Page 6 of Last Breath (Blood Wine Dynasty #2)

He didn’t push it. Jett had always been like that. Sometimes she felt like a jammed door that he’d half-heartedly try to nudge open, but always gave up. Sometimes she wished someone would ram into her and knock her down.

He turned back to the road. Watching him drive was almost like watching poetry, a poem she wanted to ignore because she knew he was navigating the route back to the Barbarani Estate.

Jett drove like a musician strummed a guitar, like a baseballer pitched, like a dancer leapt and twirled.

The rhythms of his movements felt like balm on a bad sunburn.

She’d sat and slept and thrown up in the backseat of his cars in some of the darkest moments of her life, even if he’d had no idea exactly what he was taxiing her away from.

He’d never pushed.

She wondered sometimes how much he’d actually known and how much he’d deliberately not said.

Like that night when she was eighteen and he and Greyson pulled her from the clutches of her psychotic online stalker, Sally Sue.

There had been many moments when Jett’s silence and his driving had patched her wounds, but she didn’t like to think about them too much.

Like the summer he picked her up from her third year of uni and the conversation he’d probably forgotten.

The night that kid had fallen from the balcony at a party they’d all been invited to.

She had a sinking feeling she’d add this drive to that list.

Now they were back in range, Jett’s phone was exploding with notifications.

‘Is that my brother?’ Nella asked.

Jett looked down at his phone, and she clicked her tongue in disapproval. He raised his head lazily back to the road. She was fairly confident Jett could drive blindfolded and not make a single mistake, but she’d never bloody tell him that.

‘No.’

‘Intriguing.’ She went to snatch the phone but he was too quick, shoving it into his right-side pocket. ‘Something to hide?’

Acid surged in the pit of her stomach as he stared resolutely ahead at the entrance arch to Ground Zero: the Barbarani estate and winery.

‘Whose car is that?’ She jabbed at the window as they passed a glossy silver Audi parked awkwardly in the driveway – no Jett to escort it in.

‘No idea.’

It had only been six months, but she felt a twinge of dismay that she couldn’t tell if he was lying.

Jett knew everyone by their car. Ask him for the name of a guy he’d been sitting next to at a party, making polite conversation with all night, and he’d go blank.

But he’d remember that he’d arrived in a 1955 Cadillac convertible if asked ten months later.

Whoever owned the Audi had to be important.

There was no way Tomaso would let someone other than family in on this shitshow the La Marcas were raining down on them.

The Barbaranis and the La Marcas had been at war ever since their respective rival patriarchs, Emilio and Antonio, had shared a cabin on their boat ride to Western Australia from Italy after the war.

Australia had needed men to work and build railways, and it was smack-bang in the middle of the Red Scare.

The government needed to line the continent with fit young blokes who could protect them against a Communist invasion.

The Communists never came, but the Italians dug deep roots.

Emilio and Antonio both wanted more from this new life.

They paid their dues and built their railways, but both were driven to pursue their own ventures in the wine industry.

Emilio developed the famous blood wine – the Barbarani Sangue – and Antonio found success with his pinot noir.

That was the story. That was the truth. The La Marcas were criminals – their business was not limited to wine – and they were literally harbouring a murderer in their mansion.

There might not be any solid evidence against Forrest Valentine yet, but he was guilty in every sense that mattered.

This bullshit claim about the wine recipe was not going to hold up in court.

Emilio and Antonio had hated each other from the moment they’d locked eyes.

There was no way Nella’s nonno would have shared any of the secrets to the sangue with his nemesis over a bottle of red.

And if Nonno Emilio had stolen the recipe from Antonio, there was no way Antonio would have let him get away with it.

The La Marcas were just fishing because of what happened six months ago, when Nella lost her father and her little sister. Neither family had walked away from the bloodbath of the Barbarani gala intact, and they each blamed the other for what had gone down.

So, yeah, Nella wouldn’t need to be here long. She looked over at Jett as he parked Bessy in front of the mansion. Bessy normally lived in Jett’s garage with him. Would he offer to drive Nella back to Perth, or should she just do the grown-up thing and book herself an Uber?

Her legs wobbled on the gravel driveway as they remembered how to stretch and support her weight after being cramped up underneath her for four hours. Her fuzzy green Miu Miu slippers would not survive the walk to the front door.

Jett strode ahead of her, his eyes on his phone.

If it wasn’t Tom, who’d been messaging him so incessantly?

She felt a spike of something foreign. Jett didn’t really keep secrets from her; he didn’t really have anything to keep secret.

Except the scars and tattoos. But he’d never been particularly private about his phone.

He didn’t have a lock code – she was always able to grab it from the front seat and save them from his terrible Spotify playlists.

Why did it matter anyway? She wasn’t living here anymore. She was in Perth, soon to be in India, or Bali ... (she couldn’t remember EXACTLY what the shaman had said).

Jett rang the mansion’s front door bell.

‘Oh, so you don’t just barge in here .’ She nudged him in the shoulder. Well, his elbow. She missed her high heels.

‘You should know better about locking your door.’

She swallowed. The memory of Sally Sue was hazy, like a bad trip, just flashes of sounds, of scenes that felt like she was watching them happen to someone else, or something she’d seen on TV.

The worst memories weren’t the zip ties cutting into her wrists or the vision board Sally had made of her and Nella – their future life ‘together’ that Sally had imagined, before AI and deep fake was a thing, with photographs printed and pasted onto magazine bodies.

It was Nella’s own naivety, her desperation to escape her father’s world that made her believe Sally’s bullshit email so completely months before, where she posed as a lawyer looking for an intern over the summer.

That was the part that burned the most shame, inside Nella, all these years later.

‘You need to ...’ The look he shot her was serious, but she never found out what she needed to do because the door opened.

It was Tomaso. ‘This must be really bad,’ she said. ‘I’ve never seen you open a door on your own before. Must have taken you ages to work out the mechanics of a handle.’

Her brother looked her over like she was a stray cat that had started peeing on his doorstep. ‘What are you wearing?’

‘Considerably more than when I found her,’ Jett said, thrusting his phone into his back pocket and pushing past Tomaso.

The white marble entrance hall was cool, but new beads of sweat prickled on Nella’s neck as though the arches were dripping their molten gold onto her.

The diamond chandeliers clung to the ceiling like barnacles on a shipwreck she’d last seen floating peacefully on the water.

Her memory of her home was warped by her nightmares of her last few days here.

‘You lose your phone?’ her brother demanded in a similar tone to how someone might ask if she’d killed a man.

‘Nope.’

Tom growled. ‘Do you not understand how serious this is, Antonella?’ His eyebrows arched at her and hers arched back higher.

All the Barbarani siblings shared the same thick, dark eyebrows.

Of course Nella waxed and plucked hers bi-monthly, and Tom usually did too, but he’d clearly skipped his last few appointments.

His hair was messy like he’d just had sex with a thorn bush, and the normal care he took to manscape every fine beard hair was gone.

‘You look like merda. ’ His eyes paused on her pockmarked skin and trackpants.

‘So do you.’

This was the part where normal siblings would have hugged. ‘ Affrettati !’ he ordered, stepping back.

Nella and her shoes didn’t make it two steps towards the end of the corridoio before she stopped abruptly at the sight of the figure standing behind the oak door.

Her slippers skidded on the freshly polished cream entrance floors.

She glared up at the man, who was holding an Audi key ring and a green binder, leaning casually against one of the white hey, we’re Italian AND rich – did you notice? columns.

Nella turned back to Tom. ‘What the hell is Clarkson Lieu doing in my house?’