“You stupid little bitch,” he started.
“Stop! All of you! What is this, fucking preschool? We’re all going to sit down, and we’re all going to talk.”
“Salvatore.”
Roman said my name and walked into the room. I just then realized he’d been absent.
“I just got off the phone with Paul Pagani, Sr. Neither he nor his son will be here after all. He’s already addressed his son’s responsibility and taken care of it. Jr. won’t be a problem, he assures us. The moneys that were taken have been returned, and he’s given his word his allegiance is to the head of the Benedetti family.”
I nodded. “Then this will truly be a family meeting.”
“Apart from this whore,” Franco muttered.
The tension in the room was palpable. No one moved to sit, and it looked like either Dominic or my father would explode at any minute.
I sighed, shaking my head, but before I could speak, Dominic drew a pistol and held it at his side.
“She’s the mother of your other grandchild, old man, but you’re too fucking stupid to see it, aren’t you?”
“Dominic, give me the gun,” I said, shadowing him as he moved around the table to where my father stood, but it was like he couldn’t hear me. Couldn’t see me. Couldn’t see anyone but our father.
“I was too much of a coward to tell you she was pregnant with my baby. Mine, you stupid fuck.”
“Dominic,” I started, cautious.
Franco watched him, glancing at Isabella for a moment as he finally understood. But Dominic wasn’t finished.
“You never cared about me. All your love went to Sergio.”
“That’s not true,” our father said. “He was just firstborn.”
“Fuck firstborn! This isn’t the fucking Dark Ages. It doesn’t fucking matter.”
“You betrayed your family. I accepted you as my own, and you betrayed me.”
All heads snapped to my father then.
Roman approached Franco and whispered something into his ear. I turned to Dominic to see his face as he slowly understood what was being said.
“No, I’ll tell this bastard who he is.” My father shoved Roman away. “Son of a fucking foot soldier who thinks he should be head of my family.”
“You’re lying,” Dominic said, raising the pistol.
“Dominic, give me the gun,” I said, mirroring every move he made.
I heard a gasp at the door, and Isabella moved, shielding Lucia, who’d just walked in.
“Dominic, please, give me the gun.”
“You all thought your mother was a saint. Died a martyr.” Franco snorted. “You didn’t know her very well. None of you did.”
“You’re a fucking liar, old man,” Dominic spewed.
“She whored herself out.”
“He’s not worth it,” I said to my brother. “He’s lying, and he’s not worth it.” But it was like he couldn’t hear me at all.
“Don’t you dare talk about her like that.” Dominic wiped his face with the back of the hand that held the pistol.
“Like your bitch,” Franco said, gesturing to Isabella.
That was it, it was finished. Dominic aimed, my father’s face changed to one of surprise, of shock. I don’t know if any of us thought he’d do it. Thought he’d actually pull the trigger.
I grabbed Dominic’s arm, but he cocked the gun. My father’s mouth opened, another taunt leaving it, pushing Dominic to the breaking point.
Gunshots never sound the way you think they should. They’re louder, deadlier, and a hell of a lot faster than in the movies.
Lucia’s scream was all I heard. Everything else was background noise. She drowned it all out with her scream.
I lunged between them, intending to push my father out of the way, to save him. To save Dominic from doing something he’d regret for the rest of his life.
But it never worked that way in real life either. Never like the movies. The heroes didn’t walk away, arms raised, triumphant.
More often, they got hurt.
They got killed.
I did knock my father out of the way. Landing on him was softer than the damned marble floors I always hated. A second later, and I’d have been too late.
Or maybe I already was.
Lucia screamed again, dropping to her knees, her hands bloodied, her face splattered with it. Her crutches clanked to the floor near my head as she grabbed my face, looking over her shoulder, shoving someone away. Her tears kept dropping on my face, and she kept wiping them away again and again, talking, I think. Her mouth moved, but no sound came. No sound. Only pain. Only fire in my side.
When I put my hand to the place, it felt warm and wet, and when I reached to touch her pretty, pretty face, I covered it in red, smearing it down over her jaw, her neck, down until she faded from view. The last thing I felt was her hair tickling my face, her body pressing against mine, the movements desperate.
22
Lucia
“Salvatore, no!”
I held his face with one hand and pressed my other hand to the place on his side that wouldn’t stop bleeding. I kissed him. Kissed him and kissed him. When I tried to push the hair back from his forehead, I left blood in its place. His blood. God, there was so much of it. Too much.
“Don’t die.”
He hadn’t promised me that. He’d made me three promises, but he’d never promised me he wouldn’t die.
I’d never asked him to promise that. I’d never…
“Don’t die,” I whispered just to him.
He was too still, and when my sister touched my shoulder, and I looked up at her through the blur the haze of my tears caused, I sucked in a trembling breath. Her face, the look in her eyes, telling me it was bad.
“There’s a helicopter on its way to take him to the hospital,” she whispered, kneeling down beside me, holding me when I turned my attention back to him.
They would take him away. They would take him away, and I would never see him again. Why did they do that? Why did they take them away? How could you hold an empty space? How could you say good-bye?
