The Enforcer (Untamed Hearts Book 3) (16 page)

Was he fucking joking?

Tino was already willing to sign up for the third option.

The put-a-bullet-in-Tino’s-brain option.

“Come on, Frankie.” The same guy groaned, as if he was taking personal offense. “It’s Sunday. I don’t wanna kill a kid on Sunday. Can we get it over with?”

“Fine. Hold him.” Frankie stopped hitting Nova and fisted his hair, jerking his head back again. “You move. You take that shirt out of your mouth. You do anything but lie there and watch, I’ll double it. Got it, champ?”

Tino would end up having a very close relationship with death. He would touch it from all sides too many times, and there was something morbidly serene about it. When it got close enough, people often froze rather than run. They would stand there and let it slam right into them.

Other hit men didn’t understand it.

But Tino did, that slowing of the world around him as they forced his shirt off. When his father jerked his head back, his voice sounded far away as he asked, “Tell me how many?”

Tino considered lying, but at this point, he was pretty sure that wouldn’t help. They’d have to be stupid not to know Tino had been counting.

So he used his kick-ass math skill and whispered, “A h-hundred and twenty,” before they shoved his shirt in his mouth and showed him firsthand why Nova’s eyes had gone wide.

Chapter Thirteen

Their ma was dead.

Nova cried for a long time. This soul-wrenching, broken sobbing after he’d gotten done destroying anything remotely breakable in the apartment. Truth was, he made a bad day unnecessarily worse, because it wasn’t like it was a fucking shock.

Their ma had been sick for a few years.

She’d been a shell of a person for the past three weeks.

She hadn’t talked for days.

There was a part of Tino that was relieved she wasn’t hurting anymore, but Nova came unglued. There was no calming him down. He just freaked. So Romeo crawled into the bottom bunk with Tino, and the two of them let Nova cry.

Romeo stroked his hair, pushing it away from his forehead in the same long, sweeping gesture their mother once used, and whispered, “
Va tutto bene, piccolo. Andrà tutto bene
,” until Tino fell asleep to the sound of Nova’s sobs.

It’s okay, baby. It’s going to be okay.

It was the fingers in his hair.

He wanted to pretend they were his mother’s, maybe Romeo’s, but they were shaking, frantic, grossly sticky when they caressed his face.

“Open your eyes. Come on. Please, God. Please. Please. Please.” One hard, desperate kiss was pressed against Tino’s hairline, before Nova went back to begging in Italian, “Madonn’, Ma. Please. Make him open his eyes. Open your eyes, piccolo. Cazzo, Ma. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

There was just this raw desperation to the prayer.

It made him feel like Nova was reaching in and jerking him back. Tino really wished he wouldn’t. He didn’t want to come back. He did not want to open his eyes. He did not want to remember the way Nova had kept his face buried against the cement, elbows tucked tight to his ears, hands in his own hair as he hid from watching them beat Tino.

The whole time as Tino lay on the basement floor, choking on his screams he reached out to Nova, believing in some strange way that Nova was going to save him. That something would click in Nova’s brain, and he would figure out a way to stop their father from hitting him over and over and over again until Tino was lying in a pool of his own blood.

Maybe Nova thought he wouldn’t have to look Tino in the face again.

Maybe Nova wouldn’t have to, because Tino passed out when they stopped with his back and jerked his pants off to tear into his thighs instead. When the basement finally faded out, Tino thought he was going to see his ma again.

In a way he felt like he’d earned it.

The hard way.

Except Tino’s eyes flew opened when the pain came back and slammed into him like a Mack truck. He sucked in a hard gasp of air from the shock of it, but then he was choking. His entire mouth tasted terrible and chalky, and he turned his head, spitting something out at the same time he let out a scream.

“Fuck. Shh.” Nova grabbed his face, forcing Tino to turn toward him. “Be quiet. I know it hurts, but you have to be quiet. I want you to stay awake, but you need to be quiet for me, okay?”

Tino used to have this natural tendency to do whatever Nova told him to if the cards were down. If he was in danger, he trusted Nova implicitly to get him out of the shit.

He was pretty sure he’d never been in more trouble than he was right now, and Tino trusted Nova exactly zero to save him.

But he stopped screaming and just cried.

