Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (82 page)

“Neither should you.”

“I’m not trying to protect you,” he said.

“Thank you for that.” I brought the cone to my mouth. The water numbed my upper lip with an icy shock.

He clicked a button on the door’s edge. “This is something else.”

He stepped outside and closed the door with a resounding click, and I dropped the paper cone, splashing cold water on my feet.

Then the fire alarm started.

What had he promised in exchange for the blaring klaxon alarm that went off? I didn’t wonder about that until after I’d tried the knob and found he’d locked it from the outside. I pounded on the door, screaming his name for all of fifteen seconds, calculating what he’d traded with my father.

Our life together. That could be the only thing my father would want. And I knew Antonio’s calculations, because we were of one mind. He hadn’t lied in saying that he wasn’t trying to protect me. He was doing something else entirely. If his plan was to give me up, take Valentina home… then what?

Then something. Maybe he intended to figure it out once Valentina was safe and he’d made peace. Maybe I already knew the answer.

I trusted him. Even as I screamed for him to open the goddamned door, I trusted him.

Then I caught the stink of smoke.

My eyes burned. Was it in here? Would he leave me if the room was on fire?

I turned around. The room was dark but for the illumination from the chai-colored sky and a tiny pinprick of hot orange.

“So,” an Italian-lilted voice said. I heard her clearly between the honks of the alarm. “I can finally see you.”

antonio

Amor regge senza legge
.

oosely translated… love rules without laws.

Romanticized. A completely painted-pink version of truth. When love swells and all the world seems small in the face of it, the heart feels like the most powerful thing on Earth. Above all worldly things. Money. Laws. Common sense.

One follows the heart to paradise or destruction, but it rules, and it doesn’t tell you where you’re going. You just go. Laws be damned. Laws of family and country can go to hell, and you can follow.

I’d had no business marrying Valentina, but I loved her. After the first few months, I became dissatisfied in bed, but I stayed faithful. Nothing I did was good enough for her, so I tried to do better. She became an emotional burden, yet I committed myself to her.

Valentina had had no business marrying me, but she did. She was from the north and hated the southern part of the boot. Yet she loved me. She hated the camorra as much as she embraced my family.
Omertà
burned her alive and set her apart from her friends. But she kept silent for me.

As time passed, maybe one of us would have changed enough to make us happy together. Maybe we would have bent toward each other and met. The day I left with the taste of her risotto sliding against my tongue, disappearing behind the growing bite of bitterness, I realized how far we were from each other. She’d become vicious and moody, and no matter what I did, the only thing she wanted to talk about was my walking away from being my father’s consigliere.

She was pregnant. She didn’t want to bring children into the fold. Saddle them with a father who could be dead or imprisoned. She’d never told me any of that, but I knew it was true. It was obvious.

I didn’t owe her anything. We’d failed each other. I was no more responsible for the failures of our marriage up to the point she disappeared than she was. But after that, I blamed her for everything. For keeping my son from me. For letting me grieve for her. For showing up only when she thought I was dead.

I trotted down the hall, running with the
whoop
of the siren. I’d grabbed a white coat and headed against traffic to the cardiac floor. I had a room number. Theresa was locked away. That had been my promise. Declan Drazen would manufacture a way for me to get Valentina if I left Theresa behind. I had to go alone. He was protecting his daughter. I was grateful. At least if I wasn’t seeing sense, he was.

I was going to get Valentina and send her home by plane or slow boat. Arrange something with my son she’d agree to. I would apologize to Theresa with the most profound and honest apology I could muster. Then I would end my marriage somehow. I’d do something that was against every tradition in my family and get a divorce. Or get an annulment and make sure my son was taken care of in some other meaningful way. Something more, and something less, than my father had done after my mother annulled their marriage.

I was elated. Walking on air. Everything I wanted was about to come to me. I could settle down and let Zo take the reins of the business without fighting for my crew. Theresa and I had enough money, time, love.

My god, I loved her.

I didn’t think it could happen. She and I, together almost normally. But it was going to happen. In the short trip down the hall, I remembered the scent of olive blossoms on the way up the 5 freeway. I would buy a small orchard between Los Angeles and San Diego, and we would live on it together. Close to her family. Close to Zia, who I forgave in my heart for keeping my wife and child from me. I would run the business legitimately, completely above board, and Theresa would keep the books and numbers. She’d pressure me to be more efficient, and I’d teach her why I couldn’t be. We’d fight and make up and fight and make up and make children and make up and—

I got to room 498 mid-smile. The door was closed, probably because Valentina was supposed to have checked out already. I had a moment of concern that she might have tried to escape when the alarms went off two floors below, but I was propelled by my plan, thoughtless in my fantasy of a life with Theresa, and naïve in my belief in her father.