My lip trembled. I bent down to his face, his beautiful face so pale, so still. My hair made a curtain between us and the room, and I listened for his breath, tried to feel it on my skin, feel its soft warmth. I wanted him to call me pigheaded again.
I wanted to hear him telling me he would keep everyone safe.
He had. He’d kept that promise.
Why hadn’t I made him promise to keep himself safe?
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Lucia.”
My sister said my name, but I ignored her.
“I should have made you promise,” I said, tears rolling from my face onto his. I smeared the blood with them, trying to clean him, remembering then that he had made one promise to me he hadn’t yet kept. “You have to wake up, Salvatore,” I stated, gaining some strength. He kept his promises. He wouldn’t not. “You promised me you’d give me what I wanted. The life I wanted. You promised. You have to wake up now.”
“Lucia,” Isabella said again.
“Go away,” I told her, still cleaning his face with my tears.
“Ma’am.”
Other hands were on me, another voice was talking to me.
“Lucia, they’re here. They’re going to take him to the hospital. You have to let them see Salvatore.”
I kept one hand on Salvatore’s chest, trying not to think about the fact it was still. I looked up at the men, at the room around me, and I leaned away, letting them look at Salvatore. Letting them start their work.
Two other men lifted Franco Benedetti onto a stretcher. Roman looked at all of us, his face one of shock, blood splatters marring it and ruining his perfect suit.
“Ma’am, we need to take them now.”
“Which hospital?” Isabella asked.
“Bellevue.”
“Come on,” Isabella said, dragging me to my feet.
“He’s not
dead?” I asked, confused.
The paramedic gave me a cautious look. “We’ll do what we can for him.”
“Let’s go,” Isabella said again. “We need to get to the hospital. They’ll be much faster with the chopper.”
“What’s happened?” Natalie asked from the doorway, her face crumpling when she saw Salvatore unconscious on the stretcher.
I looked around the room, searching for him, for Dominic. “Where is he?” I asked my sister. “Where is he?” Anger gave me strength, but my sister held fast to me.
“Salvatore got in the way between Dominic and his father,” Isabella said to Natalie.
“Where the hell is Dominic?” I screamed to anyone who would answer.
“Let’s go,” Isabella said. “Salvatore needs you now.”
That got my attention. I turned to her and nodded. I followed her to the front door, cursing the crutches and my damn ankle.
“He’s so fucking stupid,” I said to her as she drove too fast off the grounds.
“He wanted to save everyone,” she modified.
“Why did they take Franco?”
“Heart attack.”
A fresh onslaught of tears came, and I sucked in a loud breath. “He did it for nothing. He tried to save that horrible man for nothing.”
Isabella took my hand and squeezed it, forcing me to look at her. “He’s not dead yet. He needs you to believe in him, understand? You can’t be weak now, not now, Lucia. He needs you.”
I looked at her face. She looked much older than her twenty-two years all of a sudden, and her eyes—they held lifetimes of sadness inside them.
“How’s Luke?” I asked, remembering.
She focused her attention back on the road. “No change.”
“Where’s Dominic?”
“He slipped out.” She shook her head. “I saw his face. He just kept looking at Salvatore, lying at his feet. For so long, it was what he wanted, but then, when it happened…”
“Where is he?”
“His face, Lucia. I’d never seen him look like that before. Not ever.”
But I didn’t care about Dominic or what he felt or what his face looked like. I would kill him with my bare hands when I saw him.
My sister was right, though. Salvatore needed me now, and I would focus all my energy on him. He was a survivor. He would survive. He had to.
When we arrived at the hospital, he was in surgery. They’d brought him to the same unit where Luke had been.
Déjà vu.
Only this time, the doctor wouldn’t talk to us. We weren’t family.
“Fuck! I just want to know if he’s alive!”
“Ma’am, you need to calm down,” the doctor said.
“Lucia.”
I heard a man’s voice behind me. I turned to find Roman walking into the waiting room, his face cleaned of blood, although his shirt still had splatters of it.
“They’re operating. There’s nothing for them to tell.” He turned to the doctor. “Add Lucia DeMarco to the list,” he said. “Keep her updated on Salvatore Benedetti’s condition.”
The doctor nodded and made a note of what I assumed was my name and walked away.
“Thank you,” I said to Roman.
He nodded and sat down. Defeat was the one word I would use to describe him in that moment.
“What about Franco?” Isabella asked.
“Stable”
“Of course. Of course he’s stable while his son is in there possibly dying.” I sank down into a chair, and Isabella wrapped her arms around me.
“Shh. Remember, you have to be strong. He needs you now more than ever.”
I nodded, wiping away tears and snot.
We sat in the waiting room for a long time. Isabella excused herself to make some calls, to make sure the sitter could stay with Effie longer, to check on Luke. Roman and I remained silent, lost in our own misery. All the while, my ankle throbbed.
“He should never have goaded Dominic like that. He’d sworn never to do it.”
I turned to Roman. “What are you talking about?” I hadn’t been in the room, not until it was almost the very end.
Roman glanced at me. “Franco isn’t Dominic’s father, but he loved my sister. Loved her enough to keep it hushed. To act like Dominic was his son all along. He had no right to tell him like this.”
