The driveway was torturously long and dark. When we finally stopped, Luca hitched me away from his body and opened the door of his SUV, propping me into the passenger seat and shutting me in before I could try and tumble out. He jumped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. It roared to life beneath us. The clock on the dashboard read 10:04.
“Where are we going?” I already knew. I just wanted him to speak to me, to acknowledge what he was doing. Even yelling was better than the stony silence that stretched out between us. The quiet meant he was too focused on what he had to do, and that my pleas weren’t causing him to waver.
We drove in silence for a long time, speeding along deserted roads I didn’t recognize, until finally strands of civilization edged back into view. I tried to stay alert, but I could feel myself slipping in and out of consciousness as the pain ebbed and flowed through my body.
I tried everything to get through to Luca: I cried, I pleaded, I yelled, but he never replied. He never even looked at me. He just stared, face-forward, at the road, grinding his jaw and gripping the steering wheel so hard his fingers turned white.
And then when the clock read 10:57, almost an hour after leaving Lake Forest, we stopped. Luca turned off the highway and pulled around the back of a small service station. He parked the car, and for the first time since we had started driving, he turned to me. I stared back into his fathomless blue eyes, and waited as he shifted in his seat. He pulled something out of his back pocket, and my stomach curled with terror as he leaned toward me. He dropped it into my lap and for a moment I felt no pain, just surprise. It was a fifty-dollar bill.
Then he spoke quickly and quietly: “I took you from Felice’s house against your will. When we made it into town, I stopped at a red light and you escaped. You ran into a service station. I couldn’t come after you because there were too many people inside. I couldn’t risk getting caught. You called a cab to pick you up. You went home to your mother and you both fled Cedar Hill immediately.”
I started to shake, first my hands and then the rest of me. He was setting me free. He wasn’t going to kill me. “What about my uncle …” I said as tears pricked the back of my eyes.
Luca’s expression was unyielding, his voice dark. “You will not return home until after your uncle’s funeral. Valentino won’t keep us in Cedar Hill just for you. He won’t like it that you escaped, but he will be able to move past it once Jack Gracewell’s debt is settled.”
“But if — ”
“Sophie,” Luca cut me off. “You will never see your uncle again.”
“Please,” I whispered. “Please, you have to help him.”
“There are certain mistakes I can afford to make,” he replied evenly. “And certain mistakes I can’t.”
“Do you mean they’d kill you if you tried to help him? But they’re your family.”
“I mean I wouldn’t try,” he said plainly.
I swallowed my words. Not only could Luca not help Jack, I knew he wouldn’t. In his heart, he believed he should die, and there was nothing I could do to change that. How could a boy who was raised to believe that bad people are wholly bad possibly understand the idea that within bad there can be good and, more important, the potential for good? Luca and his family were looking at the world in black-and-white.
With a quick glance over my shoulder, Luca pulled his switchblade out of his pocket and cut the ties around my wrists. I watched as they fell apart limply. He pressed the handle of the blade into my hand and closed my fingers around it. “You stole my knife and took it with you in case you needed protection.”
I looked down at the inscription: Gianluca, March 20th 1995. He was really giving me his blade, his personalized blade. And what’s more, he was trusting that I wouldn’t use it against him. It felt cold and unnatural in my hands, but I kept it, stuffing it in a pocket of my shorts alongside the fifty dollars.
“Thank you,” I said, because I couldn’t manage anything else. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or horrified. I was exhausted, I was numb, and I was shaking. But he was setting me free, and whatever else was happening around us, that meant something. He was going against his family. He was giving me my life back.
“You’ll never see us again, Sophie.” There was a devastating finality in his words, but there was still nothing in his expression. It was, as ever, carefully controlled.
Before I could respond, the handle of the passenger door clicked and I turned to find Nic standing there, in the small parking lot at the back of the service station, holding it open for me. I stepped out of the car. We looked at each other, and I could see every shred of heartache bound up in his dark eyes.