Inferno (Blood for Blood #2) (21 page)

The house phone rang, and my mother’s footsteps sounded in the hallway. I strained to listen, noting the rarity of the phone ever ringing at all these days. A new client? I hoped so. My mother dropped her voice, so I lowered the volume on the TV. Millie was scrolling mindlessly through Instagram on her phone, looking at pictures of someone else’s food.

‘… left it all to me and it’s not fair.’

OK, definitely not a client, then. She was never usually rude to clients. In fact, my mother, interminably polite, was really only rude to one person.

I muted the TV.

‘… just up and leave like it’s nothing!’

Her voice had risen, her pitch rousing Millie from her scrolling. She snapped her head up and I put my finger to my lips.

‘I have to clean this up again, and how am I supposed to do that? There’s no money.’

‘Who’s that?’ Millie mouthed.

I shrugged, keeping my finger at my lips.

My mother dropped her voice again, and the words that reached me this time were disjointed, plucked out of sentences so I couldn’t find their meaning.

‘… since that night … normal … the truth … promise when I thought … any more.’ I got up and crossed to the door, easing it open a notch. I still had to strain, but the words came together now, and I held my breath so I could hear them all.

‘… not fair on either of us. I have to.’

I peeked out. My mother was standing in the hallway. She was leaning against the bathroom door, one hand twined in her hair, the other clutching the phone. ‘Fine!’ she hissed. ‘But it’s not right. I don’t think it’s right!’ She dropped her head and brought her hand to her eyes, rubbing them. ‘I’ll send her,’ she said. ‘But we’re not done talking about this. Not even close.’

By the time she had hung up, I was standing in the hallway, my eyes burning holes in the back of her head. She turned
around and instead of surprise, there was defeat in her reaction.

‘Sophie.’ Her arms fell limply to her sides. ‘Oh, Sophie, I’m so tired.’

I took a cautious step towards her. ‘Was that Jack?’

She blinked dumbly. ‘That was your father. He wants you to go see him tomorrow.’

Surprise bubbled in my mind. ‘Why?’

‘Because he knows what happened with the Falcones,’ she answered flatly, frown lines rippling along her forehead as she conceded, ‘I told him.’

‘Why?’ My horror seeped through my voice. Why would she do that, knowing there was nothing he could do to change it? Why worry him needlessly when she was so worried herself? And then I pinched myself as guilt wrapped around me. She wasn’t coping, that was why. And once upon a time, he had been her rock. Maybe he still was, even though animosity lingered between them. Maybe she still needed him just as much as I needed her.

She raked her hair away from her face. Her defences were down and she was too tired to put them back up. ‘Because I wanted to make him see.’

‘See what?’

Her gaze shifted past me to where the sun was pushing through the hall window. ‘That everything isn’t OK,’ she told me plainly. ‘That it hasn’t been OK for a long time.’

‘No,’ I said, quietly, feeling a strange sense of relief at unveiling the truth we had been so carefully avoiding. I didn’t realize how badly I had been craving it. ‘No, everything isn’t OK.’

But, why, I wondered, did he want to see me and not her? I studied my mother’s slumped frame, and saw in her what he probably had heard in her voice – weakness.
It’s me
, I thought.
I’m the one who has to fix this
.

As if a switch had flicked inside her, my mother snapped her head up and her gaze became hard and shining. ‘You know, despite everything that’s happened, I love your father very much,’ she said, her words woven through a heavy sigh. ‘I love the life he built for us. I love the daughter he gave me. I love our family.’

‘That’s good …’ I ventured, ineptly. She hadn’t spoken so openly or tenderly about him in a long time. The words were warm, but there was something beneath them … a barb, a sadness.

‘I miss him, Sophie,’ she admitted. ‘I miss him every day.’

Tears spiked behind my eyes, her sudden candour jarring. ‘Me too, Mom. I miss him too.’
I miss us. I miss our family
.

‘But sometimes …’ She shook her head, slowly, her gaze drawn to the ground between us, to another time and place, to something I couldn’t access. ‘Sometimes I feel like I might just explode.’

