My Father's Test Turns Lovers Into Killers novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Seventh Card

Paolo says she wrote him one too and shoves her out of the garage; Teo kisses her, she breaks it with a joke, and he says to look at his eyes when he comes out.

I found Paolo at seven in the morning, in my father's garage, washing the black Lincoln with a chamois.

I had slept on my bathroom floor with two cards in my coat pocket.

I held the one with his initial out in front of me.

"Paolo."

His hands stopped on the hood.

He saw the card, and all the color left his face.

"Where did you get that?"

"The cellar. It's in my handwriting. I didn't write it."

He laughed, one short ugly breath, and threw the chamois into the bucket.

"Sure you didn't."

"Paolo, I swear on my mother."

"Don't." He came around the car so fast I backed into the workbench. "Don't you put your mother in this."

His hands were shaking.

I had never seen Paolo's hands shake, not even the night he proposed to me in a restaurant full of strangers.

"You read it to me in the dark," he said. "Do you know that? Somebody read it out loud, in your voice."

"In my voice?"

"Soft, like a girl. Like you were crying." His eyes were wet and furious. "He told me there was a man in the chair, and the man had put his hands on you."

I stopped breathing.

"There was a hood over his head, and a gun on the table, and the voice said, you can walk out and never see her again, or you can make it stop."

"Paolo."

"I shot him." He said it flat, like a street address. "Twice. He was still talking when I did it. I couldn't see his face, he was begging, and I thought of you, and I pulled the trigger."

I couldn't speak.

"Then the lights came on, and the hood was off, and he was a stranger. A stranger with a wedding ring on, Allegra. Some guy who'd never seen you in his life."

He took the card out of my hand and tore it in half, and then in half again, and the pieces fell on the concrete.

"Do you want to know the worst part?" he said. "I'd have done it again. If you'd asked me to. That's what that room does. It finds out what you'd do for the woman you love."

"I didn't ask you to."

"Get out of here."

"Paolo, listen to me, somebody is using my handwriting."

"Get out!"

He shoved me in the chest with both hands, not hard enough to hurt, just hard enough to send me stumbling through the garage door.

I landed on my hands in the gravel.

A pair of work boots stopped in front of me.

Teo crouched down and took my wrists, and turned my scraped palms up between his.

"Who did this?" he said, in a voice I hadn't heard from him before.

"Nobody. I fell."

He looked past me at Paolo, standing in the garage door with his chest heaving.

For a second Teo's face was so cold I almost didn't know him.

Then he looked back at me and it was gone.

"Come on," he said. "Let me see your hands."

He took me to his truck, which was parked across the street, and sat me on the tailgate.

He kept a first aid kit under the seat, a real one, with everything in it, and he cleaned the grit out of my palms with a sting of alcohol and a clean white gauze.

"You've done this before," I said.

"Four years in the Army. I was a medic."

His fingers were careful, and his thumb rested on the inside of my wrist, right on my pulse.

I told him everything.

I told him about the key and the cellar, and the chair, and the drain.

I held up the last card in my coat, the one with his initials.

He looked at it and gave it back.

He didn't look surprised.

His face was calm, as if he had already known what to expect.

"You don't have to go in," I said. "We can get in my car right now and drive to Vermont. I mean it. We'll get married in a barn."

"Allegra."

"Please. Six men, Teo. One of them told me he'd have pulled the trigger again, if I asked."

He taped the last strip of gauze and smoothed it flat with his thumb.

Then he took my face in his hands and kissed me.

It was not like the night before.

It was hard and quick and desperate, and my back hit the side of the truck bed, and his hand slid into my hair.

I kissed him back until my head spun.

I had my fingers fisted in his shirt, pulling him closer, when I made myself stop.

"Don't get used to that," I said against his mouth.

"Used to what?"

"Being kissed in a gravel lot at seven in the morning by a woman who just got thrown out of a garage."

He laughed, low and rough.

Then he stopped laughing and rested his forehead on mine.

"I'm going in," he said. "Friday. I have to."

"Why?"

"Because if I don't, you'll never know whether I would have come out the same."

I closed my eyes.

"When I come out," he said, "look at my eyes. Then tell me if I'm still me."

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