by K. J. Dahlen
There is a man in my bedroom.
I will my legs to move. Run, I think, but my body does nothing. My feet might as well be part of the off-white carpet, speckled with pink and blue that Uncle David installed before we moved in.
“I—” My voice is breathless, an ineffectual wheeze, and I raise my trembling hands in front of me like that’s all it’ll take to ward off a man who’s climbed into my bedroom through my window. It’s open. It’s open. Did I forget to lock it? Can you forget to do something you never need to do in the first place? His face is hidden by a shadow.
It’s hidden by a shadow until he steps forward, into the light.
Relief is a flood of sparkling warmth through every inch of me. I know this face. I know this person. I haven’t seen him since—God, what is it, middle school? It’s the same face that used to laugh with me under the bleachers, doing our homework like a couple of straight-edge kids who wanted to hang A's from their report cards like Christmas decorations. I know him, and the fear goes out of me like a ghost, the pleasant buzzed-drunk feeling taking over.
“Jesus,” I say, keeping my voice low. Now that I know who it is, I really don’t want to wake up Uncle David. “You scared the shit out of me.” A giggle escapes me. “What the hell are you doing in my bedroom?”
5
Gio
It’s the wrong girl.
Gears click and grind in my head. This isn’t Alessia Ricci. This is Sia Andrews, and she’s drunk.
I scared the living shit out of her. Her whole body tensed, but she still swayed on her feet. The scent of her is heady with perfume and alcohol, her blonde hair shining even in the dim light of her bedroom. She wears a little black dress covered in sequins, every curve hugged by pinpricks of light.
How did my father get the wrong girl?
“Sia?”
A faraway expression flits across her face, as if she’s remembering something, and she laughs again. “Gio, what are you doing here?” I move my hand away from the gun at my waist. “If you missed me, you could have sent a text. My number is still the same.” She smiles at me, wrinkling her nose, and my heart twists. This is the smile of an unguarded Sia. She’d never do this in front of a crowd, but underneath the bleachers, the sun warm on her back, she looked exactly this way. How many more times could I have seen her like this if my father hadn’t transferred me to the same private school as my brothers? “I know. Can you believe it? All this time, the same phone number, and I’ve gone through six or seven phones.”
It comes back, a tidal wave running up my shins, up to my knees, up to my chest. I had an unbelievable crush on Sia Andrews, and I never said a word about it. Why the fuck would I? She wanted to spend time with me, and she had no reason to care. I was gangly and serious, and she was beautiful, and every second we spent swimming in that friendship was a gift from the fucking gods.
I have to say something.
This plan that I had—that I’d grab her the moment she stepped in—is so far off the rails that there’s no saving it. No—what the fuck? It’s the wrong girl. I could have killed the wrong girl, and then where would I be? Where would any of the Morettos be?
Her big, blue eyes are colorless in the shadows of her bedroom, but she doesn’t look away from me. She’s waiting for an answer. After all these years, and I show up in her bedroom. I reach for an explanation. A joke? I could joke my way out of this, I’m sure of it. We understood each other back then. We understood each other so well that one look between us was enough to send the other into silent fits of laughter.
She was my best friend, even if she never knew it. Right up until the day I left that school.
I open my mouth to joke with her, but my father’s face swims up into my consciousness. Fuck. I can’t let him down. I can’t leave here empty-handed. At the very least, I’ll leave with information.
Namely, what the hell she’s doing in Alessia Ricci’s bedroom.
“Are you staying the night here?” It’s not the smooth segue I wanted, but it’s something.
“What?” Sia steps closer, searching my face, still wearing that smile. “Of course I am. I live here.” She points a wavering finger at me. “You, on the other hand—you’re in my bedroom and you shouldn’t be.” Her voice curls around the alcohol, sensuous and slow. “You’re different, too.” Sia considers me, her head cocked to the side. “You’re...taller. And hotter.” She claps her hands to her cheeks. “Forget I said that.”
