Tears rolled down her face, but no one noticed.
“Listen to your friend.” Nova was still looking at his sister. “Let us do this. Let’s find Tino. Then we’ll deal with the rest.”
Carina stared at him for one long moment; then she turned around and shouted, “MA!” so loud they all flinched when her voice echoed off the kitchen tiles.
Carina made a move to go look for her, but she didn’t have to go far. Mary Moretti showed up before Carina was out of the kitchen, looking remarkably poised and sober for midnight. She leaned against the curved archway in the kitchen and gave Carina a wide, pleased smile. “Looking for something?”
“Where is he?” Carina growled at her mother as she took a threatening step forward. “You better tell me where the fuck he is, or I swear to God—”
“I honestly don’t know where he is.” Mary shrugged, looking completely comfortable with Carina standing there, pan and knife in hand. “Dead somewhere, if we’re lucky. He knew the rules. He broke them. Troia don’t fuck off the clock. I always win, sweetheart. Always.”
“I take it back.” Nova’s voice was razor-sharp and icy. “This is all you, princess.”
Mary held up a plastic box in response. It looked like a garage-door opener, but Brianna knew it sounded an alarm to the guard station that they were under attack. There were always Moretti soldiers guarding the house. They took shifts. None of them slept there, but soldiers were there in case of emergency.
They all watched her push the button.
And they knew there was about a thirty-second window before they had company.
Still, Nova said, “Take this bitch.”
Mafia violence, in theory, was something Brianna knew happened. She still screamed when Carina hit her mother with that frying pan. Brianna was almost as shocked as Mary looked right before her head snapped to the side with a spray of blood.
Brianna didn’t know anyone could hit someone that hard.
To say nothing of Carina, who had topped out at five feet nothing, and the doctors told her last year she was done growing.
Brianna had to turn her back. It was an instinct, and she found herself shaking, with her face buried in Carlo’s chest as she listened to the absolutely gruesome act of Carina beating her mother with a fry pan and screaming, “WHERE IS HE?” over and over again. “WHERE’S MY BROTHER?”
Carina’s voice was raw, agonized, as if she was exorcising every demon she had carried with her since birth.
Finally, it was Nova who said, “Stop! Carina!”
And for one minute, the dull, horrible thump of metal against flesh stopped, and Carina growled again, “Where is he? Tell me, or I will cut your eyes out of your skull and leave you alive just for the fucking fun of it!”
Brianna turned around, even though Carlo grabbed her arm to stop her. She stared in horror at Mary on the floor, her face bloody, her nose smashed. Mary opened her mouth to talk, but most of her teeth were missing. All that came out was an awful gurgling sound.
Carina held the butcher knife on Mary, pressing it close to her right eye, and Brianna realized she was actually going to do it right there in front of all of them.
She was going to cut her mother’s eyes out.
Brianna dry heaved against her will, covering her mouth, and Carlo grabbed her arm and pulled her back against his chest just as she saw Mary point toward her purse on the counter.
Brianna looked away from the horror in the archway, turning her head on Carlo’s chest to see Nova grab the purse and dump out all the contents on the counter. He searched through them with a shaking hand until he found a small planner. He flipped through the pages rapidly, too fast to see anything, except he must’ve, because he said, “It’s the client list.”
The sound of a knife clattering against the tile echoed, and Brianna turned against her better judgment to see Carina stand up over her mother and drop the pan. It should’ve been over, but Carina kicked her one more time, forcing Mary’s cheek to smack against the tile.
Mary stopped moving.
She could be dead for all they knew.
For the first time Brianna noticed the other men in the room.
Moretti soldiers who were here to protect the family.
Soldiers who just watched Carina beat the shit out of her mother and did absolutely nothing to stop her.
“Someone call my nonno!” Carina said to no one in particular. “Right now!”
Brianna had never seen cell phones come out of pockets so fast in her entire life.
“If she’d been raised by a Siciliana, she’d know not to fuck with one,” Carlo said sadly. “This buttana actually looked surprised.”
“Right? I know who I had my money on,” Nova said as he flipped through the book again. “Fucking with the guineas is bad for anyone’s health.”
Brianna realized Nova wasn’t talking about Mary.
She was just a bleeding afterthought. The first casualty in a full-out mafia war that blew up right in front of them, and Brianna was standing there, watching it happen.
But all she could think about was Tino.
Nothing else really mattered to her.
Please let him be alive.