He pulled a page from the envelope he was holding, and slid it across the table. I stepped forward tentatively, staring over Gino’s head to look at it. We were all craning to look at it.
‘Stateville biometrics,’ narrated Felice for those who couldn’t see. ‘They make a record of their prisoners’ identifying markers when they’re brought in. Valentino pulled some strings. He received this email thirty minutes ago.’
Felice’s words droned in the background of my attention. I was too busy staring at a photo of my father. It was like his mugshot but in this one, his shirt was off, and there were three images, one of him side-on, the shamrock on his arm small and blurry. He’d told me he had gotten it with a friend on his eighteenth birthday – a cautionary drunk tale. His back was bare, and in the photo of his front, right over where his heart was, was a crest with a black handprint inside it. Beneath it were the words Fidelitate Coniuncti.
Donata’s final words to me.
‘Loyalty binds us,’ translated Valentino. He wasn’t anywhere near the photo, but I’m sure he had already stared at it long and hard. ‘The Marino family motto.’
‘That,’ Felice’s index finger stabbed the tattoo on the page, ‘is the Marino crest. Every Marino since the dawn of Cosa Nostra has had this crest engraved on their person. Many of us in this room have seen them first-hand on their corpses.’ He sucked in a gulping, excited breath. ‘He’s covered it since, smart boy. But these he can’t get rid of.’ He moved his finger and pressed it over my father’s grainy, lifeless eyes. ‘These are Don Vincenzo Marino’s eyes.’ He lifted his head and moved his finger until it was an inch from my face. ‘And so are those.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE LIFE
I pulled back from the table. I was finding it difficult to stay calm, more difficult than it was to believe what Felice was saying. I had seen that crest a ton of times, on hot days when my father worked in the garden, when he got out of the shower in the morning. He had told me he and Jack had gotten the same one as teenagers – as a way to always remember each other no matter where they ended up in the world. So they would never forget where they came from.
So they would never forget where they came from.
The room was deadly silent. I stumbled backwards, pressing myself against the wall and feeling its coolness through my tank top. I was going to pass out. I was going to get killed.
Felice seized the stunned silence. ‘If you examine the records, collated with Angelo’s research, you will see that the prison-recorded birthdate of Michael Gracewell matches exactly that of our own dear Vince Marino Jr, the boy who disappeared on me all those years ago. The missing Marinos might not legally exist any more, but they are still living right under our noses. And I’d bet my own blood and bones that their nearness to this family is no coincidence. I put a bullet in their parents, so little Vince Marino put a bullet in Angelo, and Antony put five stab wounds in Calvino in Eden. All this time, we wondered what Gracewell was offering Donata. It was simply his true identity. A Marino always sticks by their own.’
At that, the seated Falcones broke into a rush of frantic murmurings. The tide was turning. Felice was winning. Chaos was rising. I was going to drown in it. ‘No,’ I insisted, shaking my head violently. ‘No, it’s not true. It can’t be true.’
‘Liar!’ Elena sprang to her feet. ‘We’ve caught you out. Admit it! Admit your father is Vince Marino. Admit your uncle is Antony Marino.’ She jabbed her finger at me. ‘Admit that you, Sophie Marino, are a rotten liar.’
‘I’m not a liar!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t know anything about this!’
Dark gazes pressed against me. They were waiting for me to say something, to justify the insanity of walking into their house and expecting to live.
They’d never believe my innocence. Not now. How could I not know where I came from? How could I not know who I was?
How could I not know?
How could they not tell me?
‘It’s not true,’ I said weakly, hearing the doubt in my words. ‘It can’t be true.’
Luca turned to his brother. ‘Valentino?’ he said quietly. His expression was thrumming with unexpected vulnerability. It made me want to slam my head against the wall. ‘Is this true?’
The room fell deathly silent. Valentino nodded. ‘È la verità.’
Luca turned, slowly. His face was shuttered again. He was in commander mode. To me, he said, as simply as if he were asking my age, ‘Are you a Marino?’