She turned from me abruptly and stalked through the kitchen and into the garden, where she disappeared into her flowers.

I watched her go. I had come to know that feeling all too well.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PRISON

T
he bus to Stateville Correctional Center was airless, the seats dank with years of enmeshed body odour. I curled up by a window near the back and flicked through the playlists on my iPod. I listened to Joshua Radin and watched Chicago fade into remoteness.

I arrived early in the afternoon. My hair was flat against my head where I had leant against the window to sleep. I wound it into a ponytail. My clothes were sticky. The humidity hadn’t broken yet and the heat outside was stifling. The sky was overcast, a thick blanket of blinding white pressing down on me. The air was charged, the ends of my hair floating with static.

A storm was coming.

Inside Stateville, the meeting room smelt like disinfectant.
Three prison guards lined the walls, watching with glazed indifference. I tried not to catch their eyes, afraid they might see through me and find out the things I knew.

My father shuffled in to meet me. He was a little slumped over, like the act of keeping his head up required too much energy. He was still wiry and thin, with greying hair that flicked out behind his ears and dipped into big, grey eyes. They used to be bluer, like the ocean.

He lifted his head and his smile lit up his features. For a passing moment, he could transform himself into the father I used to know outside of these walls. ‘Sophie, it’s so good to see you.’

I wasn’t allowed to hug him, so I struggled with what to do with my hands. I settled on an awkward wave/salute.

We sat down. I was studying his face, his neck, his hands – any part of him that I could see – searching for signs of injury. He was studying me just as closely. It threw me a little. The bruises on my face had gone now, and the swelling around my nose had disappeared. I was paler than usual, but other than that, my injuries no longer marked me. Still, he knew about them now, so it made sense that he would try and search them out.

There was a crack running down the back of my plastic chair. It dug into me and I shifted, trying to get comfortable. There was no point. I folded my hands on my lap, searching for the right words. How should I begin? How much should I say?

The discomfort on his face mirrored mine and I almost smiled at how similar we were. He dipped his head and gave me a
look
. The room around us faded, until it was just the two
of us, secured in our own little bubble. He dropped his facade and his face crumpled.

His words tumbled out. ‘I know what happened, Soph. Your mom told me.’

‘Yeah, well,’ I said, lacing my fingers together in front of me. ‘Jack’s an asshole.’

Grief etched itself into the planes of his face, pulling them down until he looked old and weary. ‘I’m so sorry. That’s all I can say. I am sorry all of this has happened to you. I’m sorry your life was in danger and I wasn’t there to help you. I’ll never forgive myself.’

Something settled deep inside me, burning, and I had the sudden urge to clutch at my stomach and rip the feeling out.

‘You don’t have to say sorry,’ I said, sounding angrier than I had meant to. But I
was
angry with him, about what had happened, about the mess he had made for all of us. ‘It didn’t have anything to do with you.’

He dropped his head into his hands. ‘You’ve been through too much. And I wasn’t there. I’m never there.’

I looked at the crown of his head, where tiny white hairs were beginning to sprout beneath the grey and brown. ‘Dad, I’m fine.’
No thanks to you
. I didn’t say it though, I couldn’t be cruel.

He lifted his head. ‘You’re not fine. And neither is your mother. She’s terrified, and I don’t blame her. I’m trying to give her advice but she won’t listen to me. She’s angry at me, Soph. And she has every right to be, but she’s not coping and I’m worried about her.’

‘You and me both.’

I asked the question that needed to be asked, the one
flashing at the front of my brain. ‘Have you heard from the man of the hour?’

‘Not yet.’ My father’s breath whistled through his nose. When he spoke again, his words quivered with anger. ‘The things he’s done, the position he’s put you and your mother in. He was supposed to keep you safe in my absence, not risk your lives.’

‘Did you know?’ My fingernails were digging into my hands, making crescent shapes in my skin. ‘Did you know what he was up to all that time?’

‘No.’ I had barely finished my question before he snapped out his answer. ‘Of course I didn’t know.’

