, the one that would always hold the knife. Keeping a secret doesn’t become easier over time. The weight of it accumulates, until you’re faced with a choice-crumble beneath it or let it go.
I don’t want to crumble.
“I learned a bunch of anatomy after it started,” I say. “I thought maybe I could find ways to kill them quickly, so that they wouldn’t feel so much pain. It worked for a few. I learned all the arteries, and I’d nick the closest one in whatever area he told me to cut. He caught on and told me the next time they died too early, he’d do to me what I was meant to do to them.”
“Lazaro?” Damiano asks, his voice so low it feels like a tremor inside my heart.
“I often thought the thing he got off on the most was watching me decide. Would I follow his commands? Would I abandon my empathy for other people? No, not even abandon, just push it aside, turn it down to zero. It was interesting to him, I think, because he always gave me the illusion of a choice. I could tell him no. But it was just that, an illusion. If I didn’t kill whoever he brought to me, he’d kill someone I loved, like Lorna, our housekeeper. At the end of the day, blood would be spilled.”
“He made you kill people?”
“First he made me torture them. Cut off their fingers and toes. Mark their flesh with words. Skin them alive. He liked doing it himself but for some reason he liked watching me do it more.”