“You live here,” I repeat slowly.
“Yeah.” She nods overenthusiastically. “I do.”
“With Alessia Ricci? Or are you a friend of hers?”
The smile vanishes.
Her face, already white in the filtered glow of the streetlight, turns ashen. Her hands drop back to her side.
Shit.
“I live here.” Her eyes flick to the carpet. “This is my bedroom.”
Oh, shit.
Understanding dawns, a hard, unrelenting sunrise, the puzzle pieces fitting together in a violent snap. Her expression told me everything I needed to know. Of course my father didn’t get it wrong. He’s never been wrong in his life. It makes perfect sense that a hunted girl would use a false name. Sia? Jesus, could she have chosen something more obvious? Shame on me for not seeing it in middle school. I could have told Marco Moretto that I had her then.
But even now, even in this strange wash of pride and surprise, I know—I couldn’t have done it.
I liked her too much.
I might have even loved her.
I could have loved her even now, if it wasn’t for her last name. Any other last name.
“I think you should go.” Her voice is steely, but it has a wobble in the center, not quite able to bear the load she’s putting on it. “Right now.”
My thoughts tumble and whirl, a million words an hour. New plans. I have to come up with a new plan. Or maybe...I need to go back to the old one. I’ve gathered new information. The old plan is feasible again.
Or at least it would be, if my heart didn’t squeeze at the sight of her. “I can’t do that.”
Understanding shades her face, her eyes going wide, and her chest expands with one breath.
A midnight stillness hangs over the house.
She lunges for the door.
But Alessia Ricci is drunk, and I’m faster.
I catch her in my arms, the warm weight of her pinned against me, and inhale the clean river scent of her shampoo. One movement, and I have my hand over her mouth, my other arm locked around her neck. Something we’ve practiced a million times in all the self-defense trainings my father sent us to. I don’t even break a sweat. Alessia gasps against my hand, mumbles something I can’t make out.
“I can’t leave without you,” I whisper into her ear. “You know that, right?”
6
Sia
My mother’s words ring loudly in my ears, the toll of a bell that’s come too late for me to hear. She was right. Fuck, she was right. Sia Andrews, she’d said, her sunken eyes locked on mine. If anyone says the name Alessia Ricci to you, you run. You run as fast as you can and you never look back. Run, and never stop running.
The arm locked around my neck chokes off my breath and my hands scrabble uselessly at his skin.
I know why he can’t let me go.
I always thought it was fake, a ruse, a legend. The paranoia of adults, adults who are paranoid about fucking everything.
But they were right.
Gio knows my secret. Gio is one of the ones who have been looking for me all my life. He’s a legend come to life, and he’s about to crush the spirit out of me right now.
I tap at his hands, a silent plea, and he loosens his grip. His other palm is still clamped tightly over my mouth, and I gasp in a deep breath through my nostrils. Shit. He smells good. He smells really good, a light spritz of cologne over the warm scent of his skin, and I hate him for it. More than that, I hate myself for seeing his face a few moments ago and thinking he was hot. Hot
as hell. The grown-up version of him, all dark eyes, all dark hair, all sculpted jaw, is too much to bear.
It’s making me fucking complacent.
I want to run, but I can’t escape his grip.
I want to scream, but I am certain that Gio will kill me, and then he’ll kill my uncle.
My uncle, who wanted to protect me.
It was already too late, clearly.
I try to blink away the drunken haze but it doesn’t work. I careen back and forth between drunk and sober, pressed against the hard line of Gio’s torso.
“You’re coming with me.” His voice is silken, deep, and I nod as best as I can in his unforgiving hands. “If you scream—”
I shake my head. No, no, no. I won’t scream. I swear to fucking God, I won’t scream. It’s all happening too fast for me to wrap my mind around, but I cannot get Uncle David killed. I can’t. I also cannot square the Gio I knew in middle school, that puppy dog of a boy who looked at me like I was precious, who laughed with me like there was nobody funnier, with the man who lifts me off my feet as easily as if I was a feather.
