Page 194 of Bitter Poetry

“Him? Ettore?”

I nod.

“He killed my mother.” God, saying that out loud, acknowledging it is like a fresh form of grief and my chest starts to stutter. “He put my father in a wheelchair.” That doesn’t hurt any less. “It’s the only way, Christian. You’ve got to take me back. I’ll do it tonight. He won’t even suspect me. He never suspected anything that we did.”

I feel sick again saying what I intend to do. In the cold light of day and in the wake of the killings, I understand that everything has changed. While my conviction to see Ettore dead might not have waned, I find many flaws in the following-through part.

“Got to? Not a fucking chance I’m taking you to him.” He blows out a breath. “Jesus. Do you have any idea how crazy that is?”

Tears pool in my eyes: guilt, self-recrimination, and regret.

“Killing someone, even someone you fucking hate, is not easy. I’ve seen plenty of street-wise soldiers balk when it comes down to it.”

“I won’t balk.”

“Carmela, you’re not a fucking killer. And I don’t want you to be—ever.”

He rakes his fingers through his hair. His hand is shaking. I’ve never seen his hand shake, not even when he killed those men.

“A piece of me would die letting you have any part of that. I got you away from Ettore—I hate that it took so long to do it—and I will never willingly take you back… And suppose you did? What about afterward? What do you think would happen to you?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead.” I had, and it involved Dante and Christian magically sweeping in.

“The place would be locked down. Ettore’s brothers would have,” he tightens his shaking hand into a fist and then lets it go, “taken their revenge out on you.”

“I just wanted it to be over… and I didn’t want to lose you or Dante in a war.”

“Jesus.” He sucks air in through his teeth. “That was really brave, Carmela. It’s fucking crazy, but it’s also off the charts brave. But Dante and me—and Leon, too—we don’t let the women we love fight the battles. That’s not how this works. It’s not howwework. And even if I wanted to, I can’t take you back to him. I just choked Roman out. He’s alright—I fucking like him. His wife’s due to have a baby any day, but I choked him out, and I thought really hard about just killing him...”

The magnitude of my actions and the danger present and future hit me with all the velocity of a wrecking ball in full swing.

He just said he loved me.

A screaming siren and flashing lights whip past the front of the store.

“It’s not safe here. I’ve got to get you back to Dante,” he mutters, but he’s no longer looking at me, or at the passing police car; he’s staring at the occupied table a few down. A young man and woman have a laptop out with several open books scattered over the table. Backpacks with the local campus name sit on the floor beside their chairs.

Students. My sister is going to the same university in a matter of weeks.That might have been me, too,I realize with a faint, wistful longing for something that never was.

Christian rises abruptly and approaches them.

A short conversation follows that I can’t hear.

He hands over a wad of bills to the young man, who packs his laptop into his backpack and snatches up a car key from the table.

“We’re leaving.” Christian’s arrival at my side snaps me out of my daze.

“Leaving for where?”

CHRISTIAN

We step outside of Starbucks. Two more cop cars come ripping past, sirens blazing.

“Does that have anything to do with you?” Vince, the student I just paid five hundred dollars to drive us to the marina, asks.

“You got student debts, yeah?”

He side eyes me, before his lips tug up on one side. “So does my girlfriend.”