‘I—’
‘You heard Valentino,’ said Nic, who had become markedly dishevelled in the last minute. He threw his eyes to the ceiling, his hands raking through his hair. ‘She’s a fucking Marino.’
I backed towards the door.
‘So we’re agreed?’ Felice yelled above the rising commotion. ‘I can kill her?’
‘No!’ said Luca, arms outstretched towards him. ‘Keep your head, Felice.’
‘Everyone be quiet and don’t move!’ said Valentino, and the room fell silent again. ‘We must come to a decision.’
Run, said a voice in my head. Run and don’t stop. Don’t stop even if they shoot your legs out from under you.
‘Nicoli.’ Felice’s voice was shrill as a bell. ‘Let’s let Nicoli decide her fate.’
‘Felice,’ Valentino warned. ‘This is not a game.’
Felice pulled out his gun and waved it above his head. ‘I want to know which is stronger,’ he told the room. ‘Loyalty or love.’ He pointed the gun at my head and cocked the trigger. ‘I want Nicoli to tell me what to do to the Marino in our midst.’
‘Basta,’ said Luca, his voice little more than a growl.
‘Felice,’ said Paulie.
Valentino said nothing. So Felice kept his gun high.
Nic stepped towards me, but without blocking Felice. He cocked his head, his expression unreadable. ‘She can stay if she proves herself. She has to kill a Marino. We can use her connection to them.’
Luca came to stand by Nic, the two brothers shoulder-to-shoulder, both of them looking at me as if they had never truly seen me before.
Maybe they hadn’t.
‘Go,’ Luca mouthed. ‘Now.’
I seized their makeshift shield – whether they meant it that way or not – flung open the door and ran as fast as I could. I didn’t turn around to see if they were following me, or to listen to the rising shouts and screeching chairs. I sprinted and sprinted until my chest burnt and my legs shook, and then I pulled out my phone and called Millie.
My mind whirred as I ran. It couldn’t be true. Fate wouldn’t be so cruel. My own parents wouldn’t be so dishonest as to keep something like this from me. The secret was too huge. Too impossible.
And yet that tattoo kept flashing in my mind. Forgotten arguments from long ago undusted themselves – all those times when my parents thought I was asleep, all those times my father looked over his shoulder, or stood at the windows of our house, watching the darkness. The clawing sense of wrongness in what he had done to Angelo Falcone. The anxiety that rested behind his eyes now he was in prison, the sense that something bigger was coming and he couldn’t stop it. Puzzle pieces were shifting all around me … and somehow, somehow the impossibility of it didn’t seem so big at all.
I’d escaped from the Falcones with my life just now. But I knew that once Donata realized what I’d done, it would be forfeit either way. If loyalty was supposed to bind us, then I was the worst Marino in history, because I had just unravelled it completely in the course of one afternoon, and laid her imminent plans to move against the Falcones right on their doorstep. I was stuck between two bloodthirsty crime families, and over the course of one day I had made enemies of them both.
Millie pulled up when I was almost a mile outside Felice’s house, forcing myself along the main road, staying close to the thicket of trees in case an offending SUV rolled by and put a bullet in my head. I threw myself into her car and doubled over, covering the back of my head with my hands. I was h
alf-crying and half-choking.
‘What happened?’ Millie asked. ‘What the hell happened in there?’
‘Just drive, please,’ I begged her. ‘I have to get home.’
She crushed her foot on the gas pedal, and after a minute I sat up and blinked into the darkening sky. It was later than I thought. She was waiting for me to speak.
There was only one thing to say.
I had added it up in my head. The tattoo. The Marinos’ interest in Jack, in me. Sara’s dimples. The sense of kinship I felt with her. Donata had yelled for Antony that night at Eden. He was already standing behind her, trying to entice me into their family, their business. He was my only uncle, and I didn’t really know him at all.
Everything I thought I knew was changing.
There was only one way I could ever know for sure. Only one person who would tell me the truth. And she was at home packing up our lives so she wouldn’t have to face it.
‘Millie.’ I heaved a shuddering breath. ‘I think I’m a Marino.’