‘Did Mom fill you in on everything?’

‘As much as she could,’ he said. ‘But I don’t want to talk about that, I want to talk about my girls.’

‘Well, I want to talk about the drugs and the Golden Triangle Gang and everything else that’s put us in hot water. I want to talk about everything you missed.’ So I did talk about it. I told my father everything that had happened up until the warehouse shoot-out – I told him about Jack’s shadiness, about the drugs and the gang he had been a part of, how he walked my mother into the warehouse, how he stood over me and tried to kill the Falcone underboss. I talked until my voice nearly ran out. I talked until I was sure I had toppled Jack over in my father’s mind, until I was sure he saw the cold, hard truth about his little brother.

Then I let up, breathing long and deep, as a small weight shifted inside me and I felt less bound up than before.

My father, who had been listening intently, unblinking as he watched me, straightened in his seat. ‘Soph, I promise I’ll
make him pay for endangering you and your mom,’ he said. ‘I’m so disappointed in him – in his choices, in the path he’s chosen. I should have cut him off long ago.’ Compared to all the words I had just hurled at the space between us, his answer felt like nothing, but I could see how his face had changed, how everything in his brain was slotting into different places. He was completely wrung out. He scrubbed his hands against his forehead. ‘But I can’t get to him. I don’t know where he is or what he’s doing.’

That was the moment. Indecision flickered inside me. To tell or not to tell. To stir or not to stir. But I needed guidance. A plan for when Jack came back – I needed my father to intervene so I wouldn’t have to. So I decided to give him this chance to step up and protect us, the way he’d said he would. ‘I know where he is,’ I said, without batting an eyelid. I sat back in my chair, instinctively pulling myself away from him in case the force of his reaction was too great. ‘Jack’s with the Marino crime family.’

‘No,’ he said, quickly. ‘No way.’ Well, that answered the question of whether he had heard of the Marinos before. ‘Jack would never be so stupid. He would never openly consort with the Marinos.’

‘He is,’ I insisted.

My father shook his head.

I pressed on, determined to push Jack from whatever pedestal my father had placed him on. ‘I don’t know what he’s offering Donata Marino but he’s with them, I swear. He’s not even hiding it.’

‘God,’ my father exhaled. He looked like he was about to pass out. He raked a hand through his salt-and-pepper hair.
‘After everything. To do something so dangerous. What is he
thinking
?’

It didn’t really feel like he was talking to me any more, but since I had the answer, I figured I’d supply it.

‘Protection,’ I said. ‘That much is obvious. The Falcones want Jack dead, so he’s hiding with the one family who will happily go against them.’

My father’s eyelids fluttered at half mast. He looked genuinely ill rather than angry. I slid my hands across the table as close to him as I could without touching. I willed my strength into him. ‘Do the Falcones … do they know where Jack is?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ My brain flashed with scenes from Eden. ‘They’ve known for about a week. There was a … showdown of sorts … It was on the news,’ I tacked on, deciding that telling my father I was actually there would be the world’s stupidest mistake. He’d freak out, even more than he was now. ‘I know Jack was there, though … someone I know saw him.’

He recoiled from the information, his eyes growing wide. ‘He was at the Eden shoot-out?’

‘You heard about it?’

His eyes were darting, panicking, as he processed the information that his only family in the whole world apart from my mother and me was now in the middle of the city’s most dangerous blood war. Jack was courting violence and murder, and my father couldn’t get to him – he couldn’t be the protective big brother he was used to being. Jack was on his own.

‘Of course I heard, Soph. Donata Marino’s
teenage
daughter was just murdered by the Falcones.’ My father indicated
behind him in the general direction of the prison. ‘Franco Marino is serving his sentence here. He howled the walls down. A Falcone was murdered in his cell yesterday morning, but nobody’s talking.’ My father composed himself, his mouth turning hard. ‘Listen to me, Sophie, I need you and your mother to leave Cedar Hill immediately.’ He lurched forwards, his hands thudding on the table. ‘Leave the house, leave the diner and get as far away as you can.’