Page 79 of The Mad Don
“Bad mood?”
I pull back from him. He didn’t come for any reason except to enjoy this. I turn my face away.
“Giovanni sent me to give you a gift,” he says.
He raises a hand. His men come in and take me by the arms and drag me up off the floor. I’m too weak to do anything. My legs don’t have it in them. I haven’t eaten in days, and my body has nothing left to fight with.
“I want to see him,” I say to Fabiano.
He smiles.
“He’s preparing for his sister’s burial. He has no time for cheap romance.”
“You did this,” I say. “Didn’t you? You set up all of this.”
“I’m afraid you’re confused.” His voice is mild. “You did this. Take her.”
They pull me out, down the corridor, through the house, out the front. They shove me into the back of a car. Thunder rolls somewhere over the house as the doors shut and the engine starts.
Where are they taking me?
The thought turns over and over. Is he sending me back to Kirill? Just like that. That easily after all of it. I look at the men on either side of me, at the driver, at Fabiano in the front — four of them. I’m one of me, and I haven’t eaten, and my hands are shaking from hunger and grief, and I can’t fight four, not like this. I make myself wait. Watch the road and wait for the moment when I can take advantage of anything and run. I can’t solve Lucia’s death when I am locked up.
The moment doesn’t come.
The drive is long, so long that the city falls away, then the towns, and then there’s nothing on either side but open land, going gloomy under a sky full of rain. The car slows down, and it stops in the middle of nowhere on a flat stretch of wet ground with no building in sight.
They pull me out into the drizzle.
The rain is cold; it soaks into my hair and my clothes in seconds. Fabiano gets out under an umbrella one of his men holds for him.
“Boys,” he says. “Bring her gift.”
Two of them go to the back of the car. They open the boot. They lift something out of it, they carry it between them, and they drop it on the ground in front of me.
It’s a body.
I look at it. The rain is hitting it and running off it.
“What is that?” I say.
Fabiano smiles.
“You have a brother, don’t you? The one you’ve been searching for all this time.”
I look at the face, and I scream.
The face is gone. It’s been beaten into a red ruin, the features broken past anything I can read, and the sound that comes out of me isn’t a word; it isn’t anything; it just tears out of my throat, and I can’t stop it.
No, no, no, no!
“I heard Kirill had men out looking for him too,” Fabiano says. “For years.”
My knees go, and I’m on the ground.No. No, this isn’t him; it can’t be him.
“Giovanni, did you do the honor?” Fabiano says. “A reunion.”
I press my hands over my ears.No. That’s not true. That’s not true; it can’t be true; he is lying!
