Luca jogged over to me, his arms streaked with blood and fur. He was saying something, but I wasn’t listening. The reality of what had just happened was sinking in. The ground around us was littered with dead rats, and my body was streaked with their blood. One had landed a yard from my shoe. I stepped over it, moving towards the explosion site.
Yet again, the proof of Marino cruelty was shimmering in front of me. I was watching my mother’s blue Ford now burnt black and heaving beneath dying flames. I was fighting the urge to rip their poisoned, savage blood right out of my skin.
Felice and Paulie darted past me, their arms filled with buckets of water. Elena was outside too, trying to keep the children away from the flames. I could hear her screeching at Sal and Aldo behind me. One of Paulie’s girls, Greta, was wailing uncontrollably.
I drifted towards the car. At the very end of the driveway, plumes of smoke curled into the sky, turning the air to an unnatural, rancid smog.
A gift of smoke and ash. A hundred bloodied rats. A warning, not a shot. And somehow, that made it all the worse.
I stared as the flames made my eyes water, as the dead rats painted blood at my feet. I stared as Nic and CJ tied rags around their mouths and batted at the dying fire with blankets. I stared as Felice doused four buckets of water over the car, as Paulie inspected the damage. I stared as Elena came charging towards her sons, the younger children now barricaded inside the house.
Gino and Dom were covered in blood, too. It had soaked into their jeans, and criss-crossed their T-shirts, ending in smudges around their necks. Gino had a big crimson splodge on his cheek.
The smell was so achingly familiar. Dom’s forehead was mussed with grey, his hair burnt at the tips. Gino’s ponytail was like straw, strands broken off at the ends. He looked like he was about to vomit on himself. Dom raised his head to his mother. ‘They stuffed the car with dead rats before they detonated it. It nearly blew us into the next life.’
Elena walloped him on the side of his head. ‘Non parlare così!’
‘Mamma!’ he yelped.
‘Imbecilli!’ she snapped, giving Gino a similar clout. ‘Have I really raised morons? Do you not understand the danger in unfamiliar gifts? You do not approach what you don’t understand! Go inside and get cleaned up before I twist your ears off for not listening to me!’
I stayed rooted to the spot as every inch of me turned to rage and ice, as thoughts of revenge surged into my mind and swept me up inside them. I stared and stared, and then I screamed so loud that my voice cracked and my throat felt like it was bleeding. It was a raging cry, a response to their message, so loud and unavoidable now. Because that was when it hit me. They had stood here and looked up at Evelina, through the gates, and laughed – I’d bet – laughed as they destroyed my mother’s car. They had brazenly come to our door and hurled the threat directly at me. Remember what happened to your mother? Look and see. Remember what we did to her? Here is your reminder. Here is what we do to rats. Here is what we will do to you.
You are a rat, Sophie Marino, and we are coming for you.
’Sophie.’ Luca’s hand on my arm, holding me back, as though I would leap at the car and burn myself against the scalded metal. ‘Come away from it.’
I rounded on him. ‘Why should I?’
This message was for me. Why should I hide from it? The immediate world began to fade – the edges of it blurring black and quiet around me. I had never known animosity like this. I had never felt so passionate about anything.
I stared at the car again. I could feel my anger pounding in my ears, heating the tips of my fingers. It was catching in my chest. Pooling underneath my tongue. Prickling up the back of my neck.
Calm down.
Your time will come.
You’re going to make them pay.
CHAPTER TWO
ALLY
In the library at Evelina, I collapsed into an armchair and tried to massage the headache from my temples. Even after three showers, I could still smell the dead rats, the lingering smoke. It was making me sick.
I tried to quell the rush of heat surging through me, pushing my heart rate up, tripping through my breathing. I lay back, counted out a seven-second exhale. Bookshelves lined every wall and climbed right up to the corniced ceiling. Three stained-glass windows peered on to the gardens at the front of the house.
An oil painting of Evelina Falcone, Felice’s dead wife, hung over the stately fireplace, her half-lidded gaze turned towards the windows, her lips curving into a small smile. Her dark hair was piled high on her head, coming loose in tendrils around her face. It was like something out of the past – a da Vinci recreation, the makings of a shrine. I had no doubt that Felice had commissioned it, that he had bought her the diamond choker around her neck. And yet, for all the wealth she must have had, her eyes held only sadness.
The library was like a place of worship, with low lighting and an array of sumptuous leather chairs, and yet there was a staleness about it too. In this palace full of game rooms, flat-screen TVs, consoles and acres of land to lose yourself in, there were few Falcones who chose to seek out solace in the library, and so it had become like a time capsule from another era. Dusty and forgotten. Silent.
Silence was exactly what I needed.
A knock at the door roused my thoughts before they could spiral somewhere violent. Nic slipped inside, his hands shoved in his back pockets. ‘Hey.’
‘Hey.’
His hair was wet, dark strands sticking to his forehead. He smelt like shampoo – not smoke, not like me. He sank into the chair opposite me. ‘What are you doing in here?’