Page 59 of Last Breath (Blood Wine Dynasty #2)

Nella

Hospitals were one of the only places in the world where having the surname Barbarani didn’t make a difference.

Nella had pleaded, tears streaming down her face, her hair sopping wet from the sea and Jett’s blood. To everyone in the waiting room, she must have looked like an accused witch who’d survived her trial by water.

‘Who is he to you, ma’am?’ the nurse had asked.

‘He’s my ...’

The nurse tilted her head in a sympathetic way.

‘He’s my driver.’

‘I’m afraid I need to speak to a family member or a spouse.’

‘He doesn’t have anyone! He only has me!

Please, please, let me see him. I won’t get in the way, I promise.

Please.’ She’d never begged for anything as long as she could remember.

Not since her father had beaten that weakness out of all of them.

She hadn’t even begged for her life, six months ago at the gala.

‘He’s in surgery. You can’t go in. Let me check with my supervisor and I’ll see what I can do after ...’

‘You need to tell me what’s going on!’ Nella pleaded.

‘There was one bullet, I know that, I think it hit him in the shoulder, just over his tattoo, but she kept firing ... she kept ... Was he hit anywhere else? I held him up for as long as I could, but he slipped back under the water before the others got to him. Please ...’

‘Nella.’ As a firm hand gripped her upper arm, the scent of apples enveloped her atmosphere. Max. ‘Come on, I’ve got you. Let’s go sit with Tom while we wait – he wants to talk to you. You can’t do anything for Jett right now.’

‘Tom?’ Her brother’s name broke through the foggy trenches of her mind.

‘The road cleared. The rain’s helped with the fire – they’ve got it contained. He got back to Bindi Bindi just as we got to the hospital. He called me.’

Nella let Max lead her away because she’d lost control of her own body. Her bones were milk, her heart a rock too heavy for her chest to carry.

Max’s strong, steady body, along with the crusted sand beneath her fingernails, pushed Nella’s mind back to Devil’s Pool. Somehow, between the time she’d been standing in front of Sally Sue to when she jumped in after Jett, six other figures had emerged on the beach.

Grey and Max had met Nella halfway back to the shore. She’d managed to keep Jett’s head above water but she couldn’t do that and swim. By the time they reached her, Jett had passed out. Everything from then to now were flashes of mosaic memories that she couldn’t fit together.

Oliver (yes, Oliver ) had been on the phone to the ambulance, pacing the sand like an eagle searching for prey.

Avery’s voice had travelled down from the cliff, where he and Luca had Sally Sue on the ground.

Eliza was waving to the convoy of police and ambulance vehicles, shouting at the paramedics to come to Jett, not the cliff.

All these people. Nella still didn’t understand. How had they known?

‘Why?’ Nella asked, her vision blurry, trusting Max to guide her through the hospital halls that smelt like antiseptic and gravy. ‘I thought you were angry at me. Why did you come?’

Max made a noise that was a half laugh, half snarl. ‘Of course I’m angry at you. But you’re still my friend, for fuck’s sake.’

My friend.

Nella only half listened to Max’s explanation of what had happened since Nella ditched Greyson in the garden. Friend. The word that was now tainted forever was ringing in her ear, not like a gunshot, but like a forgotten favourite song.

Max and Grey had tracked Bessy to Devil’s Pool (Jett had installed tracking devices on all the Barbarani cars after Luca once went on a road trip to Sydney with his friends after their father banned him from the jet).

They’d arrived at the same time that Oliver was pulling in, along with a PI who’d helped him track Clarkson’s stolen iPad (to the front seat of Bessy, where Nella had left it).

Not long after, just before they heard the first gunshot, Luca and Eliza arrived – Eliza still in her scrubs, Luca, hungover.

Eliza had been trying to get hold of Jett to tell him Razor had pulled through the surgery.

When she hadn’t been able to contact him, she’d called everyone else, and the only person who’d picked up had been Luca.

While she’d waited for Luca to collect Razor, Eliza called Avery to report the attack, saying the wound had been made by a knife, not another animal.

Suspicions raised, with nothing to go on except the last place he’d found Jett under strange circumstances, the three of them drove to Devil’s Pool.

Well, Avery drove. Eliza and Luca had followed him there after they promised they wouldn’t.

Then Sally shot Jett. And Nella jumped in after him.

And when she’d reached the shore, her knights in shining armour came into full focus and she saw they weren’t knights, just the people she’d let down in one way or another. Still there. Waiting for her.

Tom was sitting in the waiting room like he was in his office in between meetings with international wine sellers. But it was the person sitting next to him that made Nella do a double-take.

‘Sophie?’

