Shattered Loyalty, A New Beginning Blooms novel · Chapter 5 of 24

Chapter 5: Storm

By nightfall the sky over the river had turned the color of a bruise.

Santino came back to the boathouse with rain on his shoulders and a white envelope in his coat.

He'd driven me up that afternoon in silence.

Now he set the envelope on the table and did not open it.

"Cash," he said. "Carlo hugged me at the door. He thanked me, and he told me to take a week by the water and rest."

"Did he lie?"

"I don't know." He sat down heavily. "Twenty years I've known when that man was lying. Today I couldn't tell."

Thunder rolled across the water.

The lamp flickered twice and went out, and the whole boathouse dropped into the red glow of the stove.

Neither of us moved.

The rain came down on the roof.

"Why did you do it?" I asked.

"Do what?"

"Everything. Twenty years of him telling you who to hurt, and you went. You never asked why."

He was quiet for so long that I thought he wouldn't answer.

"I was fifteen," he said. "I was in a county detention center for stealing from a grocery. My father was dead, my mother was dying, and my sister Marta was eleven. Carlo walked in one day in a good coat and said he needed a boy who could keep his mouth shut. He paid Marta's school. He buried my mother." He shrugged, but it was a stiff, tired movement. "You don't say no to a man like that. He didn't buy my hands. He bought my whole life."

"He raised me too," I said.

"I know."

"He sat with me at my father's grave on my birthday every year. Every year, Santino."

"I know."

"And last night he sat there and let Lucio hand me over."

My voice shook.

I was standing now, I didn't remember getting up, with my arms wrapped around my own ribs.

"I don't want to think about him," I said. "I don't want to think about any of them. I want to feel something that isn't this."

Santino looked up at me.

The firelight caught half of his face, the broken nose and the grey in his beard.

His dark eyes had been watching me for days.

"Livia," he said.

"Don't." I crossed the floor. "Don't tell me it's a bad idea. I know it's a bad idea. I know you were told to kill me. I know you could still be wrong about everything."

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