Seven Days Before the Mafia Princess Died novel · Chapter 18 of 24

Chapter 18: Ninety-Nine

Bianca stood at the foot of my hospital bed and didn't sit down.

Ciro had brought me back at two o'clock, gray and shaking, and the surgeon had said a few things to him in the corridor that I was glad I didn't hear.

Now I lay propped on three pillows with the line in my hand and the afternoon on the ceiling.

She still wore the gray coat.

She hadn't taken the silver bird off, and it rose and fell on her collarbone with her breath.

"Ciro's outside the door," I said. "Carlo is outside the other one."

"I know."

"If you came to finish what you started in the boathouse, they will hear."

"I didn't come for that."

"Then say it."

She looked at her hands.

"I thought I'd have a speech," she said. "On the drive over I had a whole speech."

"And?"

"I don't."

I waited.

She had always been better than me at filling a silence, and for the first time in seventeen years she let one sit.

"Do you know what it's like," she said at last, "to be loved because somebody is sorry?"

I said nothing.

"Papa never once raised his voice at me. Not once. When I broke Mamma's mirror, he laughed. When I got a girl expelled for a thing she didn't do, he bought me a horse." Her mouth twisted. "I used to think it meant I was special."

"You were."

"I was a debt. I was something he owed." She breathed in. "And I could feel it, Sera. Even at eight. I could feel the whole house tiptoeing around me like I was a bomb."

"So you took what you wanted."

"I took everything, to see where it stopped."

Her voice was very small.

"Nothing ever stopped. Your room, I wanted it, so Carlo carried your bed into the hall, and nobody even looked at you. I thought, there. That's the end. Now somebody will say no." She laughed, wetly. "Nobody did."

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