Page 18 of Last Breath (Blood Wine Dynasty #2)

Nella

The man who killed Clarkson was standing beside her bed.

His shadow was long and slender, and he was breathing heavily, just like he had before he’d ...

‘How are you still in bed?’

The murderer was not a murderer. It was just Tomaso. He stormed over to her curtains and ripped them open, forcing daylight to infiltrate the room. Nella stayed where she was, heart in her throat, staring at where Tom’s shadow had just been.

She could lie here forever, her blankets warm, the air conditioner blowing a steady breeze so it felt like she was somewhere else – in the Northern Hemisphere perhaps.

Maybe even further away. Maybe Jupiter. Just close her eyes and go back to sleep, and she wouldn’t have to face any of this. It could all go away ...

Her warm, protective crust ripped off and she was an exposed, shivering ball in her period undies and an oversized grey shirt with a grumpy ginger cat in a pink tiara on the front.

At least Concetta, the housekeeper, had made Nella’s bed with a doona the colour and texture of porridge and hadn’t grabbed the Sleeping Beauty blanket Nella would always beg her to put over the sheets.

A blanket that now she’d always associate with unwashed blonde hair, zip-ties, damp basement floor and her own stupidity.

And the secondhand embarrassment Jett must have felt when he covered her with it after he and Grey broke her out of her stalker’s home.

She should have tossed it out well before then, once she’d outgrown the Disney-induced delusion that a single kiss from a good guy would fix her entire life.

‘What the fuck, Tom?!’

‘It’s 8 a.m.’

‘Right, so I’ve had approximately two hours’ sleep.’

‘Jett dropped you back just after midnight. What were the two of you doing until six, then?’

Nella stuffed her face into her silk pillow at his ridiculous insinuation.

‘I have no idea what Jett was doing, but I was here, alone, going through that.’ She kicked the pink binder at the foot of her bed.

Plus googling every possible combination of ‘ Abby + Barbarani Wines + Emilio + Lieu ’ she could think of.

‘What is that?’ He regarded her binder like it was an enormous pink cockroach.

‘From Dad’s office. It’s every bit of hard copy paper he has about the wine and Nonno Emilio’s recipe.’

‘Who said you could go in there? Anyway, get dressed. We have a family meeting in fifteen minutes.’

‘My shower’s going to take at least twenty.’

He let out a huff. ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls yesterday?’

‘Because a man died.’

‘Our lawyer died.’ Tom glared. ‘And you are a lawyer.’

‘I’m on sabbatical.’

‘You’re on the case. Our family’s case.’ He said it like it was a terrible joke pulled from a cheap Christmas bonbon, but she was trying not to think of the angry promise she’d made to Matteo La Marca last night. If she didn’t take the case now, it had all just been empty words.

She couldn’t read him. When had her brother become completely illegible to her? Twelve hours ago he would have paid a street busker to be their lawyer over her and now he was talking like it was star-written fate the task would fall to her all along.

‘Plotting your escape plan?’ Tom asked as she pulled her hair out of its night-time braid.

‘Yep. This isn’t actually a scrunchie, once I wrap it twice around my wrist it obliterates everything within a ten-metre radius to dust.’

‘You don’t know your duty.’

She was more certain than ever that Tomaso had ripped their father’s soul from his corpse and swallowed it whole.

‘You want to abandon your family, Antonella?’ Tom continued. ‘ Bene, you can leave, you can run away to Perth or Siberia or wherever you want and I won’t bother you ever again.’

‘And all I have to do’—Nella pulled her hair out of its elastic—‘is represent the family like a good little wind-up lawyer.’

‘You need to win .’ Tom strained against her insinuation of imperfection. ‘I need to know you did everything in your power to prove the recipe belongs to us.’

For the second time in forty-eight hours, Nella slammed the bathroom door against an intruder in her personal space.

She showered under blistering water that boiled her skin until she looked like an unshelled lobster.

Towelling her hair, she chose her outfit carefully from her closet suite, accessible through a second door to her bathroom, while Tom grumbled and lectured outside the other door, oblivious or unconcerned that she couldn’t hear a thing.

He was still muttering to himself when she reappeared with a face full of make-up and her hair straightened with a wet-to-dry automatic iron she’d forgotten she’d promised to review.