He’s strong.
Even if I wanted to fight back, he’s too strong, and I know it by the way he lifts me so effortlessly.
He stops at the window, considering. Then he presses me against him, his hand still over my mouth, his elbow driving into my ribs, dangerously close to my breasts, and uses his other hand to close the window.
Gio carries me like a lion carrying its prey through my uncle’s quiet house. He stops only once, when the fridge starts a cooling cycle, the abrupt humming in the kitchen breaking the deathly silence of the night. He listens for a heartbeat and then keeps going. At the front door, he flips the latch and steps out, me braced in his arms, one hand over my mouth, like some perverse version of carrying a bride over the threshold.
He even closes the door behind us. What a gentleman.
There’s a car waiting down the block. How did I not notice it when Portia dropped me off? It’s black, nondescript, but nobody fucking parks on the street. This is what I get for not believing my mother. This is what I get for not paying attention.
He opens the passenger door and drops me down into the seat. I’m shaking violently, my whole body is trembling. Run, now. The thought occurs to me as he steps around the front of the car and I lift my hand from my lap. That’s as far as I get before he’s inside on the seat next to me. I let my hand fall back down onto my knees. He’d catch me, on the open street, and then he’d go back for my uncle.
Gio starts the car and it purrs to life beneath us, the air in the closed-off space of the vehicle filling with his scent, and I can’t believe I’m not screaming, I can’t believe I’m not crying, I can’t believe how cold the fear is streaking through my veins.
He pulls away from the curb.
“Are you going to kill me, then?” The words tumble out of my still-drunk mouth, one after the other, and I can’t stop them. The thundering anxiety at the center of my chest is too much. “If you are, do it now, Gio. Do it now.” I sound more than a little hysterical.
He flicks his eyes toward me. “Not right now,” he says mildly. “Put your seatbelt on. We’re going for a drive.”
7
Gio
She was sweet to me.
It shouldn’t matter at all, but it does.
This girl who’s trembling beside me in the passenger seat of my car while I drive away from her safe little suburb was fucking sweet to me, all those years ago. She was never cruel. She was a real friend, a genuine friend, and that’s my hang-up.
It shouldn’t be a hang-up, but it is.
Functioning on autopilot, I clear the suburb's darkened streets and head toward Washington Groves, the school we attended all those years ago. It’s a fifteen-minute drive away, and she doesn’t say a word the whole time I’m driving.
I need time to think.
The school is bordered on three sides by open fields, a mistake in zoning or planning or some shit that gifted it with space it shouldn’t have had. At the back of one of those fields is an access road. This was part of the plan all along—this access road. Who the hell ever comes back here? Nobody. It’s the perfect place to carry out my mission.
I pull onto the gravel road and throw the car into park.
This close to the school, its hulking shape intermittently visible through the trees, it’s hard to shut off the memories. And there are lots of memories. Those stupid Valentine’s flowers, made of candy, the ones they used to sell all week leading up to the holiday. Sia always sent me one, and I always sent her one, too. We weren’t dating. That shit was beyond what I ever thought possible, back when I was either ridiculed or feared, depending on who I was looking at. But not Sia. She wasn’t afraid of my dark eyes, the way I stared too pointedly when my thoughts ran away with me. She’d only tap my forehead and say, "Gio, come back."
Fuck. This was supposed to be my entry into the family, and the thought of telling my father that I wasn’t man enough to destroy the last of the Riccis makes me sick.
But so does killing Sia Andrews.
She’s not looking at me.
