I tap my phone with my forefinger. Curious.
I wait until it’s past eight o’clock and then get in my car and head over to the address Lorenzo gave me. I’m not in the mood for a party, but I want to know what he’s up to. I expected to see a load of cars parked along the street, but there are only a handful of cars, and none of them are outside Lorenzo’s address.
The man himself is standing in the driveway with his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans. He looks annoyed as I pull up next to him and roll the window down.
“Fashionably fucking late,” he tells me.
There’s not a trace of a slur in his voice. “You know me, always fashionable. Where is everyone?”
“Who’s everyone?” He turns and walks up to the front door, and then shoots over his shoulder, “You coming or not?”
I guess I am. As I step out of my car, I notice how the perimeter of the block has been dug up and there are pallets of bricks and concrete on the front lawn. The house itself seems to be undergoing renovations. New front door. New windows with heavy metal shutters being installed. It’s an austere two-story building and it looks like Lorenzo’s throwing all the security he can at it.
“Are you building a fortress?”
Lorenzo gazes around. “Yeah. Fortress. Compound. Whatever you want to call it. This place is going to be impenetrable once I’m finished with it. No one gets in or out without my say so.”
A pang goes through me at the thought that this is the kind of place where we could have kept our sisters safe if we knew they were in danger.
There’s not much to see in the hall. There are paint tins and plastic sheets everywhere. “Nothing says house party like heavy renovations.”
Lorenzo ignores my quip and heads for the stairs, heading down rather than up. I follow him, curious to know what he’s got in the basement.
But it’s more than a basement. It’s like there’s another house down here. Cold, bare concrete, well-lit with strip lights and so much space. All four of us could fit our cars down here. Lorenzo heads down a corridor and pushes open a door.
“I’m thinking a shooting range here.” He points to another door. “Armory there.”
I perk up. A shooting range? Lorenzo knows I love weapons of all sorts. There’s nothing more satisfying than target practice with a sleek gun after a long day.
He moves back up the corridor to another door and disappears through it. Curious, I follow him. It’s a big, open space with nothing but stacks of boxes marked with “Medical Equipment” and pharmaceutical-sounding names. It looks like Lorenzo’s kitting this place out to be some sort of med room.
“What’s this? Are you finishing your degree?”
He shakes his head. “You remember my Great Uncle Tomaso?”
Tomaso has been retired for about two decades but he used to be a surgeon. “Yeah. How old is he now? Eighty?”
“Eighty-three. He’s moving in and he’s going to teach me some shit.”
My eyebrows shoot up my forehead. I don’t hear from him for three weeks and suddenly he’s bought a house and is covertly learning medicine. “Surgery?”
“The basics. Stitches. Transfusions. Thought it might come in handy.”
It would definitely come in handy. Since Mayor Romano kicked off his tough-on-crime policies, finding a doctor who’ll treat our men without asking questions or calling the cops has been nearly impossible.
Lorenzo stares at my incredulous expression. “What, you think I can’t do it?”
“Of course you can do it,” I hesitate and add, “If you’re sober.”
I haven’t seen one bottle of vodka anywhere. Lorenzo smells like plain soap without a whiff of alcohol on his breath.
“Will you…” He scowls and clears his throat.
I wait. I want to hear him say the words. I want this on the record in case I see him going off the rails again and I have to do something drastic like tie him to a chair.
“Help me,” he mutters.
I punch his shoulder. “Are you kidding? Of course I will. What do you need me to do?”
Lorenzo glances around the room and then back to me. “You already did it. You came.”
My throat feels suddenly thick. “Were you worried that I wouldn’t?”
“I wouldn’t fucking blame you.”
After everything he’s done for me, I can find it in me to be patient with him. I will make myself find that patience because I’m not going to let myself come that close to giving up on him again. My voice is hoarse as I say, “Please get better, because I need you to do something for me, too.”
“What’s that?”
“Forgive me.”
Lorenzo flinches and moves like he’s going to grab me but changes his mind. He speaks through clenched teeth. “Don’t fucking say that. There’s nothing to forgive. I don’t regret watching those videos and I’m grateful that you didn’t. If you had, there’d just be two of us fucked up and I’d feel even worse.”
His complexion is still gaunt and unhealthy, but there’s a fire burning in his eyes again. A small one, but I think it might get brighter.
“I have new plan. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I saw and heard unless I got blind drunk, so I’ve decided not to try and block it out.”
I frown, not understanding. “What do you mean?”
“I think I’ve just got to let those thoughts come. Just…” He makes a sweeping gesture with his hand. “Pass through me and then let them keep going. I don’t know. I’m not good at expressing this shit.”
Lorenzo heads over to a box and pulls out a stack of dog-eared notebooks. “This is where I wrote everything down that I saw. Fat lot of fucking good that did us, but I haven’t thrown them out. I still need these books. I’m adding to them. Weirdly, if I write all the gore and screaming down, I feel better.” He flicks through one of the books. “After you shouted at me the other week, I started writing, and I haven’t touched a drop since.”
I stare at the notebooks in his tattooed hands, horror and grief warring inside me. Those pages are filled with our sisters’ suffering. They should be burned. They should be destroyed—
I swallow down my pain. If writing in those notebooks gives Lorenzo relief from what he put himself through for us then I’m not going to stop him.
Lorenzo lifts his bright eyes to mine. “So, yeah. Thank you for yelling at me, you asshole.”
He tosses the notebooks back into the box and gazes at them. “Whoever he is, he’s not going to win. One day we’re going to find him, and we’re going to make him suffer.”
“The place is finished. Want to see?”
I grin at the sound of Lorenzo’s voice on the other end of the phone. “You know I do. I’ll be right over.”
It’s been six weeks since I visited Lorenzo in his new house, and he’s stayed sober the entire time. Brick by brick, he’s rebuilt his sanity.