‘OK then.’ The car jolted to the side and Luca slammed on the brakes, pulling us into a mud ditch at the edge of the street. My body strained against the seatbelt as I lurched forwards. He pulled the parking brake and flung the door open.
‘Where are you going?’ I half-shrieked, undoing my seatbelt and whipping my head around at the same time. The place was deserted. There were no cars behind us – just fields and trees and muck on either side of us.
Luca was already out of the car, striding towards the field beside us. ‘Wait there,’ he called over his shoulder. He ducked through the fence and got lost in the grass. It brushed against his knees as he walked through it, bending low and scouring the ground. Clad completely in black, and with a switchblade sticking out of his back pocket, Luca ran his fingers along the grass.
He was completely and utterly out of his natural environment. And it didn’t bother him at all.
I waited in the car with his keys and his phone and his gun and the radio still on, and tried to figure out just what the hell he was looking for on this random dirt road.
He ducked back into the car a couple of minutes later, his cheeks tinged with the faintest circles of pink. He was holding a small bunch of flowers in his hand, dirt still clinging to some of their ends, heads drooping against one another where he had grouped them together in his fist.
He held them across the armrest between us. ‘Here,’ he said, not quite looking at me.
A bouquet. For me.
My jaw unhinged. I took them from him, my fingers scrabbling against his palm as he released them and I tried to keep the mashed bunch of blue flowers together.
‘Thanks,’ I finally managed, rotating them, checking that they were really real. ‘You got me violets.’
‘Is that what they are?’ He was already easing the car back on to the street. I caught the hint of his smile. He so knew what they were. Nerd.
Something swelled in my chest. They were half-wilted, ripped from the earth and strewn with stray blades of grass that were probably covered with tiny bugs, but they were the first bouquet of flowers I had ever got. And they were beautiful.
‘I earned these,’ I said, beaming at my bounty as I held them in my lap.
Luca nodded at the road, his lips stretching to reveal a flash of white teeth. ‘You definitely did.’
The start of the afternoon – the prison, the highway scare, the gun, the terror – faded with the fields behind us.
Luca dropped me off at the end of my street just after six p.m. I scooped my flowers up and hopped out, turning to wave them at him. ‘Thanks for the ride.’
‘You’re welcome.’
I gestured down the street, in the direction of reality as it came creeping back in. ‘Anyway, I’m sure you have … diner business to attend to.’
He shook his head, his expression turning sombre as his seriousness returned with thoughts of his family. ‘I don’t watch the diner, Sophie.’ He sighed, just a little, and his brow furrowed. ‘My responsibilities are closer to home.’
‘Oh,’ I said, realizing that Luca’s presence in Cedar Hill really was just a favour to me. An act of kindness that had saved me from melting on that bus. ‘Thank you for going so far out of your way for me.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘You don’t have to seem so surprised.’
‘Hmm,’ I teased, pretending to consider him. ‘Maybe you’re not so bad after all.’
He leant across the seat, jabbing his finger in the air. ‘If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it. I have a reputation to uphold, you know.’
‘Oh, you mean the whole asshole thing?’
‘And speaking of reputations, don’t do anything stupid,’ he added, leaning back into his seat and releasing the parking brake. ‘Fight your natural urges.’
I frowned at him. ‘And it almost ended so well.’
He shrugged as I shut the door. Through the open window I heard him say, ‘Well, then it wouldn’t really be us, would it?’
He didn’t wait for my answer and I didn’t stand watching his car as he took off, back to Evelina and the underworld. My thoughts skipped to the safe and all the secrets it held, to his brothers who were lurking somewhere nearby. I turned for home, my bouquet of blue violets held tightly in my hand.
There was a time, not too long ago, when I never would have expected eleven flowers and half a doughnut to lift my mood so high. But that was before Jack, before the diner, before the Marinos, before the Falcones. That was before my father told me to get the hell away from Cedar Hill.
My footsteps slowed as I realized that to honour my father’s wishes, I would have to ask my mother to do the impossible. I was caught between them – between everything – and all the roads were hazy and grey, and I didn’t know which one to choose. The sky was grey too, heavy with a distant rolling storm, and it pressed down on me as I walked, suffocating me slowly under its heat.