‘Is this your answer?’ Tom glared at her outfit – loose high-waisted pants (fuck Gen-Z for cancelling skinny jeans), a pastel pink sleeveless vest with a deep cleavage slit and her unanimous-jury-verdict Louis Vuitton stilettos (she would never, ever bow down to the new sneakers-at-the-office trend).

She needed her armour. Her ice fortress was not enough on its own today.

But it all felt wrong, like deep down she knew that Clarkson should be the one wearing his suit.

He should be the one reading her father’s files. The one Tom was glaring at.

‘You never actually asked the question. You told me what was going to happen, just like Dad would have.’

‘This is not a joke, Antonella. I am still in charge here.’ He started smoothing her doona, then whipped it away again when he saw the crumpled sheets underneath.

‘Not of this,’ she said. ‘But you win. I’m taking the case.’

Tom sniffed as though trying to detect the scent of a lie. ‘What do you know about Lieu?’ he asked, now tucking in her bedsheets like an envelope. She’d never seen them that flat in her life – it was like he’d liposuctioned her doona.

‘I know he was killed in my office.’ She swallowed; it was like razors.

‘ Was killed ,’ Tom said, vigorously plumping the pillows like a housemaid from Downton Abbey. ‘Didn’t die .’

‘You talked to Jett?’ She had the audacity to feel a twinge of annoyance that separate conversations had happened without her, although she knew of course they had, and had been going on for the past sixth months.

‘You think Lieu was murdered?’

‘I think he discovered something.’ The words felt stupid when she said them to Tom, different to when she’d said it to Jett. ‘Could have,’ she amended. There was no point freaking out the rest of the family now. Not until she knew more. Not until she’d found that green notebook.

Tom grunted. Whatever that meant. Nella had refused to learn to translate ‘surly adult male’.

‘Who convinced you to act like a human being and take your family’s case?

’ Tom asked, lines of suspicion fighting against his own Botox (he’d never admitted it but Nella knew).

They took the winding white marble stairs, their feet hitting each step at the same time, neither willing to break the pace or step out of pattern.

These were the stairs their father had died on.

It was becoming so clear now, the real reason Tom hadn’t wanted her to take the case. Giovanni would not have wanted it. Kinda funny that she and Tom finally had something in common – well, besides the Botox. They were both still trying to please a dead man.

Giovanni had thought she was a joke. A cute little girl playing dress-ups down at the courthouse, waiting for Daddy to come and call her in for dinner time.

But he’d waited and waited for her to come running back home.

It was always going to end like this, she realised.

Her out in the cold, and him not standing at the window anymore.

No confrontation, no reconciliation. One moment he was there – glaring, judging – and the next he was gone.

‘You mean I couldn’t just come to the decision on my own? I needed someone to think of it for me? A man perhaps?’ Nella’s heels were a hindrance, but she didn’t slow down.

‘Speaking of men, who are you dating?’

‘Ashton Kutcher.’

‘Poor Mila, I knew she was looking a bit distracted lately.’

‘Why do you care?’ They’d reached The Spot.

The tenth stair up, one down from the flat marble landing before the staircase branched off into the east and west wings.

This was where their father had died. Nella stared at the shiny, polished marble – an impossibly white, floating ice-cap.

If she stared long enough, she could see the marble start to darken, and the stain of her father’s blood mottled against the stone.

‘Because the media are fucking piranhas at the moment.’ Tom’s voice was thick but neither of them mentioned the stairs.

They kept walking, no longer in sync. ‘They got their taste of flesh and blood after the gala. Now Clarkson. Which, with the police raid yesterday, is going to spark all sorts of questions and rumours about the court case ... Bloody lucky that succubus Sarah Kingsley—’

‘Sophie.’

‘—seems to have been scared off since the gala. Or perhaps it’s because Greyson found himself a new girlfriend without a track record of defamation.’

‘And my sex life is relevant because ...?’ Nella refused his chivalrous arm, spread wide to let her through into the conference room first, and stood by the door, arms crossed.

The squiggly M above Tom’s nose (usually ironed out by Botox) deepened. ‘I’m just saying it would be exceptionally fortunate if you weren’t just joking about Ashton Kutcher. We need attention away from Clarkson and the gala and the court case.’

‘Why can’t Luca date a Kardashian or something? Or has he already dated them all?’ Nella’s insides were crystallising with shards of ice with every careless word her brother used to describe the recent events that had punctured a hole in her heart.

The M was going to become a tattoo. ‘People aren’t looking at Luca right now. They’re looking at you.’