Inferno (Blood for Blood #2) (31 page)

I shook my head. This guy was utterly deluded. There was no way he was taking me down like this. Not when I needed Sanctuary. Not when I had my mother to think about.

‘You know, Vincenzo’s boys weren’t there that day,’ he said to me. ‘The two of them were gone before I could finish the job.’ He clicked his fingers. ‘They had vanished in a puff of air.’

‘Jack and my father aren’t twins,’ I countered.

Felice shrugged. ‘Neither were the Marinos. Twins make it a better story. It seeks to justify the Marinos’ hit on my own father on the day Luca and Valentino were born.’

‘You’re clutching at straws,’ I said. ‘You know you are. Everyone can see it.’ I was starting to sound less sure of myself, but only because he was so convincing. That didn’t
make him right. He was a lunatic.

‘You’re either a good liar or a dumb fool,’ said Felice, coming closer. I watched his hands, anticipating the appearance of a real gun, but he kept them where I could see him, raising them as he asked, ‘Do you know why your father murdered my brother? Because I think I finally understand now.’

‘It was an accident.’ I blinked back the tears pooling in my eyes.

Felice was losing his composure. His voice was shaking. ‘Don’t you think it
strange
?’

‘He came for Jack that night,’ I said, repeating what Felice had told me all those weeks ago. ‘You said it yourself.’

Felice turned to the others. ‘Who here believes Michael Gracewell’s hit on Angelo was an “accident”?’ he said, making air quotes.

There was a stony silence. Nic deflected his gaze. Luca wouldn’t look at me either.

Felice turned back to me. ‘Haven’t you ever asked yourself what your father was truly capable of?’

I declined to answer, offering him my most contemptuous glare instead.

‘I made my own assumptions, but I didn’t know. The truth is, my brother never told me where he was going that night. I knew he was up to something so I had to follow him, like a
scarafaggio
!’ He was starting to perspire. The lie was breaking through. ‘Your father killed Angelo because he knew who he really was! Angelo was going to break apart your perfect little life.’

Thirty heads rolled back towards me. There was a general
sense of wonderment – dark Italian eyes widening in surprise, mouths going slack. A flurry of whispers scuttled along the table. They were falling for it. They would vote against me.

‘You’re lying!’ I shouted. ‘Stop it!’

Luca shot to his feet so he could stand between Felice and me. ‘Drop this now, Felice,’ he warned. ‘It’s not right what you’re doing.’

‘Luca.’ Valentino’s quiet interruption killed the commotion. It was remarkable; whenever he spoke, the whole room dangled on his word. Luca backed away from Felice and stood, instead, by his twin’s shoulders.

To Felice, Valentino said, ‘Show them the photo.’

Felice didn’t take his eyes off me. ‘With pleasure.’

He pulled a page from the envelope he was holding, and slid it across the table. I stepped forward tentatively, staring over Gino’s head to look at it. We were all craning to look at it.

‘Stateville biometrics,’ narrated Felice for those who couldn’t see. ‘They make a record of their prisoners’ identifying markers when they’re brought in. Valentino pulled some strings. He received this email thirty minutes ago.’

Felice’s words droned in the background of my attention. I was too busy staring at a photo of my father. It was like his mugshot but in this one, his shirt was off, and there were three images, one of him side-on, the shamrock on his arm small and blurry. He’d told me he had gotten it with a friend on his eighteenth birthday – a cautionary drunk tale. His back was bare, and in the photo of his front, right over where his heart was, was a crest with a black handprint inside it. Beneath it were the words
Fidelitate Coniuncti
.

Donata’s final words to me.

‘Loyalty binds us,’ translated Valentino. He wasn’t anywhere near the photo, but I’m sure he had already stared at it long and hard. ‘The Marino family motto.’

