“Can you tell me your name?” he asked. “Can you tell me anything?”
I opened my mouth, my voice a broken whisper as I tried to speak. No idea if he heard me or if he understood, but he said, “My name’s Ignazio. Just hold on, okay?”
Blackness took over then, more little flashes. It took a while for me to realize Ignazio had saved my life, pulling me out of a homemade grave and finding help.
“How long does it take?” Five asks, his question catching me off guard, drawing me out of the memory.
He’s staring down at Aristov. The hole is only about four feet deep, six and a half feet long.
“What?”
“How long does it take to die this way?” Five asks. “Hours? Days?”
“More like minutes,” I say. Buried alive. “Inhaling dirt, a thousand pounds of pressure on top of you. You’d suffocate.”
“Sounds terrifying.”
It is.
Within a few minutes, Aristov’s no longer visible. He doesn’t have an Ignazio to save him like I’d had. Less than an hour later, and the hole is again filled.
We kick stuff on top of it—leaves, tree branches, stones, making it blend in, so if anyone stumbles upon the area, it won’t stand out. We’re deep in the woods, an hour or so across the border in New Jersey, in the middle of fucking nowhere. He’ll likely go undiscovered forever.
“I don’t know about you, but I feel like I could sleep for a month,” Five says as we toss the shovels in the blood-soaked trunk, adding dirt right on top of it, a forensic team’s wet dream. “Probably could use a vacation after the night we’ve had.”
“Florida’s nice this time of year,” I tell him. “You should take the trip down.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, there’s some work on the groves that needs done.”
Five laughs, pulling out the car keys to head for the driver’s seat. “It’s not really a vacation if you’ve got me on the clock.”
I shrug, getting in the passenger seat. I’ve never taken a vacation from working, so I don’t know what that’s like. There’s always stuff that needs done. Seven climbs in the backseat, staying silent, as Five drives us back into New York under the cloak of darkness, heading straight to my house in Queens.
The rest of the guys are here, waiting. Well, except for Three. He’s still off handling things.
I dismiss everyone right away, not in the mood for company, needing some time to get my thoughts in order, but Seven lingers, standing on my front porch. As much as I’m still itching to gut him, I have to admit he’s got balls. Big balls. Maybe too big, but still... it takes balls to stand here.
“What do you want, Seven?”
“A second chance,” he says.
“Why should I give you one?”
“Because I want to make it up to you.”
I shake my head. “That’s not a good reason. I don’t care what you want. Not anymore. So if you’re looking for a second chance, come back when you’ve got a good reason as to why I should give you one. Until then...”
I wave him off.
He turns away, leaving without arguing.
My brother meets me in the foyer as soon as I’m in the house, my boots tracking dirt in along the floor.
“What happened?” he asks. “What’s going on?”
“Nothing,” I say. “I took care of it.”
“You took care of it,” he repeats, looking all around me, and I know what he’s looking for: Scarlet.
“She’s fine,” I tell him. “She’s with her kid.”
His eyes widen. “You found her daughter, too?”
“Yes.” I grasp his shoulder, squeezing it. It’s all of the reassurance I can manage. “All’s well that ends well, right? Or some other cliché bullshit. Whatever you want to hear right now.”
“But—”
He’s got questions, I know... so many fucking questions... but I’m not in the mood. “Not tonight, Leo. Let me get my head right before you interrogate me about this shit.”
He just stands there, gaping at me, as I walk away, heading to my library. He doesn’t try to follow, dropping it for the moment, going into the living room to report what he knows to his girlfriend, to set her pretty little head at ease that the world is a beautiful place again, that the sun will come out tomorrow and the flowers will soon bloom and they can sleep snug as a bug in a fucking rug tonight without worrying about monsters hiding under the bed.
Me? I’m exhausted, but there’s no way I can sleep, not with so much weighing on me. Turning on the lamp, I run my hands down my face before fixing my attention on my still unfinished puzzle.
It has never taken me so long to do one before.
After grabbing a bottle of rum from the kitchen, I decide to dive into the puzzle, hoping the alcohol will numb my pain, hoping focusing on something else will keep my head from exploding. I don’t know how much time passes, the night wearing away, but I’m feeling little more than a tingling sensation in my muscles when there’s a knock from the doorway.
I glance over, seeing Three standing there.
“How’d it go?” I ask quietly.
“Okay, I guess,” he says, stepping into the library, rubbing the side of his face. It’s red, a hint of a bruise forming on his pale skin. “I had them checked out by a doctor. Neither seemed happy about it, but they’re both okay, for the most part. Nothing seriously wrong. Some dehydration, a bit of malnourishment, a hell of a lot of bumps and bruises on Morgan, but that was obvious just looking at her.”
“Tell me about it,” I mutter. Her skin was a kaleidoscope of injuries, but the kind of shit that is just superficial. The real damage, I think, has to be rooted deeply in her, the kind of damage that fucks up somebody mentally.
I should’ve gotten to her sooner.
I’m a fucking failure.
I wavered and waited… and waited… and waited… so not to get her hurt. A lot of fucking good that did, huh? While I sat around, biding my time, he did what he did to her.
I can imagine, you know. I don’t need anyone to tell me. I saw the way she looked.
Should’ve just tossed the grenade and ended it before it started.
“Anyway, so I booked them this suite at The Plaza,” Three says. “This little pink poufy looking place. They do tea time and shit. Figured a little girl would like that, right? Cupcakes and pink shit and... tea?”
“I don’t know,” I mumble, looking back at my puzzle, picking up a piece. “I don’t know anything about kids.”
“You raised one.”
“Pretty sure the one I raised was born more mature than me.”
Three pauses to lean against the table. “I don’t know shit about kids, either, clearly, because the little girl wanted nothing to do with it. Said some shit about it looking like another palace, said she wasn’t doing it anymore, whatever that means. So Morgan gave me some address in Long Island, told me to take them there... some house they could stay at. They seemed, well... okay.”
“Okay,” I repeat.
“Yeah.”