The pain was all-consuming, ripping him up from the inside out. His head was resting on Nova’s lap, but he couldn’t stop moving, writhing from the agony, wanting to somehow crawl out of his skin and get away from it.

Tino wasn’t really awake.

He wasn’t present in that shower stall.

He remembered bits and pieces of those first few moments after he woke. The glow of the light in the bathroom. The blood that was everywhere. All over Nova, all over Tino, sticky on his skin and crusty in his hair. He wore only a pair of black boxer briefs, but even those were agony. He felt like his entire body had turned against him.

Mostly he remembered absolutely hating Nova.

Even completely mindless from the pain, he knew Nova’s fucking pride caused this, knew that his brother was so caught up with being smarter than everyone else that he let this happen. Now Nova forced Tino back into this hellhole, made him wake up to this nightmare when he could’ve let him die instead.

Tino hated him even as he rolled on his side and curled into Nova to keep the pressure off his back and let him caress his hair. He wanted it to be Romeo here with him.

Or Ma.

Or
anyone
but Nova.

What he didn’t remember, but he found out later haunted Nova most intensely, was that Tino told him all of this in choked sobs as he lay there and worked really hard at bleeding to death.

But Sicilians, they’re hard to kill.

And like rats, they’re stronger in packs.

“Tino?”

“Get out. Get out. Get out,” Nova growled, his voice echoing off the tiles. “Get out! They’ll find you here! Get out!”

“They’re gone. Ma’s asleep,” Carina whispered from the other room. “Why is he crying? Can I help?”

“Are you a fucking doctor? Do you have a medical license?”

“I have a first-aid kit.”

“A first-aid kit,” Nova repeated manically. “I need so much more than a first-aid kit to fix this, sweetheart. He’s dying. Get out.”

The thing about Carina was, she didn’t take direction too well.

She was pretty much on her own agenda most of the time.

She also had balls the size of Texas.

Tino heard the bathroom door click open, as Nova cursed in Italian and then whispered again, almost desperately, “Please get out. Don’t see him like this.”

Tino turned his head on Nova’s thigh, blinking past the agony, and saw Carina kneeling there in her nightgown, as if she had fallen when she walked in. Her hands were over her mouth, and silent tears were rolling down her cheeks as she stared at them.

“I-I lost the pill,” Nova finally said to her. “I had it under his tongue, but he spit it out. I can’t find it. He needs another one. Can you get it off the counter?”

“Yeah, I can get it.” Carina got to her feet. “He needs water.” When she came back with a glass from the kitchen, she asked, “Should we turn on the shower? There’s so much blood. It’s so much. I’ve never seen this much.”

“I think that would be incredibly painful for him,” Nova choked out. “If he’s gonna die, I don’t want him to hurt any more. Give him the pill.”

Nova thought Carina wasn’t a real sister.

They weren’t raised with her, so she didn’t count.

But Tino was pretty fucking sure it took a real sister to shove a pill down his throat even though he was choking on the water.

It definitely took a real sister to pull his head onto her lap and help Nova hold Tino on his side when he puked his guts up into a dishpan.

Without fail, it took a real sister to go back to the castle across the pool, covered in Tino’s blood, and steal her mother’s stash of weed when Nova asked her if she had anything to help that wouldn’t make him sick.

Tino wasn’t a fan of smoking
anything
, but he would’ve shot up heroin if they told him it was going to help.

Nova
was
a fan of smoking, but he said he wanted a clear head. So Carina was the one who sat there in the shower stall with him, her fingers in his hair just like his ma used to do, with long strokes as she pushed the sticky strands back from his forehead.

It took a real sister to light a blunt and hold it to his lips.

But it took a cosmic twin to smoke it with him until the world finally softened around him a little, and he started to believe there was still some beauty out there somewhere.

“I have a talent,” Carina said into the darkness, because the light was bothering Tino. The tip of the blunt glowed bright, and her voice was raspy when she blew out the smoke. “You want me to show you?”

“Yeah,” Tino whispered and then took a long hit when she put it to his lips. He held it in longer than Carina, desperate for it to erase more of the pain. When he blew it out, he watched as it danced in the rays of moonlight from the bathroom window. “Show me.”