‘That,’ Felice’s index finger stabbed the tattoo on the page, ‘is the Marino crest. Every Marino since the dawn of
Cosa Nostra
has had this crest engraved on their person. Many of us in this room have seen them first-hand on their corpses.’ He sucked in a gulping, excited breath. ‘He’s covered it since, smart boy. But
these
he can’t get rid of.’ He moved his finger and pressed it over my father’s grainy, lifeless eyes. ‘
These
are Don Vincenzo Marino’s eyes.’ He lifted his head and moved his finger until it was an inch from my face. ‘And so are those.’

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THE LIFE

I
pulled back from the table. I was finding it difficult to stay calm, more difficult than it was to believe what Felice was saying. I had seen that crest a ton of times, on hot days when my father worked in the garden, when he got out of the shower in the morning. He had told me he and Jack had gotten the same one as teenagers – as a way to always remember each other no matter where they ended up in the world. So they would never forget where they came from.

So they would never forget where they came from
.

The room was deadly silent. I stumbled backwards, pressing myself against the wall and feeling its coolness through my tank top. I was going to pass out. I was going to get killed.

Felice seized the stunned silence. ‘If you examine the records, collated with Angelo’s research, you will see that the
prison-recorded birthdate of Michael Gracewell matches exactly that of our own dear Vince Marino Jr, the boy who disappeared on me all those years ago. The missing Marinos might not legally exist any more, but they are still living right under our noses. And I’d bet my own blood and bones that their nearness to this family is no coincidence. I put a bullet in their parents, so little Vince Marino put a bullet in Angelo, and Antony put five stab wounds in Calvino in Eden. All this time, we wondered what Gracewell was offering Donata. It was simply his true identity. A Marino always sticks by their own.’

At that, the seated Falcones broke into a rush of frantic murmurings. The tide was turning. Felice was winning. Chaos was rising. I was going to drown in it. ‘No,’ I insisted, shaking my head violently. ‘No, it’s not true. It can’t be true.’

‘Liar!’ Elena sprang to her feet. ‘We’ve caught you out. Admit it! Admit your father is Vince Marino. Admit your uncle is Antony Marino.’ She jabbed her finger at me. ‘Admit that
you
, Sophie
Marino
, are a rotten liar.’

‘I’m not a liar!’ I shouted. ‘I don’t know anything about this!’

Dark gazes pressed against me. They were waiting for me to say something, to justify the insanity of walking into their house and expecting to live.

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.

There was only one thing to say.

I had added it up in my head. The tattoo. The Marinos’ interest in Jack, in me. Sara’s dimples. The sense of kinship I felt with her. Donata had yelled for Antony that night at Eden. He was already standing behind her, trying to entice me into their family, their business. He was my only uncle, and I didn’t really know him at all.

Everything I thought I knew was changing.

There was only one way I could ever know for sure. Only one person who would tell me the truth. And she was at home packing up our lives so she wouldn’t have to face it.

‘Millie.’ I heaved a shuddering breath. ‘I think I’m a Marino.’

‘
What?
’

‘I think my dad’s real name is Vince. I think he and Jack are the missing Marinos.’ I started to hyperventilate, my hands clutching around my throat as I tried to gather myself. ‘Say something,’ I pleaded. I needed it to go away. I needed my life to be normal. I needed to calm down. ‘Say anything.’

‘Wait,’ gasped Mil. ‘Wait, wait, wait, hang on. Wait. Does this mean that you and Nic are somehow … related? Have you been like … incestuously making out this whole time?’

OK. Anything but that. ‘
Ew
.
God. No
.’ I reeled backwards, disgust warring against my rising freak-out.

‘OK, sorry, my bad,’ she said, raising her hand in placation. ‘But in my defence, these Mafia family trees are incredibly complicated and I really only concern myself with the hot members.’

‘I’m not related to Donata,’ I said, realizing the small mercy in that at least. ‘She married into the family.’

‘But isn’t she, like, the Marino boss now?’ Millie released a low whistle. ‘Damn, that lady is ambitious.’

‘Mil,’ I groaned as I stuck my head between my knees and shut my eyes. ‘My whole life is literally turning upside down, and I really just need you to talk about something else. Anything else. Please, just distract me. I need you to make it stop.’