“Cazzo!” Enzo swore. “I forgot. Can you not come?”
For a long list of reasons, she had to go. “I’ll come. I just have to figure out how to explain my absence to Fallon if I’m not here when she wakes up. I’ll figure it out. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Don’t let him do anything.”
“I won’t. He hasn’t tried to fix the problem yet.”
And he wouldn’t for quite a while. Tommy was used to other people making his messes go away, so it would take him a very long time to make a decision for himself in the midst of one.
~oOo~
Tommy had set Emily Elgin up in a lovely condo in Cambridge, a couple blocks away from the Charles River, in a tidy neighborhood where tenured professors and mid-level college administrators lived. Emily had been a cocktail waitress at one of Tommy’s pet clubs and was not the college type, but she appreciated her ‘classy’ neighbors. Tommy liked that she was at just enough distance from his family to be both conveniently hidden and conveniently accessible.
Of the many comares her brother had had—sometimes more than one at a time—over the years, Giada probably liked Emily best. She was quiet and sweet. She didn’t stick up for herself any better than any other woman Tommy had ever hooked up with, but then she wouldn’t; self-assertive was decidedly not Tommy’s type.
In fact, Giada thought Emily had been as well suited for her brother as it was possible for a woman to be. She had made no demands on him. She’d appreciated every gift he’d given her. She had no designs on him but what he wanted to give her. They’d met when he’d broken the arms of a man accosting her as she was leaving work for the night. She considered him her savior.
But now she was lying on the floor of the master bathroom of the condo he’d bought her. Her savior had become her executioner.
Feeling like a homicide cop, and the closest thing to one who would ever see this scene, Giada stood in the doorway and took it all in.
Giada’s older brother, the don of the Sacco Family, the storied Italian family of the Boston underworld, had beaten this sweet woman into a purple, misshapen blob. The beachy décor of the bathroom, all hues of sand, sky, and sea glass, was spattered and sprayed with blood and bits of bone and tissue. He’d also stabbed her repeatedly, in the gut, with a shard of the broken mirror, and her intestines had spilled in a reeking pile on a small rug patterned with seashells.
Sweet Emily, who’d only wanted to make Tommy happy.
Giada stepped carefully into the room, trying not to put her boots in standing puddles of congealing blood, and picked up from the floor a slender white stick with a pink cap. Two pink lines in a window at the side. She studied it for a moment. Not to understand what it was—that was readily obvious—but to absorb the horror. She’d thought she was past shock at what Tommy was capable of. She’d thought she was even past surprise. But this was a level beyond the most basic humanity.
He’d done this, all this, because he’d made her pregnant.
A shadow at the doorway drew her attention. She turned to see Enzo, looking grim. “Ah, Giada,” he muttered as he contemplated the room. His voice was almost too low to be heard. “It’s time. It must happen. If you can.”
This was not the place to have the talk those words really meant, but they were vague enough to apply to the moment as well. She nodded and made her way back to the door.
In the bedroom, sitting on the chair at Emily’s pretty, fussy makeup vanity, her brother hunched over his knees. A sky-blue towel was wrapped around his dominant hand, soaking through with his blood. From holding the mirror shard he’d used to carve the seed of his own child away.
Family love was like a chronic illness, Giada thought. An addiction. No matter how awful the people of your blood were, it was impossible to eradicate the love from one’s heart entirely. Even if you loathed them, even if you’d learned to recognize the abuse for what it was, if you saw the cruelty and lack of conscience, even so, there was still love, coiled on the floor of the heart like the last clotty scum of curdled milk in a bottle left out in the heat.
Her brother had been the tormenter of her childhood. The complicator of her adulthood. The obstacle to her ambition. An embarrassment. An abomination. Now, he threatened to destroy what their father had built—what their father had given to him and not to her, on the single basis of the lump of flesh hanging between his legs.
And yet, she still loved him.
But she was disgusted and furious now.
Crouching before him, she set the test stick on the floor at his feet, where his attention was focused. He flinched to see it, and lifted his eyes to hers.
All active anger had left him; he was in the contrition stage of the domestic violence cycle. It wouldn’t last. Soon, he’d find a way to put the blame back on Emily and quench this tiny flicker of conscience.
“Giada, I … she …”
Oh, look, he was already looking for a way to stomp out the flame.
Giada stood. “Did I see Fabio downstairs?” she asked Enzo, while her eyes stayed locked with her brother’s. She wanted him to see her handling his shit yet again.
“Yes,” Enzo answered. “He’s waiting for orders.”
Orders. What she, Giada, would give him. And Fabio would tell himself they’d come from Tommy.
“Fabi needs to take Tommy to the ER and get his hand sewed up—not here in Cambridge, but back in the city. Better yet—they should go to the cottage, to that urgent care on the way. Say he cut it with a broken glass. That’s even true, right?”
His eyes still locked on hers, tired and empty now, Tommy nodded. “Right.”
“Alright. Go on. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Tommy stood and staggered to the door. He stopped and turned back. “What’ll you do with her?”
“Make her go away.”
Emily had no family; that was Tommy’s type. He’d isolated her from any friends; that was his way. There was no one to wonder where she’d gone but her neighbors, and neighbors hardly noticed each other anymore.
He swiveled his head and cast a quick, guilty glance at the bathroom. “I love her, you know. I do.”
Giada didn’t reply. She watched her uncle follow her brother from the room. Then she pulled a burner phone from her coat pocket and dialed a number not in her contacts, but one she knew by heart.
When the hoarse rasp of a lifelong smoker at waking said a grouchy hello, Giada said, “Hey Marv, it’s Giada. Sorry to call at this hour, but I need a full-service clean and pack, stat.”
~oOo~
With a gentle twist of his hand, Enzo got the waitress to set the coffee carafe on their table. She gave him a humoring, flirty little smile and headed to the counter with their order.
Giada was exhausted, and her elderly uncle could not have felt especially spry. It was seven in the morning, and she still had Tommy’s wife in her guest room at home, with nothing more than a note saying she’d had to get an early start, but Fallon should ease leisurely into her morning.
Also, she had a full agenda at work today.
Normally, she took her coffee with sugar, but this time, she swallowed it down hot and black, hoping the bitter scald would add an extra kick of energy.