“You’re worried about Dominic? He deserves to be the one in there, not Salvatore.”
He met my gaze. “No one should be in there. Period.”
“I may be a horrible person, but I don’t agree.”
He sighed. “You’re nowhere near a horrible person.”
He got up and left the room. I remained where I was. Isabella stayed with me until, almost four hours later, a doctor finally came out, looking for next of kin.
“That’s me,” I said, although it wasn’t quite me. “Lucia DeMarco.”
He checked his sheet of paper. Satisfied, he looked back at me. The space of that second stretched to an hour, and I dreamed the worst, thought I should prepare myself to hear it, but how did one prepare to hear something that terrible?
“Mr. Benedetti is an incredibly lucky man. And his will to live is tremendous.”
I smiled, feeling a thousand pounds lift from me. “He’s going to make it?”
“He shouldn’t have, not given the route the bullet took, but he is. He’s asking for you.”
“I can see him?”
“Only for a few minutes. He needs to rest. We’ll sedate him, but he’s insisting on seeing you first.”
“He’s pigheaded,” I said, wiping away fresh tears. I followed the doctor, a joy filling me that I’d never in my life felt before. Never knew possible.
I walked into the private room, where machines beeped and doctors and nurses worked around the bed where Salvatore lay, eyes closing, then opening, turning his head away from the nurse who tried to attach yet another tube.
“Salvatore!” I hobbled over to him and took the seat someone pushed behind me.
He opened his eyes and gave me a weak smile. He kept opening and closing his hand, and I placed mine inside it. He stilled then, lay back, and shut his eyes. I sat there and watched, not sure if he held my hand or I held his, not sure it mattered anymore. I watched him sleep, counted the needles in his arms, watched them inject something into the tube of one of the IVs.
“He will be out for a while. You can go home and get some rest. We’ll call you when he’s awake.”
“No,” I said, not taking my eyes off him. “I’m staying here.”
“Ma’am…”
I felt Salvatore’s tiny attempt at squeezing my hand and turned to the doctor. “I’m just as pigheaded, just so you know. I’m not leaving.”
23
Salvatore
I probably dreamed Lucia calling herself pigheaded, but it made me smile all the same. And every time I opened my eyes, there she was, sitting by my side. At first, she still had blood on her. My blood. Then she looked like she’d showered and changed. I saw Roman too, but she was my constant.
She’d remembered what I’d said. What I’d promised her. I vaguely recalled her voice, telling me I hadn’t yet kept the promise to give her the life she wanted.
I had changed rooms. I knew it from the way the light came in the window. I wasn’t sure how long I’d been in the hospital until finally, I opened my eyes, feeling a little less groggy, and the things around me didn’t seem so like a mirage.
Was it a mirage? Was Lucia a mirage?
“Hey.”
I looked up at her beautiful, smiling face. She still sat in the same place, holding my hand, watching me.
“Hey.” It felt strange to speak.
“How do you feel?”
“Like I’ve been run over by a truck.”
“Do you remember what happened?”
My mind traveled back to that morning. My father, Roman, Isabella, and I in my dining room. Dominic. Dominic with a gun. My father telling him he wasn’t his
son. Calling our mother a whore.
Something beeped, and the door opened. A nurse rushed inside.
I took a deep breath, and the beeping leveled, but the nurse gave me a warning look.
“It’s good to see you’re awake, Mr. Benedetti, but you need to stay calm, or we’ll have to sedate you again.”
I opened my mouth to tell her to fuck off, but Lucia squeezed my hand and spoke to her.
“It’s okay. I’ll make sure he stays calm.”
“Thank you.”
The nurse left, and I looked back at Lucia.
“They called you pigheaded,” she said. “Well, I did actually, but they agreed.”
I smiled, but it hurt to speak or move. And as much as I wanted to keep looking at her, my eyelids began to droop.
“Go to sleep. I’ll be here when you wake up.”
I did, unable not to, and when I woke next, I was in a different room yet again, this one less sterile-looking. Lucia again sat by my bed, talking to her sister, who sat on another chair, and Effie, who was watching TV with the sound muted.
“He’s awake,” Isabella said.
Lucia turned to me. “Finally. I didn’t mean sleep for three more days.”
This was surreal. “I want to sit up.”
“Bossy already,” she teased and handed me a remote control. “Here, push this button. Stop if it’s painful.”
I pushed, and the bed moved. Effie came over to watch, entranced by the operation.
“Wow! Can I get one of those, Mommy?”
“No,” came Isabella’s voice.
I smiled and came to a stop when the slight throb at my side became painful. “How long has it been?”
“Almost two weeks.”
“I baked you some M&M cookies” Effie said, coming over with a tin. “They helped Luke, and he’s out of the hospital now. If you eat these, you’ll be out soon too.”
“That so?” I asked.
Lucia took the cookie Effie had fished out for me. “I’ll give it to him after his dinner, okay? We don’t want to spoil his first proper hospital meal, after all.”
I made a face, and so did Effie. She then turned to me. “Grilled cheese is the only safe thing,” she whispered. “And no matter what you do, do not eat the pea soup.”
Salvatore: a Dark Mafia Romance Page 21