For the rest of his life, Tino would never hear a version of “Ave Maria” quite like that. With Carina’s voice echoing off the tiles, as if they’d been designed just to make it sound more angelic.

When she spoke Italian, it was broken.

When she sang, it was magnificent. Flawless. The way it was supposed to sound, a psalm of beauty, art, and love. It was so heartfelt it was haunting, and Tino might have thought later he imagined just how beautiful it was.

That the drugs rose-colored the magic.

But he watched Nova, who sat bathed in blood and moonlight with his back against the bathroom wall. His arms were folded over his knees as he listened to this girl, who looked so much like him but wasn’t his sister, sing a prayer to the Mother for the three of them who were worse than parentless. Then he bowed his head, as if he needed a moment to let it really sink in.

The thing about Nova was, he remembered everything. Most of it he really wanted to forget, but sometimes something would happen, and Tino would see him take the time to appreciate the gift.

When Carina was done, Nova kept his head bowed, but he whispered, “You do have a talent, Carina.”

No sarcasm.

No ego.

Just an honest observation that no one, not even Carina, could deny.

“You wanna hear another one?” she asked both of them.

Nova lifted his head and looked at her with tears rolling down his face. “Sì, grazie.”

* * * *

When the first rays of early-morning light crept in through the bathroom window, Carina asked, “Why’s he so cold?”

Nova didn’t answer, just stretched out to lie next to Tino, whose head was still in Carina’s lap. They’d put a blanket over Tino sometime during the night. Nova pulled it up carefully, making sure not to brush it against Tino’s back as he whispered in Italian, “I’ll meet you,” and then took over running his fingers through Tino’s hair. “I’ll get Romeo out of prison, and I’ll meet you, okay?”

Nova sounded so broken, so lost, it was kind of hard to keep hating him, so instead Tino just said, “I love you, Casanova,” because hating him was too hard. It hurt too much, and he really didn’t have the strength to hurt any more.

He was so tired.

Nova burst into tears. He pressed his lips to Tino’s forehead, choking on his sobs as if anything else was past him.

“Why is he cold?” Carina asked again, her voice quivering with fear. “Why won’t you tell me? I know you’re freakishly smart. I heard my daddy tell my ma about it. So I know you know. Tell me why he’s cold.”

Nova pressed his forehead against Tino’s and said, “Because he’s in shock. He lost too much blood.”

There was a long silence before Carina sighed. “I have to go. The sun’s coming up.”

She got up carefully, but brought them a pillow and promised she’d be back soon. Then she was gone, and it was like the two of them sharing the bottom bunk back in their apartment. Up until now Nova wouldn’t let him close his eyes, wouldn’t let him rest despite the pain, but now Nova just sobbed.

Tino felt guilty, but he used Nova’s distraction to finally close his eyes. His body felt so heavy, like the weight of the world was crushing him into the shower tiles, and he was desperate for an escape.

He wasn’t sure how long he slept, or if he was even awake when Carina’s voice filtered back into his dreams. “Don’t freak out.”

“What’d you do?” Nova let go of Tino and sat up. “What is it? What’d you do?” He repeated it like the same sort of chant he used in the basement. “What’d you fucking do, princess?”

“It sounds like you’re freaking out,” Carina whispered. “I just, um… I sorta—” She paused, as if looking for the right words. “’Cause he’s my cosmic twin and—”

“
What did you do?
”

“I sorta told.”

“What?” Nova choked. “Do you know what they threatened to do to him if I told anyone? Do you know what they threatened to do to my other brother in jail?”

“I didn’t tell my daddy.”

“Did you call the cops?” Nova sounded even more horrified. “They own the cops. They own social services and—”

“I didn’t call the cops,” she said as if the idea was insane. “I told my nonno.”

“Your nonno?” Nova repeated, and then his entire body jerked as he pressed back closer into Tino. “
Oh my God.
”

“He’s sending my zio now, and I think you’ll like him ’cause he’s like you and—”

“Like me?” Nova repeated, except there was a knock on the door, and Nova repeated the same chant of horror, this time in Italian, “
Che minchia hai fatto?
”

“It’s okay,” Tino whispered, remembering Nova’s prayer for it to be true in the basement. “It’s okay,” he repeated again, and he wasn’t even that scared.