‘You’ll have to lie to Valentino,’ I said. ‘You’ll have to trick your own family. How is that going to work?’
He took a step backwards, towards the door, his hands clasped behind his back. ‘It will work because it’s only temporary.’
‘Temporary?’ I wanted to bridge the gap he was making, to tug him towards me.
He levelled me with a dark look. ‘When we’ve taken care of Donata and Jack, you’re going to leave us. And then it will be over for good. For ever.’
‘What will?’ I whispered, feeling like the ground was being ripped out from under me.
He swallowed hard – all the things that lingered on his tongue – and his face re-shuttered, the impenetrable mask coming down once more. ‘This. Us. Everything.’
This. Us.
CHAPTER THREE
COMMON GROUND
Iwanted to say something, anything to distract from the feeling of hurt blooming in my chest, but in the next instant, he was gone, and I was alone again. Dwarfed by the sudden, jarring silence, the realization that I had just been dumped by the only person in this house I felt I could rely on. Dumped by someone who probably never felt a shred of what I felt for him. And what did that mean for my future? If I didn’t have this family, I had nothing. If I didn’t have my cause, then I had nothing to move towards.
I left the library and made my way back into the house. Elena was in the kitchen, soaking tea towels in disinfectant in a basin. She had been tending to Dom and Gino all afternoon. She greeted me by way of a hiss.
‘Save it,’ I snapped. ‘I’m not in the mood.’
She followed me across the room, stood over me as I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge. I slowed my movements, tried to show her I wasn’t intimidated, even though I could feel her gaze in the hairs on my neck. ‘Well, maybe I’m not in the mood for a Marino living under this roof, girl. Maybe I’m not in the mood for the gifts your family sends us.’
I slammed the fridge shut and threw her a withering look. ‘Well, maybe you should get over it.’
‘You’re too close to my sister, girl.’
‘And yet it’s you who share her blood,’ I pointed out. ‘I’ll never be as close to her as you are.’
Her expression changed, her eyes narrowing, and then something weird happened. Her lips quirked up, and she offered me a half-smile. ‘You’ve gotten tougher, little Marino.’
‘Trust me,’ I said, returning her smile and matching the faint maniacal undertone in it. There was no happiness in this moment. ‘This is only the beginning of my strength.’ I felt the slow burn of all that rage inside me and kept it there, ready to use as a weapon when the time came. Luca, or no Luca, I would have my revenge. I would finally stand up for myself. ‘I am going to kill your sister.’
Elena’s smile grew, stretching her cheeks wide. ‘Not if I get to her first, Persephone.’
There. My name. Not the ideal version, but still. It was better than ‘worm’. It was better than ‘Marino’.
‘I hate her,’ I said simply. ‘I hate her, and I want her to pay, and I don’t care how or when it happens, but I want to be a part of every second of it.’
‘Well,’ said Elena, stepping closer until the air between us became a potent mixture of her floral perfume and the faintest scent of smoke. ‘There is something, then, that we have in common.’
CHAPTER FOUR
BARBARIANS AND LIBRARIANS
‘This is literally the scariest thing I’ve ever had to do.’ Millie slammed her locker shut, and the clang of metal reverberated inside my eardrums. She hitched her bag on to her back and expelled a dramatic breath. ‘Seriously, Soph. I don’t know why I agreed to do this. I can barely live with the anxiety.’
‘There there, Millicent.’ I patted her on the shoulder. ‘I’m sure you’ll rise to the occasion.’
She clenched her eyes shut. ‘That’s easy for you to say, you don’t have to deal with all this horrible pressure.’
A part of me wanted to burst out laughing – a horrible, screeching, humourless laugh. If only she knew how close I was to committing the most soul-changing act in the world. If only she knew how ragged my soul was now, how much time I spent replaying all the ways the Marinos had stung me, all the ways I wanted to hurt them. As far as she was concerned, I was just lying low at the Falcone compound. If she really knew what I was going to trade for their acceptance, she’d have my head on a plate.
‘I have to organize an entire school dance,’ Millie wailed. ‘Can you even imagine that kind of stress?’
I snorted, trying to grasp on to the hint of amusement and not the thick, cloying dread that had taken hold of my insides since yesterday, since the sight of my mother’s car burning on the threshold to the Falcone underworld started haunting my every waking thought.
‘What was I thinking? I barely have a month to pull this whole thing off and no one has come up with any good theme ideas. I am working with a pack of idiots.’
‘You’ll be fine. I have full faith in you.’ I linked arms with her as we made our way to English class, pushing my own worries down, down, down. School was for the old Sophie. Not the new one. Not the real one.
We took our seats at the back of the classroom. I slumped into my chair and kept my head down, but I could still feel the gazes drilling into the side of my head, the whispers scuttling around the room like spiders.
She never smiles any more.
I heard it was her uncle who set fire to the place and now they can’t find him anywhere.
I heard she set the fire. She’s a psychopath just like her dad.
If I had my way I would have dropped out of school the day I showed up on the Falcones’ doorstep, but they were adamant about having me continue my studies to retain ‘some level of normality’ in my life, and Millie … well, I had made her a promise. We were going to do senior year together, and only a bad friend would break such a big promise. I was determined to be a good friend. So that meant essays and calculus and dance planning and football games and the slow creeping doom of a future I wasn’t sure I had any more.
Millie ripped a page out of her notebook and began furiously scribbling on it as Mr Simmons, our English teacher, swept into the room. He was dressed entirely in tweed, like he had just tumbled out of the early 1900s and couldn’t quite figure out where he was.
‘What are you doing?’ I tried to ignore Erin Reyes, who was one desk over and leering at me. I had already been a source of amusement to her, but now I had graduated to the shelf of ‘tragic’, and that meant she wanted to stare at me at least twice as much. Without looking at her, I rubbed my cheek with my middle finger. She muttered something under her breath and I let the satisfaction paint the smile across my face.
‘For your next assignment, I want you to pick a piece of writing that you can identify with on a deep emotional level, and explain why,’ Simmons began cheerfully. ‘So with that in mind, today we are going to dive into some poetry.’