They wore white coats, and I felt a prick in my hip. It was too late to say or do anything. Too late to apologize or to ask where Valentina was. Too late to run, too late to fight. The room went sideways, and the smile left my face.

theresa

y eyes adjusted. A woman smoking. Thin as a rail. She sounded old, but I couldn’t see her well enough to confirm. She blew a stream of smoke, leaving the last huff for two rings that drifted up in a breaking halo.

“Donna Maria,” I said, remembering her from the wedding. The alarm was muffled through the door, but it was a constant that made me raise my voice. “How long have you been here?”

“I’ve heard people fucking before. Don’t worry your pretty head about it.”

I let that hang like the layer of smoke collecting at the ceiling. It had been a separate room and a closed door, but still. She stepped forward into the window light. It cast her in blue, revealing her age. I stepped back.

“I wanted to see you,” she said. “To get a good look at you. I wanted to see if you have vengeance in you.”

“And what if I do?”

“We can’t have that.”

We regarded each other for too long. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I knew it frightened me. She looked like solid evil. Sin made flesh. As old as she was and as small as she was, she had murder on her hands.

I stepped back again. “How did you know we were here?”

“Why? Are you afraid my consigliere set you up?”

“He didn’t.” I hadn’t considered it because there was no way Antonio or my father would put me in a room with this woman. Lorenzo? Otto? One of them. They would pay.

Donna Maria pointed at my eyes. “And there it is.” She shook her head slowly.

“What?”

“Some people are born with a need to make things even. Imbalance is like a stone in their shoe. They need to shake it out. This never changes. It’s not even a choice. It’s who they are. This is you. I saw it on you just now. For you, there will be an imbalance, and you’ll need to correct it, unless I correct you first.”

Imbalance?

Vengeance.

Then there must be something to avenge. Oh God.

“Don’t.” I said one word as a full sentence, begging for Antonio’s life as an answer to what was in my head, not what had come from her lips.

She looked at her wrist then at me. “It’s probably already done.”

I had an excess of physical reactions to quell. My hands got hot. My thighs tingled. My rib cage shrank until all the air was squeezed from my lungs. There might have been more, but I hadn’t time to catalog them.

She was on me so fast, she became invisible in the space between us. My feet were lifted from under me, and the floor thwacked the back of my head.

She was so fast. I’d never seen anything like it, even in Antonio. The knife was a streak of blue light against the darkness, and my instincts acted where my mind was too slow, turning my head to avoid the blade. I jerked my hips and threw her off me just as the door opened. A solid wedge of light poured in, and the decibel level of the alarm doubled.

I was alone on the floor, sprawled like a drunk.

“Miss, there’s a fire alarm on this floor,” said the orderly, turning on the light. “Let’s go.”

I spun to look for Donna Maria Carloni, scanning every last place she could hide, but she was nowhere to be seen. The door to the pump room was closed. I pointed, but the orderly dragged me out.

theresa

onna Maria had terrified me, but she’d propelled me into action. If she hadn’t tried to kill me, I might have poked around for Antonio, trusting that he’d planned our reconnection.

How long did I have? I followed the orderly and the crowd down the hall until he checked the next doorway, then I slipped away.

Donna Maria had to kill Antonio herself, despite what she’d said to freak me out.

Right?

Unless someone else was supposed to inherit Antonio’s territory?

I had a moment of doubt when I worried that he’d intended this. That he’d given himself to death to save both of the women in his life, and Donna Maria had come to me to make sure I wouldn’t avenge a death he chose.

I couldn’t believe that. I trusted him.

I opened the emergency door just as a throng of staff and patients headed toward me. Jesus, a lot of people worked the late shift.

“Turn around,” said a ponytailed woman my age, wearing dark blue scrubs and pulling a gurney.

She took my arm, still guiding her supine patient. We were followed by a crowd of professionals acting calm and bored with a sense of urgency to their motions. The doctor let go of my arm, and as the crowd pushed down the hall, I took one step back into the lunch room. She was gone.

Hoping another staffer wouldn’t detain me, I got back out into the hall. I acted official, as if I was heading back into the burning hospital for official life-saving business that couldn’t wait.

My father was a piece of work. A fire. Did he make sure there was a real fire? Or did he just pay someone five figures to pull the wrong lever somewhere in the guts of the building?

Once in the hall, I grabbed a clipboard and trotted against traffic as if I belonged there. I had to get to the cardiac unit. If I could find Valentina, maybe I could retrace his steps. My family was on that floor with Jonathan.

The hall was mostly empty when I passed a room with the door open. It was the third I passed, but for some reason, I stopped. Inside was a man lying down, eyes taped shut, head in a kind of plastic box. I stepped in. The lights flashed against the patient’s skin. Fat tubes came out of his mouth, his bow lips gauzed against friction.