“Are you here to save us?” she asked me, sniffing through it.
My heart constricted. “Yes, gattina mia, I’m here to save you. Where is your mama?”
“She’s crying in her bedroom.”
I sighed as I stepped into the house and closed the door behind me, locking it and pulling the dead bolt across the frame. Rora grabbed my hands in both of hers, squeezing it tightly as if she was afraid I’d let go.
“Are you scared?” I asked her gently, bending to push her messy hair back from her sweet face. “What are you scared of?”
“My papa,” she whispered so quietly, I almost missed it. “He says he loves me, but he scares Mama.”
I hadn’t realized the man who’d been stalking them was her father and I couldn’t understand why Bambi hadn’t just told me. But I smiled at the little girl and stood to let her lead me back to the bedrooms.
“Bambi?” I asked as we rounded the corner and I found her sitting on her bed among a pile of strewn clothes and two open suitcases.
She was sobbing so hard it sounded like she was choking.
I went to her, sitting beside her hunched form so I could pull her into my arms for a tight hug.
“Hush,” I urged, stroking her back. “It’s okay. Calm down. Calmati.”
I held her for a few minutes with Rora standing there tugging on a lock of her hair, watching us with wide, frightened eyes.
“Can you talk now?” I asked Bambi, moving back to look at her. I pushed her hair from her face and tsked at her swollen eyes and red face. “You’ve made yourself sick crying. Everything is going to be okay, I promise, Dante and I will make it better.”
That set her off again.
My patience was a frying rope. Aurora absolutely did not need to see her mother going to pieces, not when she was obviously frightened herself.
I gently shook Bambi by the shoulders and cooled my voice, hoping it would shock her like cold water. “Georgina! Listen to me, okay? You’re making yourself sick and you are scary your daughter. Take a few deep breaths with me, si?”
She gave me a shuddering nod, hiccoughing through three deep breaths. Finally, she seemed to regain the ability to speak, because she whispered something to me.
“Scusi?” I asked, because I didn’t catch it.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated again, her voice wrecked. “I’m so sorry.”
“For what?” I asked, still so focused on comforting her that I almost missed the niggle of premonition in my gut.
Slowly, disbelieving, I pulled back from her.
She sobbed, catching it in my palm as she slapped it over her mouth.
“Bambi?” I asked, each word tightly bound with control so I wouldn’t lash out before I knew for sure. “What have you done to be sorry about?”
“H-he told me he would take Aurora,” she explained, her voice wet and thick with snot. “He told me he would take her away and never let me see her again.”
“Who did?” I snapped so hard she flinched.
“Auggie,” Aurora chimed in sullenly. “My papa.”
“Auggie?” I wracked my brain trying to think of who the hell Auggie was, but then I didn’t have to.
“Agostino di Carlo,” Bambi explained, tears squeezing out the corners of her eyes. They fell of her chin in a steady stream. “Agostino is Aurora’s father.”
Thirty-Two
Elena
She told me everything then, a voice like a guttering candle, about her history with the Cosa Nostra’s new Boss.
They’d met she was only seventeen and he was older, handsome and wealthy. He found her at bodega in Little Italy and chatted with her about which candy was better, Smarties or Reece’s Pieces. When he asked to take her for a drive, she went without question.
They only saw each other for two months before Bambi got pregnant. Apparently, Agostino was pleased.
Bambi’s father, when she told him, was not.
Emiliano had been the Capo of the New York City Camorra for years and he knew immediately who Agostino was when Bambi described him. His rival’s first-born son.
Bambi winced as she told me about being cast out by her family and then, abandoned by Agostino.
She was alone for years until Dante offered her help.
Apparently, it was a double-edged sword, because it brought her to Agostino’s attention again. He tried to blackmail Emiliano by threatening Bambi and Aurora. Even though he’d cast his daughter out as many old-school Italians would have done, he still loved her so he tried to make the money to pay Agostino off on the side.
Which had gotten him killed by a Mexican cartel.
I hauled Aurora into my lap as Bambi continued to relate her horrors in a voice stripped of all emotion. The little girl was disturbingly unperturbed hearing about her family’s past and it ached in me that she had been exposed to the horrors of mafia life in much the same way I had had been as a girl.
“When Papa died, Agostino left us alone for a while. I guess he was just patient. Then Dante got arrested and he showed up the next day on our doorstep wanting to see Rora. He really just wanted to threaten me.” She sobbed for a few seconds then valiantly tried to swallow them down. “I couldn’t tell Dante because he didn’t know about him being Rora’s father. He would have cast us out or started a war.”
“The war had already started, Bambi,” I pointed out coolly even as I cuddled Rora closer when I noticed she’d fallen asleep. “You should have told him.”
“I know that now,” she admitted miserably. “But I told my brother instead.”
A chill slid down my back.
Of course, Jacopo would have known about this.
“He said we shouldn’t tell Dante, that it would ruin everything he’d worked for in the Family. He said he’d take care of it, but Agostino wouldn’t listen to him. He made Jaco tell him stuff too.”
“You’ve been spying on the Camorra for him,” I surmised in a dead voice. “You and Jaco.”
She started to sob again, but I felt little compassion for her.
Of course, I understood the difficulty of the situation. I had no doubt Agostino would have taken her daughter for her without any qualms, that Bambi truly felt she was between a rock and a hard place.
But she had Dante in her corner.
A man who lived and breathed loyalty. Who gave a woman a job because she was a single mum with no prospects and he was just that good a man.
A man who had become a pseudo uncle to her daughter and called her the love of his life.
I couldn’t fathom why she had thought Agostino was the better of those two options.
Rage rose in my throat and then abruptly cooled.
Because I thought about Mama.
She had the choice between Seamus and Tore, and she had made that decision based on fear. That fear had led her to choose the worse man who might have appeared artificially better, especially through the skewed eyes of terror. She had assumed Tore was the greater of two evils just as Bambi had and they’d both been proven wrong.
I sighed so long it hurt my chest.
“Okay, Bambi, please stop crying and listen to me. You are going to pick up what you and Rora need as quickly as you can and then we are going to leave her. I doubt you’ll come back so take the essentials. I’m going to take you home and put you both to bed, but in the morning, you’re going to have to answer for yourself. What you did…I can’t pretend it doesn’t make me see red. But I know you’ve been in an impossible situation and I can’t fathom how hard it’s been for you to live with this.”