Vendetta(35)

“And you are?” he asked, a slow smile forming.

“I’m Sophie, and I just stopped by to — ”

“What a pleasure,” he said, silencing me with politeness and releasing my hand militarily.

I tried not to stare at the red marks all over his face: not quite pimples, more like pinpricks — hard to spot when far away but difficult to ignore at close range. It was like he had fallen into a rose garden face-first.

“Please excuse my intrusion. I do hope I’m not interrupting anything. I’m Felice,” he said, pronouncing the “leech-ay” part with a distinct Italian roll. “Valentino’s uncle.”

The switchblade buyer. I tried not to curl my lip in disgust.

“You’re not interrupting anything,” Valentino answered from over my shoulder. There was a hint of indignation in his voice.

Felice rounded the table in wide, graceful strides, taking most of the perfumed scent with him. “I wasn’t aware you boys had time to make friends in the neighborhood.”

“That’s not remotely the case,” Valentino replied, his tone acidic. “Sophie is just returning something.”

I held up Nic’s hoodie in a bid to ease the strange tension that had descended upon us.

Felice looked at it sharply. “Is that Luca’s?”

“Unlikely,” said Valentino.

Felice shook his head. “Of course it’s not,” he murmured. “He has his priorities in order.”

I wasn’t sure if that was a dig at me or a dig at the other three brothers.

“Dom’s?” Felice asked with a frown, like it was the world’s most important mystery.

“No. He’s taking out that girl from the diner.”

“Ah yes, of course.”

My lips parted in surprise. So they already knew about Millie? That news was barely twenty-four hours old! They must have shared everything with each other. And yet they apparently had no idea who I was.

“It’s Nic’s,” I cut in, feeling marginally insulted. “I ran into him at the diner last night and he let me borrow it because it was raining.”

Felice stiffened, exchanging a poorly concealed look of alarm with Valentino.

“Nicoli didn’t mention that,” he said, regaining his composure in a flash of teeth.

His response landed with a blow. How could they know about Millie already but not a single iota about me? Nic obviously didn’t think me important enough to mention, even in passing. The thought made me feel stupid for even being there.

“Well, here it is.” I dropped the hoodie back on the chair carelessly. I had clearly made too much of it already. “I just wanted to give it back, but then we got to talking about Valentino’s artwork and the time got away from me.”

“Ah.” Felice clapped his nephew on the shoulder and glanced at the pile of drawings. “Exquisite, aren’t they?”

“Yes,” I said, wishing I had never come in the first place.

“You know,” said Felice, to no one in particular, “I’ve been reading the most incredible things about artistic sensibilities and their connection to great tragedy recently.” He moved away from Valentino and began to pace around the table. “Did you know that many artists and composers have been known to create their best works following tragedies in their personal lives?”

He didn’t wait for either of us to respond, but continued striding around the kitchen, moving his hands around as he spoke. “Just look at Carlo Gesualdo, a famed Italian prince and widely regarded genius. He murdered his wife and her lover in their bed, mutilated their bodies, and then strung them up outside his palace for everyone to see. And then he went on to compose some of the most powerful and dark music of the sixteenth century.”

Valentino shifted in his chair.

Felice stopped gesticulating and zeroed in on me for my reaction. “What do you think of that?”

I tried not to think of how horribly awry my plan had gone.

“It seems to me that the composer’s tragedy was brought upon himself,” I ventured, silently wishing I could just dissolve into the ground and slither home through the earth’s core. “So I’m not sure you should count it as something that happened to him.”

“A debater, I see.” Felice’s expression turned gleeful. “But surely you could argue that the pressure of having to exact retribution was brought upon him by his wife’s actions. To punish her was the societal expectation, but the act of having to do it, for him, I think, may still have been a personal tragedy.”

“But surely he didn’t have to kill her.” If only Millie could see me now — debating the intricacies of sixteenth-century murder. All this and headstones in the last twenty-four hours — the calendar said July, but it was definitely starting to feel like Halloween.