Max fidgeted beside Nella.

Nella wasn’t sure how she felt about journalist Sophie Kingsley, who’d dated Greyson once upon a time and used his closeness to the Barbaranis to write an exposé about them, which was as accurate as it had been ruinous.

She didn’t care as much now about the article.

But she’d never forgive Sophie for what she’d done to Grey.

‘I’m going to get a coffee.’ Max squeezed Nella’s hand and stalked off to the elevator. As Nella would have in her position.

‘She still hates me?’ Sophie asked.

‘We all hate you,’ Nella said, taking the empty seat next to the journalist. ‘Tom especially.’ She turned to her brother with an eyebrow raised, realising she wasn’t as bothered by Sophie’s presence as she usually would be, because it gave her a buffer between her and Tom and everything they’d screamed at each other the night before.

‘Don’t tell me you’re here for an exclusive on what just happened, or I swear to god I’ll punch you in the face right now, Kingsley, and fight off every doctor that tries to put it back together—’

‘Nella,’ Tom admonished, while the journalist just watched her serenely.

‘I would never do that, Nella.’

Nella folded her arms, unconvinced, disappointed. She needed a punching bag. But for now, she’d latch onto the distraction dangling in front of her. ‘So why are you here, with my brother ?’

‘He brought me to you,’ Sophie said. ‘We would have been here earlier but the fire blockages held us up. I live in Nannup.’

‘You drove to Nannup?’ Nella demanded of Tom.

‘Unlike some people,’ he drawled, ‘I have a licence.’

‘No, I mean – you knew that was where the fire was. What were you ... Hang on ... But you called Grey to come and get you because of the fire.’

‘I called Greyson’—Tom looked sheepish—‘because I thought someone was following me. A white Corolla.’

‘Daisy’s car.’

‘So I’ve been informed. Thankfully, the raging bushfire standing in the way of her making you her doll again made her turn around.’

‘Why did you risk your life to see her ?’

Sophie didn’t baulk at the inflection.

‘To clear my name,’ Tom said, not looking at Nella.

‘Ian was arrested, not you.’

‘ You accused me of killing Clarkson.’

Nella’s face burned. ‘Yeah, well, I ...’ Didn’t think you cared about what I think.

‘Save your grovelling,’ her brother deadpanned. ‘At this point, remember, I knew they had arrested your workmate, Ivan.’

‘Ian.’

‘Him. And you thought it was me in the billiard room, with the knife.’

Nella swallowed.

‘But in this game of Cluedo , my cards pointed to Lockridge.’

‘Oliver?’

‘I told you Concetta had seen him loitering around the property, trying to talk to you. The email Lieu had about moving to Donna Rayne’s law firm didn’t make sense to me – there was no previous thread about a job offer or any contracts.

And I looked her up. From where he was sitting in his current partnership, moving to Rayne’s firm would have been a sideways career move, if not a step down. ’

‘Of course your brain jumped straight to he was killed because of business .’ Nella didn’t mention she’d once had similar suspicions that Oliver was involved in Clarkson’s death.

Tom sniffed. ‘Randall told me Lockridge had seen Clarkson in his office with a blonde woman, but I think we both know he’s more partial to brunettes. But what was most interesting was the email from Kingsley about a story for the local paper.’

Nella and Tom’s definitions of interesting had always been stratospherically different.

‘That was about the charity auction, wasn’t it?’ Nella asked Sophie, forgetting momentarily they were sworn enemies.

‘No,’ Sophie said. ‘I had to be discreet – I put the charity auction as the subject line, but I was interviewing Clarkson about his decision to take over Bindi Tours.’

‘His dad’s company?’ Nella said. ‘How was he going to run a whole tour business with his job?’

‘He wasn’t. He wasn’t leaving Lieu & Lockridge, Nella, he was leaving the law altogether.’

‘But Clarkson hated his dad’s business,’ Nella declared. ‘They argued about it constantly! He moved to Perth to get away from it all.’

She was burning up. Fury at Clarkson, at Tom, at Sophie for not telling her sooner, at Jett for not holding on longer roiled through her, hollowing her out.

Jett. Shouldn’t they have heard something by now?

‘People change,’ Sophie said.

‘Bullshit. They just get crappier at pretending.’

‘Well,’ the journalist said carefully, ‘maybe this was who Clarkson always was. He just needed a bit more time to figure it out.’

‘Doesn’t fucking matter, does it?’ Nella said. ‘He’s dead. Yuze will be gone soon too – there’s no one to take over the company.’

‘I’m hoping when the article’s published it could generate some interest,’ Sophie said, but she didn’t sound convinced.