I pulled away from him, from his heady scent and the hardness in his voice, and rested my elbows on my knees. ‘Then why am I so unhappy?’
Luca stayed where he was, his gaze prickling along the back of my neck. ‘You just lost your mother, Sophie. You need to give yourself time.’
‘I don’t have time.’ A familiar wave of frustration was rising inside me. ‘I want to make them pay, Luca. I know that’s the right thing, but tonight when I held that gun to Libero Marino’s head, and I listened to him cursing at me and taunting me, and calling me a traitor, I just froze.’
He stayed silent, and I don’t know why, but all the things I had been feeling started to tumble out. ‘I hate that I froze. I hate that I failed. I’m so embarrassed that I couldn’t do it, and then when I really think about it, I find myself feeling terrified that a part of me thought I could. That a part of me was ready to end a man’s life. That a part of me felt so powerful standing there with him shaking in front of me. I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what I’m capable of, but I know tonight was a failure for me.’
Luca turned to face me so I couldn’t look away even if I tried. ‘Let me uncomplicate this for you, Sophie. You don’t want this. I promise you, this is not the path for you.’
Felice’s words from the study came flooding back to me. Was this really what Luca thought or was it a projection of his own desires? ‘How do you know what’s right for me? I’m not you, Luca. I’m my own person. I want to let my mother know she didn’t die in vain. I want to embrace this life, the blood in my veins. I don’t want to be on my own.’
Luca pressed his palms against his eyes, his fingertips scraping through his hair. ‘You’re wrong, Sophie. You are so deeply, unbearably wrong, and I don’t know how to show you that. And it makes me so angry, I could scream.’
‘That’s why you keep avoiding me,’ I said. ‘I get it. You don’t believe I’m cut out for this life. You don’t think I can do it.’
He uncovered his face. ‘What?’
‘It’s true,’ I said, frustration turning to anger now. ‘You think I’m going to shoot myself by accident or stab myself, or that I’m not strong enough or smart enough to do the things your brothers do. I know you don’t think I’m cut out for this, and you hate that I’m even trying to be, but I have to. I don’t care if it makes you angry with me,’ I lied. ‘I don’t care if you don’t believe in me.’
He rubbed his temples very slowly, and I watched him work his anger into submission. Then he said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the whole world, ‘Of course I believe in you.’
‘What?’
‘I believe that you’re smart and funny and brave and determined. I believe that you’re loyal and kind. I believe that you’re a good person, in your heart. In your soul. You’re right about one thing, though. I don’t believe that you’re an assassin. I don’t think you can kill someone and be OK with it. And that is not an insult, Sophie. That I believe you’re too good and too kind to hurt someone, no matter how much they’ve hurt you. That your heart is too big. That your empathy runs too deep. That’s why I believe in you. I believe in you more than I could ever explain, and you expect me to stand by and watch while you destroy yourself right in front of my eyes. You expect me to let you point the gun at Libero Marino and shout at you to shoot him?’
He was really asking me, waiting for me to answer. ‘I want you to want what I want,’ I said slowly. ‘I want you to support me …’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I will not raise you up and give you a gun. I will not take you shooting and fawn over how great your aim is. I won’t tell you how brilliant you can be or how many Marinos you can murder if you really put your mind to it. I won’t walk you into danger and clap as you shoot to kill. I will take the gun from you and tell you you’re a thousand times better without it. I will always take the gun from you, Sophie. I will always tell you that you don’t need it. I will always support you, but I will never support that. Never.’ He scrubbed his hands across his forehead, dragging his hair away from his face. ‘You always manage to work me up,’ he said ruefully.
All this time, I thought he put himself on a pedestal, but it was me he had raised up. He thought I was better than him – than his life, than his family – but I wasn’t.
‘We’re the same,’ I said. ‘We come from the same kind of blood. How could you say all these things to me, and not say them to yourself? How do you expect me to take any of it to heart, when it’s said with such hypocrisy? If you really believed your family was truly bad then you’d walk away from it. I know you’re strong enough.’
Luca shook his head. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s too late for me. I’ve done too many heinous things already. There is no getting out.’
I lay back on the roof, a wave of exhaustion washing over me. Couldn’t he see it was the same for me? Couldn’t he understand I felt the same way? It was pointless having this argument with him. We would never agree, and the truth was, he had lied to Valentino to keep me here – and that meant I was staying.
‘I’m tired, Luca. I’m tired of this conversation.’
Luca lay down next to me. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m tired too.’
We welcomed the silence, and the respite it brought. He wasn’t the enemy and neither was I. Our world was the problem, and we were both stuck in it. We lay side by side, at an impasse, but not wanting to separate. My chin brushed against his shoulder. Our arms stretched out next to each other, my pinky finger brushing his. I ached for the fleeting closeness we had once had, couldn’t help but wonder whether we would ever have it again.
‘Tell me about the life you would have had,’ I said, into the big expanse above us. ‘Tell me about the person you would be if you weren’t a Falcone.’
I had never delved this deeply before, and I didn’t know if Luca would let me. But the moment was quiet again, and I just wanted to talk, to be with him, even if the conversation was hypothetical, even if it didn’t really matter.
‘I would have gone to college.’ His breath fogged the air above us. ‘Studied astrophysics. I would have been the biggest nerd.’ He imitated my voice on the last word. ‘When I was a kid, I wanted to be an astronaut more than anything.’
‘Did you have those sticky glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling?’
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘What aspiring astronaut doesn’t?’
‘So what happened? Didn’t you think you were smart enough?’ I said, teasingly.
‘Oh, I’m definitely smart enough, Sophie.’ His laughter echoed mine. ‘I just didn’t like the idea of having to eat cardboard food for months at a time. When I was seven, my dad bought me a star for my birthday. It came with all these specific coordinates and a certificate with my name on it, and we waited for it to get dark and then found it through the telescope.’