I felt the horror infiltrate my features. Now I saw it. I finally saw the danger that Jack and Mrs. Bailey had been warning me about. Not to mention the kind of attitude that must have put blood on Luca’s shirt before. Maybe my paranoid uncle and the old busybody had been right about this family all along — certainly about Luca, at least. I wanted to say something defiant and witty, but he was looking at me like he was going to eat me, so instead I nodded like a zombie.
“From here on out, we go our separate ways. Capisce?”
My voice shook with anger and fear. “You can’t talk to people like that.”
He moved his hands away from the car and stepped back from me again. “Do you understand everything I just said, Gracewell?”
I wrapped my arms around myself and nodded.
“So we are clear?”
“Crystal.”
“Do I frighten you?” He tilted his head.
“Yes,” I said weakly. “Are you proud of yourself?”
He looked at me for a long moment before replying. “No, I’m not,” he said, so faintly I had to strain to hear him. Then he turned from me and made his way back to the house.
“Wait!” I called as the rational part of me screamed in protest.
Luca turned around slowly.
“You make a point of keeping your brother away from me and then you bring me to the hospital to make sure I’m OK. And you don’t tell the nurse who you are in case I would think you are a semi-decent guy. I don’t get it.”
“You don’t have to get it. You just have to deal with it.”
“Why did you bother scraping me off the sidewalk, then? Why do you even care if I was roofied or not?” The question hurtled across the space between us. He blinked twice and his mouth dropped open into an O. For a second, he looked young and innocent, like his twin.
“Are you kidding?” He was dumbfounded. “I’m not a monster.”
“You could have fooled me.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and inhaled like he was about to say something. But then he didn’t. Instead, he just shook his head. “You should go, Gracewell.”
“I have a name, you know!”
He laughed, looking up at the sky, like the maniac he clearly was.
“It’s Sophie. S-O-P-H-I-E.”
He continued to laugh, but when he returned his attention to me, his voice was utterly flat. “Are you sure about that?”
I blanched. “What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
Before I could process the uneasiness grumbling inside me, he spoke again. This time his voice was disturbingly quiet. “Don’t you get it? You’re a Gracewell. That’s all you’ll ever be to us.”
“What does it matter to you if I’m a Gracewell?” I demanded.
For an interminably long moment, he regarded me pensively. When he finally relented, it was with a determined exhale, like some internal decision had finally been made. He crossed the driveway and reached me in four strides.
“You really have no idea why you’re not welcome here?” he hissed. “Are you seriously that ignorant?”
I swallowed against the sudden dryness in my throat. “What are you talking about?”
Luca frowned. I didn’t understand his question and he didn’t understand my response.
“Cazzo.” He studied me with an almost violent confusion — it pinched the hollows in his cheeks, making them gaunt. “I’m not dealing with this.”
“I want answers!” I protested.
“You won’t get them here.”
“Then where?” I said half-pleadingly, exasperation sinking into my voice.
Luca ground his jaw in slow clicks, whatever shred of patience he had for our conversation rapidly diminishing. “Go ask your father, Gracewell. You probably owe him a visit.”
A familiar feeling of dread crept up my spine. My father. Everything always came back to my father. Of course it had something to do with him — I would never outrun what he’d done. I would never live it down. But there was something more to Luca’s words, something deeper, and it was twisting my stomach. What had my father done to the Priestlys? Before he was arrested he never put a foot out of line. As far as I knew, at least.
Luca wasn’t about to wait until I figured it out. He turned away from me once again, storming into the house, and slamming the front door with a deafening bang.
Feeling my cheeks prickle and burn, I looked up and caught sight of Valentino where I had seen him that first night. He was utterly still, his elbows perched along the windowsill as he looked down on me — on everything that had just happened. His face was solemn. Did he hate me, too? Did he think it right for his twin to act like that?