Shattered Loyalty, A New Beginning Blooms novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Boathouse

Hidden in his river boathouse, Livia takes Santino's gun, and he shows her the burner's number belongs to Lucio's gym; headlights cross the gravel.

The boathouse sat alone on a bend of the river, forty miles north of the city, with no neighbors and no streetlights.

Santino unlocked the door and turned on a single lamp.

I saw a wood stove, a narrow bed, a table with two chairs, and a rack of fishing rods on the wall.

I saw a canoe hanging from the rafters.

I did not see a phone, a clock, or a way out that he wasn't standing in front of.

"Phone," he said.

I gave it to him because there was no point in doing anything else.

He dropped it into a bucket of water by the stove and watched it sink.

Then he took the gun out of his jacket, ejected the magazine, and set both on the table.

He turned his back on me and crouched in front of the stove.

He was building a fire.

He was a man who had just helped drown me, and he was building a fire.

I looked at the gun.

I looked at his back.

I crossed to the table.

I picked up the pistol and slid the magazine home the way my father had shown me when I was fifteen, and I pointed it at the back of his head.

"Turn around," I said.

He turned around slowly with a log in his hand.

He looked at the gun, and then he looked at my face.

"Safety's on," he said.

I flicked it off with my thumb.

"Now it isn't."

"Good," Santino said, and put the log in the stove.

"I'm not joking," I said. "Why did you bring me here? Why aren't I in the river?"

"Because you didn't make that call."

He said it plainly.

I had been braced for a lie.

I had not been braced for the truth.

"You think I don't know that," I said. "Everybody at that table thought I did."

"Everybody at that table looked at the phone," Santino said. "I looked at Lucio."

I kept the gun up, and my hands kept shaking.

"The number that phone was texting," he went on. "I've seen it before. In January I drove Lucio to the gym on Broad Street. His second phone was on the dashboard, and it lit up. Same number, same name saved. Agent R."

I felt the floor tilt.

"You're saying Lucio is the leak."

"I'm saying the phone in your desk was texting the number on his dashboard."

"Then why didn't you say it at the table?"

"Because Carlo would have believed his son over me." He rubbed his jaw. "I've worked for him twenty years. I know exactly how he picks."

"And you drove me to a pier anyway."

"I was told to take you to a pier," he said. "I didn't say I'd leave you there."

I wanted to shoot him for being calm.

I wanted to cry because he'd said it so simply, and I hated that I wanted to.

"Put the gun down, Livia," he said. "You won't use it on me, and if you wave it around in the dark, you'll hit the stove."

"Don't tell me what I won't do."

"Then tell me what you want."

I didn't have an answer.

I wanted my life back.

I wanted to watch Lucio's face when I read him his own texts.

I wanted Carlo to look at me again and not at the wall.

"I want to go home," I said, and the second I said it, my voice broke.

Santino took a step toward me, and I raised the gun.

He stopped.

"Home is the first place they'll look," he said. "Lucio's men will search your apartment tonight, and every road on this river by morning. They'll check the pier too. They'll find a shell casing and a tire track and decide I did the job."

"So you want me to stay here."

"I want you alive," he said. "I don't care where."

He said it with such flat certainty that I almost believed him.

My arms were starting to burn.

The gun felt heavy and stupid.

I lowered it an inch, then another, and set it on the table between us.

He didn't touch it.

He picked up the bucket that held my phone, carried it to the door, and tipped it out into the dark.

"Why?" I asked. "You don't even like me. You've said fifty words to me in eight years."

He stood in the doorway with his back to me.

"Fifty-three," he said.

I stared at him.

"I remembered," he said, and his voice was rough. "Because you never once looked through me like I was furniture."

I didn't know what to say to that.

I sat down on the edge of the narrow bed because my legs wouldn't hold me, and Santino shut the door and slid the bolt.

The fire cracked in the stove.

For the first time since the dinner table, I let myself think about Lucio's hand squeezing mine before he took out the phone.

Then I heard something outside.

Tires on gravel, slow, coming down the river road.

Santino's head came up.

Light swept across the boathouse window, white and then gone, and then two headlights stopped at the end of the drive.

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