‘What?’
‘I think my dad’s real name is Vince. I think he and Jack are the missing Marinos.’ I started to hyperventilate, my hands clutching around my throat as I tried to gather myself. ‘Say something,’ I pleaded. I needed it to go away. I needed my life to be normal. I needed to calm down. ‘Say anything.’
‘Wait,’ gasped Mil. ‘Wait, wait, wait, hang on. Wait. Does this mean that you and Nic are somehow … related? Have you been like … incestuously making out this whole time?’
OK. Anything but that. ‘Ew. God. No.’ I reeled backwards, disgust warring against my rising freak-out.
‘OK, sorry, my bad,’ she said, raising her hand in placation. ‘But in my defence, these Mafia family trees are incredibly complicated and I really only concern myself with the hot members.’
‘I’m not related to Donata,’ I said, realizing the small mercy in that at least. ‘She married into the family.’
‘But isn’t she, like, the Marino boss now?’ Millie released a low whistle. ‘Damn, that lady is ambitious.’
‘Mil,’ I groaned as I stuck my head between my knees and shut my eyes. ‘My whole life is literally turning upside down, and I really just need you to talk about something else. Anything else. Please, just distract me. I need you to make it stop.’
‘OK.’ I heard her suck in a breath, and after a moment of consideration, she said, ‘Did you know a baby puffin is called a puffling?’
PART IV
‘A truth spoken before its
time is dangerous.’
Greek proverb
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
THE KEY
I burst through my front door, half expecting my mother to be waiting for me. She was in the sitting room, a mug in one hand, her phone in the other.
‘There you are!’ She sprang to her feet, spilling tea across her shirt. ‘I’ve been calling you. You said you’d only be a couple of hours, Sophie. I was worried.’
Rage rumbled inside me. I took a deep, steadying breath.
‘Am I a Marino?’
The mug smashed at my feet. The pieces nicked at my ankle, drawing blood. I turned from her and marched upstairs.
‘Sweetheart,’ she spluttered, following me. ‘Hang on.’
‘You lied to me,’ I shouted over my shoulder. ‘All my life you’ve been lying to me.’
I crashed into her room and dragged the chair by her vanity table over to the wardrobe.
She stood in the doorway, alarm warping her voice. ‘What are you doing?’
I climbed on to the chair and started flinging my father’s old clothes out of the way, searching through his side of the wardrobe. I was looking for a half-forgotten memory from my childhood. A box I found once when I was trying to find my Santa presents two weeks before Christmas. I had come across a black box, frayed at the edges, that my father had yanked off me. A box he told me never to open.
Well, guess what? I was damn sure going to open it now.
‘Stop.’ My mother was beside me, tugging at my arm. ‘Can we just talk about this?’
I whirled on her, flinging another set of shirts on to the floor. ‘What do you want to talk about? How Dad is one of the missing Marinos? How his real name is Vince? How we’ve been part of the mob this entire time and no one thought it was a good idea to tell me? Is that what you want to talk about?’ I yelled. ‘Because I can’t imagine how you’re going to explain all that to me!’
Her eyes grew big in her pale face. ‘W-what?’
‘I know!’ I told her. ‘I know what I am.’
She stumbled backwards, collapsing in a heap on the bed. I kept rifling through my dad’s closet, shelf by shelf, searching for that box.
‘You were never supposed to find out,’ she said, her voice barely more than a whisper now. ‘Your father left that life behind a long time ago … He never thought it would catch up with him.’
I fisted a pair of jeans in my hand, turning to her. ‘But it did, didn’t it?’
She couldn’t look at me. ‘Jack didn’t get as far away from that world as your father did. He was drawing suspicion. And then … then Angelo Falcone started looking into them and—’
‘He murdered him.’ I rested my head on the top ledge of the wardrobe as the chair wobbled beneath me. ‘Dad killed him on purpose that night and you knew!’
‘Sophie …’
‘Don’t lie to me! Stop lying to me!’
