Page 11 of Last Breath (Blood Wine Dynasty #2)

Jett

The pillaged winery looked like a rotting mouth with most of its teeth missing.

The cops hadn’t worried about being delicate with the products that weren’t under investigation, so broken glass and rosemary twigs crunched under Jett’s boots as he, Grey and Luca helped Tom put the place back together.

Tom had what looked like a mild seizure every time he dragged his fingers across an empty shelf that used to store the famous sangue.

Luca had been trying to coax him into the restaurant instead, now lit gold by the setting sun and filled with the early evening tipsy crowd.

It seemed it had only become more popular after the bloodshed at the gala.

‘I say we call it a day.’ Greyson tipped the last of his dustpan debris into the bin. ‘Come on, let’s get a drink.’

‘Of what?’ Tom spat. ‘La Marca pinot noir?’

‘You know, paired with the right cheese, that pinot ...’

‘Read the room, Luca.’ Jett clenched his jaw.

‘I was.’

Tom’s eyes were dark little drills piercing into the pockets of empty space in his cabinets. ‘I don’t want to get a drink. I need to speak with Lieu.’

‘I think Lieu left because you needed to speak with him.’ Luca’s smile was wicked.

Tom exhaled a noxious gas of breath. ‘He asked me something that didn’t make sense. I wasn’t paying attention at the time because we were being looted. But I need to follow up with him,’ Tom said, phone to his ear. ‘ Cazzo! It’s not even ringing.’

‘Imagine being ghosted by your lawyer.’ Luca lolled his head back at Jett and Grey like the class clown trying to get everyone out of homework.

‘Speaking of lawyers, where is your sister?’ Jett tried to make it sound casual, as if the memory of her storming out of the restaurant hadn’t been driving endless loops in his mind all afternoon.

Luca shrugged. ‘You brought her back, she’s your charge now. But if what she said is true and you guys lied to her about Clarkson ...’

‘I didn’t lie.’

‘You did,’ Tom countered, trying Lieu’s number again. If Lieu was as smart as his reputation claimed, he would have already changed his number so he couldn’t be contacted by his client until he’d won the case. ‘Because I told you to.’

‘Jett doesn’t have to play your Simon Says games anymore, do you?’ Luca winked at him. ‘You’re jett ing off ASAP, right?’

‘What?’ Tom frowned, phone still to his ear. Grey said nothing because he already knew, but Jett didn’t miss the tensing of his friend’s shoulders. He was a seismograph, forever attuned to the warning waves in the ground that meant a Barbarani earthquake was coming.

Jett picked up an empty cardboard box and started flattening it. ‘Why would you say that?’

‘Yeah, Luca, why would you say that?’

The earthquake had arrived. Nella leant against the customer entrance door to the winery, silhouetted by the orange and pink sunset behind her. But Jett could see the expression on her face.

She knows.

‘Nothing’s set in stone.’ He swept a part of the floor Greyson had already gone over.

‘They called Mum for a reference,’ Nella said. ‘That’s why your phone was going off all through the drive, wasn’t it? It’s your new boss.’

‘I don’t have a new boss, I still work here.’

She threw back her head as though filling her lungs for a scream.

‘C’mon,’ Grey said to Tom and Luca. ‘Let’s make sure the restaurant’s restocked with the other line.’

Luca looked like he wanted to stay and watch the nuclear explosion but, seeing Grey’s face, he shrugged and followed him through the glass doors. Tom went too, phone still pressed to his ear.

‘You had other stuff going on,’ Jett said. ‘I didn’t think you’d care, anyway.’

‘I don’t,’ she bit back. ‘I just hate being the last one to know everything.’

‘What did you expect?’ His stomach was like a hotplate, her words turning it up, and up. ‘You’ve been gone six months and refused to answer anyone’s calls.’

‘You managed to barge into my life just fine when you needed me for something.’

Her eyes flickered as memories of the previous night washed over them.

Jett didn’t let them stay for long, quickly shoving them up to the attic he kept at the top of his mind for moments like that: the very worst foster homes; the night of his high school ball; Nella in her tiny, black underwear; the gala.

Once he shut the door, those memories stayed there. And he never went back.

She lifted her chin. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I told you, nothing’s final yet.’

‘Where, Jett?’

Why do you care?

He sighed. ‘A social worker I used to know, Kevin Byrne, needs a second in command for his mechanic shop up north.’

‘A mechanic shop?’ She repeated it back with the inflection of : a cannibal porno set?

He shrugged. ‘It’s an alternative education centre for kids who’ve dropped out of school or are chronic school refusers.

It’s part therapy, part skill building so they can get a job on their own.

We don’t all have the option to decline our family’s vast fortunes and put ourselves through university by working casual jobs we could leave whenever we wanted with daddy’s safety net.

’ He regretted that as soon as he tasted it on his tongue.

Nella’s mask wasn’t quick enough to cover her parted lips and wide doe eyes, the stunned shock of an arrow landing.

There was something about seeing Nella hurt that made Jett feel physically sick, but it was another feeling entirely when he was the one who caused it.

