They’d never believe my innocence. Not now. How could I not know where I came from? How could I not know who I was?
How could I not know?
How could they not tell me?
‘It’s not true,’ I said weakly, hearing the doubt in my words. ‘It can’t be true.’
Luca turned to his brother. ‘Valentino?’ he said quietly. His expression was thrumming with unexpected vulnerability. It made me want to slam my head against the wall. ‘Is this true?’
The room fell deathly silent. Valentino nodded. ‘È la verità.’
Luca turned, slowly. His face was shuttered again. He was in commander mode. To me, he said, as simply as if he were asking my age, ‘Are you a Marino?’
‘I—’
‘You heard Valentino,’ said Nic, who had become markedly dishevelled in the last minute. He threw his eyes to the ceiling, his hands raking through his hair. ‘She’s a fucking Marino.’
I backed towards the door.
‘So we’re agreed?’ Felice yelled above the rising commotion. ‘I can kill her?’
‘No!’ said Luca, arms outstretched towards him. ‘Keep your head, Felice.’
‘Everyone be quiet and don’t move!’ said Valentino, and the room fell silent again. ‘We must come to a decision.’
Run, said a voice in my head. Run and don’t stop. Don’t stop even if they shoot your legs out from under you.
‘Nicoli.’ Felice’s voice was shrill as a bell. ‘Let’s let Nicoli decide her fate.’
‘Felice,’ Valentino warned. ‘This is not a game.’
Felice pulled out his gun and waved it above his head. ‘I want to know which is stronger,’ he told the room. ‘Loyalty or love.’ He pointed the gun at my head and cocked the trigger. ‘I want Nicoli to tell me what to do to the Marino in our midst.’
‘Basta,’ said Luca, his voice little more than a growl.
‘Felice,’ said Paulie.
Valentino said nothing. So Felice kept his gun high.
Nic stepped towards me, but without blocking Felice. He cocked his head, his expression unreadable. ‘She can stay if she proves herself. She has to kill a Marino. We can use her connection to them.’
Luca came to stand by Nic, the two brothers shoulder-to-shoulder, both of them looking at me as if they had never truly seen me before.
Maybe they hadn’t.
‘Go,’ Luca mouthed. ‘Now.’
I seized their makeshift shield – whether they meant it that way or not – flung open the door and ran as fast as I could. I didn’t turn around to see if they were following me, or to listen to the rising shouts and screeching chairs. I sprinted and sprinted until my chest burnt and my legs shook, and then I pulled out my phone and called Millie.
My mind whirred as I ran. It couldn’t be true. Fate wouldn’t be so cruel. My own parents wouldn’t be so dishonest as to keep something like this from me. The secret was too huge. Too impossible.
And yet that tattoo kept flashing in my mind. Forgotten arguments from long ago undusted themselves – all those times when my parents thought I was asleep, all those times my father looked over his shoulder, or stood at the windows of our house, watching the darkness. The clawing sense of wrongness in what he had done to Angelo Falcone. The anxiety that rested behind his eyes now he was in prison, the sense that something bigger was coming and he couldn’t stop it. Puzzle pieces were shifting all around me … and somehow, somehow the impossibility of it didn’t seem so big at all.
I’d escaped from the Falcones with my life just now. But I knew that once Donata realized what I’d done, it would be forfeit either way. If loyalty was supposed to bind us, then I was the worst Marino in history, because I had just unravelled it completely in the course of one afternoon, and laid her imminent plans to move against the Falcones right on their doorstep. I was stuck between two bloodthirsty crime families, and over the course of one day I had made enemies of them both.
Millie pulled up when I was almost a mile outside Felice’s house, forcing myself along the main road, staying close to the thicket of trees in case an offending SUV rolled by and put a bullet in my head. I threw myself into her car and doubled over, covering the back of my head with my hands. I was half-crying and half-choking.
‘What happened?’ Millie asked. ‘What the hell happened in there?’
‘Just drive, please,’ I begged her. ‘I have to get home.’
She crushed her foot on the gas pedal, and after a minute I sat up and blinked into the darkening sky. It was later than I thought. She was waiting for me to speak.