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“I think your sister is awake,” Vinny quipped.
“You think?” I muttered as I approached the door. “Let me calm her down.” I tried the handle, and it refused to budge.
“It wasn’t locked before.”
“That’s only if you’re together. If she’s on her own, the boss is worried she’ll…have trouble coping with her new situation.” Vinny’s voice was carefully devoid of emotion.
I met his eyes. He wasn’t a bad-looking guy, and I’d put him around my age. He had sandy-blond hair and faded blue eyes. He met my gaze unflinchingly. This was a man who had locked a nineteen-year-old girl in a room and then stood guard outside it. A man who knew we were both here unwillingly. How did someone become like this? A person capable of such cruelty? I really had stepped into another world, one where up was down and right was wrong.
“Wow, it seems like the boss has a lot of experience holding innocent women hostage. Thank God he has good guys like you to do his dirty work for him and keep them in line,” I snapped at Vinny and headed to the door.
“Lucy? It’s me,” I said, knocking at the same time.
“Charlie?” Lucy’s voice sounded ragged.
Shit.I should never have gone exploring and left Lucy to wake up on her own.
“Let me in,” I instructed Vinny, and to my surprise, he complied without arguing.
It seemed the De Sanctis men really didn’t know what to do with Lucy. Overwrought women weren’t their area of expertise, after all. Maybe they usually just killed them. The thought wasn’t comforting in the least.
Inside the room, my sister had worked her magic and completely trashed the place. She was uniquely qualified to make a mess, so she was in her element. She’d cleared off every surface and broken the mirror. She’d stomped the feathers out of the pillows. She’d even torn down the curtains. Carmella and Lucy really weren’t going to get off on the right foot.
As soon as she saw me, her eyes filled with tears. Our fight roared back into my mind, breaking my heart all over again. Was she still upset over what I’d said to her? Was I still upset at her cruel words? Maybe a little, but it didn’t matter now. That was how it was with sisters. Every word could cut a new scar on your heart, but when you needed each other, no one else compared.
“Charlie!” Lucy cried, stepping over the wreckage on the floor and flying into my arms. “I thought they’d done something to you. I thought you were dead.”
I was surprised by her emotion, and my battered heart warmed at the display. Despite our differences, we were sisters. We could get over anything.
“So you thought you’d piss them off some more by being the most annoying houseguest?” I was going for teasing to lighten the mood. Maybe I’d lost my mind, too. I certainly deserved to at this point.
“It’s not funny. Where are we?” Lucy demanded. Her eyes suddenly widened. “Wait, did we go to the cops? Is this a safe house?”
“I hate to break it to you, but safe houses don’t rival five-star hotels.”
We both looked around the ruined room.
“This is the De Sanctis family compound.”
Lucy turned pale, her angry flush fading as reality hit. “Why?”
Blowing out a sigh, I turned to the bedding on the floor and began to pick it up. I couldn’t face her while I told her about our predicament.
“Because we’re going to be staying here, for a while, until the heat with the cops blows over and—”
“You said they’d kill us. Why did they bring us here?” Lucy cut me off.
“Why? Are you so eager to die?” I challenged instead, only delaying the inevitable.
There was something shameful about the truth, and I couldn’t wrap my head around why I was embarrassed to tell my sister about Renato’s terms. He hadn’t really explained why he was doing this, only that he had decided on me. He didn’t seem like the romantic type, so maybe it had something to do with the cops. I couldn’t make sense of it, even in my own head.
“Of course I’m not. But tell me why we’re here?”
“Well, there weren’t a lot of options, so I went with the least painful one. The cops can’t compel family to give evidence, so we’re becoming family. By this time next week, I’ll be married to one of the De Sanctis men, and then this will all just be a distant, unpleasant memory.” That explanation made more sense, so I decided to run with it. It felt better to imagine that there was a concrete reason for why the master strategist mobster had chosen me to be his bride. It made me feel safer, somehow, for reasons I couldn’t consider too closely.
Silence fell in the wake of my bright, chipper tone, so brittle and fake one wrong move would shatter it to pieces.
“You’ll be married to a De Sanctis man?Married?”
