Chapter 14: Dead This Time

At nine the black car came to the curb and sat there with its engine running.

I watched it through the gap in the curtain.

At ten past, the driver got out, looked up at the windows, and got back in.

At nine thirty it drove away.

Pietro came in through the back door at ten, with garden dirt on his knees and his phone in his hand.

"Ugo says Irene went to her room and locked it," he said. "She hasn't come out. Your mother sat in the study with the door shut."

"She'll send someone else."

"Yes."

"Then I'm not sleeping upstairs."

"Neither am I," he said.

Fausta set up the kitchen the way she had once, she told us, set it up for her husband's cousins.

She turned out every light but the one over the stove.

She put the shotgun across her knees in the rocking chair by the pantry.

She gave Pietro his father's old revolver, which she kept in a biscuit tin, and she gave me a rolling pin.

"For what?" I said.

"For the part where you don't want to shoot anyone," she said. "Sit by the wall."

We waited.

Pietro sat on the floor beside me with his back against the cabinet and his shoulder against mine.

Neither of us spoke.

Around two, the refrigerator clicked off, and the silence got heavy.

Then something small scraped at the back door.

Fausta lifted one finger.

The scraping stopped.

A key turned in the lock, very softly.

Keep reading free with an account. Start The Last Time You Chose Her from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.