‘He told me before they took him in,’ she admitted. ‘He said he had to do it, to keep you safe, Sophie. He couldn’t risk it getting out. He wanted you to live a happy life. Not the one he had. He lost his parents to that world.’
‘You knew he murdered him,’ I cried. ‘And you were OK with it!’
‘I’m not OK!’ She scrambled to her feet. I looked down at her tear-streaked face and saw the desperation in her eyes. ‘Why do you think I don’t visit him? Why do you think I don’t answer his letters? Why do you think I can’t stomach looking at him any more, Sophie? It terrifies me. I can’t stop thinking about it. I hate that world. I hate everything it stands for.’
Where was that damn box? I grabbed their wedding album from the top shelf and flung it to the floor. ‘Then why did you marry him?’
‘I didn’t know his past when I married him! He and Jack were taken away by their grandmother. They legally changed their identities. He was a Gracewell when I met him.’
‘OK,’ I said, forcing calmness into my body. ‘When did you find out he was the heir to a bloodthirsty crime family?’
‘After a few years.’
I fought the urge to take her by the shoulders and shake her. ‘Then why the hell did you stay with him?’
‘Because I was pregnant!’
The chair wobbled again. I shot my hand out and grabbed the shelf to steady myself.
‘I was pregnant and I was in love,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to punish him for where he came from. He was making an honest name for himself. He hadn’t seen his family in years. Nobody was ever going to find out. Sophie,’ she added, her voice turning hard, ‘I fell in love with someone who wanted a destiny different to the one he was born with. A man who was kind and funny and loyal and protective. And when the truth came out, I was still in love with him, because my knowledge of who he was didn’t change anything about who he had become. I loved him, Sophie, in spite of his family. Do you find that so hard to believe?’
I faltered, my words catching in my throat. She fell in love with a mafioso.
Was that really so hard to believe?
No. It was easy to understand. Too easy.
I turned back to my search. ‘You were supposed to tell me everything after Donata left yesterday,’ I said. ‘She was sure you would.’
‘I know,’ she conceded.
‘And you didn’t.’
She raked her hands through her hair, greasy tendrils swiping across her forehead. ‘I didn’t know what to do, Sophie. Your father made me swear to him that I’d
never reveal it. That I’d hide it with every last breath. But then … Jack got in hot water and he went to … he went to Donata, of all people, and he broke open the secret. And suddenly she had her eyes on you. She knew who you were. She said she was allowing me the courtesy of telling you. I told her I would.’
‘You really thought you could hide it from me?’ I asked her.
‘I had to try,’ she said, her words cracking. ‘I had to try.’
‘What were you afraid of?’ I asked, feeling marginally less angry now. It wasn’t so hard to understand my mother’s position. No wonder she hadn’t been coping well. She was chewing on a secret so big it was destroying her. ‘Telling me wouldn’t have ended the world.’
She shook her head. ‘You can’t bury something if you keep digging it up. We had to keep going, keep living the life we’d made. I was afraid you would go to them. That they would pull you in and you would see a family with money and protection and support, a family you never really had. And then Jack cut us off and the bills started piling up, and when Donata came I thought she would tell you, and you would leave me for betraying you.’
I reached down and clasped her hand. ‘I would never leave you!’
‘I wanted to do the right thing, the best thing …’ She shook her head, her expression filling with sadness. ‘But I couldn’t tell what it was, Sophie.’
‘What do you mean, Jack cut us off?’
‘Jack handles the diner money,’ she said. ‘He’s stopped sending us our share, and you weren’t well enough to go to work. I’ve been too frazzled to finish my own projects … and …’
‘I would have gone back, Mom. You should have told me sooner.’
‘Your health is more important to me.’
I rose on to my tiptoes and returned to my search, feeling a mixture of triumph and fear as my fingers brushed against something hard and dusty at the back of the closet. I pulled the box out, balancing it carefully as I heaved it down. I climbed off the chair and dropped it on the bed.
‘Sweetheart …’ she began, ‘I think we should take this slow …’
Inferno (Blood for Blood #2) Page 23