‘What are they offering?’ she asked, clearly not wanting him to see he’d landed a blow. ‘You know we’ll offer more. Christ, Jett, if it was more money you wanted, why didn’t you just say so? Conversations about our vast fortune are the only ones my family is comfortable having.’

‘It’s not about the money.’ He moved behind the counter and started to fill the gaps where the sangue had been with the new bottles of Barbarani sparkling.

She stalked over to the oak bench and leant across it, arms folded, dark eyebrows angry slashes above her eyes. ‘Then it’s about what I said?’ Her lips tugged down, slightly parted.

He wasn’t used to seeing her sharp mouth that vulnerable. ‘Not everything’s about you, Nella.’ You told me to leave. At the funeral, and then after, when you weren’t around, you told me again.

‘So what is it? Why can’t you stay?’

‘I’ve stayed here longer than I’ve been at any other job. One year’s my normal rule. You were right, it’s time for me to move on.’

‘I thought we were friends.’

It would be impossible to be your friend, Nella. He doubted she even recalled that long ago conversation.

He met her gaze. ‘Hadn’t realised I’d passed.’

It was a shitty thing to say. But everything was shitty at the moment. Why hadn’t he just turned to Nella in the car – he’d had three hours to do it – and said, Oh hey, by the way, I’ve got a job offer that I’m probably gonna take. Now it was like he’d deliberately been keeping it from her.

Had he?

‘Don’t flatter yourself.’ She pushed herself up from the table, her shoulder-length hair bracketing the sharp shadows on her face.

He’d found out about the challenges Nella put every potential love interest and friend through to make sure they were, in the words of every reality TV show contestant, there for the right reasons the day after they met.

It was the first driving job he’d done for the Barbaranis.

Nella and a group of friends from high school had gone to the Bindi Bindi mall to try on dresses for their graduation dinner.

Nella had phoned about half an hour into the trip requesting to be brought back home.

She’d slipped into the front seat, face bright and happy, and when he’d asked her if she was okay, she’d said, ‘Oh yeah. I’ve been trying to break Natalie for months.

She’d passed everything up until today – Challenge 16 ( Never swim out of your depth: honesty is the foundation of friendship ).

I put on this.’ She showed Jett a blurry photo from her Blackberry of a ruffled dress the colour of an un-brushed tooth wrapped in chains and dappled with pink and green love hearts.

‘That’s ... uh ... hideous,’ he’d said without thinking.

Nella’s smile cracked even wider and she thumped her head back on the rest. ‘Thank you! That’s all she had to say. But instead she told me that it hugged my body perfectly and the style reminded her of something she saw in Vogue .’

‘How do you know she wasn’t just being nice because she didn’t want to hurt your feelings?’

She’d arched an eyebrow. ‘Friends don’t do that. Real friends tell the truth.’ It was so innocent, so na?ve, those words coming from the whip-smart mouth of this eighteen-year-old heiress.

‘Sometimes the truth is worse than the lie,’ he’d replied, thinking about his parents and the lies he’d been told about them. Lies he wished, now that he knew they had been heroin addicts who had brought him into this world high and as addicted to the stuff as them, had been the truth.

‘The truth always comes out though,’ Nella had said.

‘I haven’t officially taken the job,’ he said now, watching her carefully.

‘What are you waiting for?’

‘The trial.’ He swallowed. ‘I want to make sure you guys are okay.’ The half-truth tasted worse than an outright lie. His promise to Vittoria felt like a betrayal of Nella.

‘We can catch an Uber to the courthouse,’ she said. ‘I don’t want us to hold you back.’

‘ Nella —’

She folded her arms. ‘You should have told me.’

‘I should have. I’m sorry.’

‘I didn’t realise you were so unhappy here.’

‘It’s not that, it’s ...’ How could he explain it to her?

How could he explain that if he didn’t get out now, his attic was going to fall through the floor and all the debris of things he’d kept bottled up and hidden was going to crash and spill out?

He would go up in flames. He had to keep moving. It was how he survived.

‘What the fuck are you doing back here?’ Tom’s yell from outside shattered the moment.

They rushed out the front of the winery, where Tom was standing like a bouncer, legs wide and arms tight across his chest. Luca was next to him, shuffling from side to side as he blew his cigarette smoke into the faces of the two police officers who’d left them to clean up their mess only a few hours ago.

‘You’re now trespassing on my property. Get out,’ Tom said, not moving. ‘You have no authority to take anything more from me. I’m calling my lawyer right now.’ He whipped his phone from his back pocket and stuck it to his ear.

‘No, you’re not.’ Avery’s voice didn’t have the same bravado as when he’d told Tom to go to hell earlier, and something cold and sharp wedged itself in Jett’s stomach. The woman cop, Gabby, had red circles around her eyes. ‘And we’re not here for the wine, we’re here for your sister.’

Everyone turned to Nella.

‘Clarkson Lieu’s body has been found at your office. We’re going to need you to come down to the station with us, Ms Barbarani.’