She’s looking out her window. The high school is lit up twenty-four hours a day, and between the trees, there are slices of the bricked, prison-shaped building in sight. I can even make out a corner of the bleachers that stand behind the school. More memories sweep over me. The way her hair shone in the thin lines of light that fell between the seats. The spritzed perfume scent of her skin floating in the warm air. The way she wore soft hoodies, always a soft hoodie, and took it off as the day grew warmer. By the time she caught the bus home, it would always be shoved into her backpack.
“Do you remember that day?” Her voice is soft, casual, none of the fight left in it. Her tone sounds like I drove her back here to fuck, away from our parents. Jesus, I daydreamed about that so many times. Driving her somewhere and letting her wrap herself around me in the front seat of my car. We wouldn’t have any room. We wouldn’t need any room.
“Which day?”
I shouldn’t entertain this kind of discussion. It’s only making it harder to carry out the plan. But I spent so many days with Sia Andrews that I can’t let it go.
“That first day we sat under the bleachers.” Sia—Alessia, I remind myself sternly—reaches up to brush a lock of hair away from her face. “It was a standoff at first, because I guess we both thought it was going to be our space, but then you said—”
“—that I’d let you sit with me if you didn’t turn out to be a stuck-up bitch.” I almost—almost—laugh at the memory of saying that to her. I’d been fucking terrified of how beautiful she was. “And then you said—”
“—I’d only sit with you if you didn’t turn out to be a raging asshole. And to never call me a bitch again.” Sia sounds wondering, as if middle school was yesterday instead of seven years ago.
I’d kept one of those promises.
I never called her a bitch.
The gun digs into my back, uncomfortable and obnoxious, and I shift in my seat. Alessia turns to look at me as I pull the gun out of its holster. The faraway expression falls away from her face and her eyes go wide, but only for an instant. She squeezes them shut tightly, her heart-shaped lips moving in a silent prayer.
It’s another punch to the gut. It would be different if she was the Ricci hellcat my father had made her out to be. If she’d clawed at my face, dragged me down with her. But this? The fear? The resignation? Fuck it.
“Oh, stop,” I tell her and reach in front of her. Her eyes fly open and she gasps, a little inhale, when she sees my arm, but I’m only opening the glovebox. The light inside turns on, highlighting the neat stack of papers I have tucked there.
Sia takes a long, deep breath and lets it out. “Why would a murderer buy car insurance?”
“I’m not a murderer.” I check the safety on the gun one last time and set it carefully in the glovebox. “Yet.”
I dig the glovebox key ou
t of my pocket, lock it, and shift the car in reverse.
We’re getting the hell out of here.
8
Sia
I hate roller coasters.
That’s not true. I can appreciate the adrenaline rush. I like a good scream every few years. I like the sweetness of lemon sorbet melting on my tongue when I'm waiting in line for a ride, the sun beating down on my shoulders. Uncle David loves that shit. He’ll ride coasters all day. Me? I max out at five. The rush and the crash, the flood of adrenaline and the tide going out—it gives me a raging headache.
Exactly like the one I have now.
I have become more certain with every passing moment that Gio’s ultimate plan is to kill me. He drove us both to the most secluded spot I could think of. In school, when we were feeling morbid, we used to joke about that access road. “That’s where I’d hide the bodies,” I said once, not knowing I was on the edge of mortal danger, even then.
But he throws the car in reverse and drives away, my head pounding with every beat of my heart.
“Where are you taking us?” I’m talking to hear my own voice, to convince myself that the worst hasn’t happened yet. “Do you know somewhere else to hide the body?” The body—my body. “My uncle’s going to be devastated.” I sound jittery, panicked, even to myself.
It irritates Gio—I can see it on his face. “Could you shut up for five seconds and let me think?”
“Sure,” I say. “Sure. Think all you want.” If he’s thinking, he’s not actively killing me.
I don’t know why. That’s the fucking kicker of all of this. I know someone upstream in my family must’ve done something awful to his, but all I have to go on are the memories of whispers between my mother and my uncle, half-overheard as a child. How reliable is that? Not reliable. Not reliable at all.