Complete Corruption (Corruption #1-3) (54 page)

Four.

Five.

Paulie tilted his head, watching.

Six seconds on the home button.

Nothing exploded.

On seven, he knew there were no texts, and I knew there was no bomb. He kicked the phone from my hand.

“Worthless.” He dropped on me, knee first, knocking the wind out of me, and wrestled the gun into my hand. He pointed it at Antonio. I tried to wiggle away, but he had me under his weight.

Antonio gasped and heaved, getting up on his elbows. I croaked his name and he turned.

“Say goodbye.” Paulie squeezed my hand around the trigger.

Antonio rolled, and as if consciousness was equivalent to utter situational awareness and agility, he was on his back with his gun at Paulie’s head as the pressure on my hand became enough for the trigger. A bullet lodged itself into the floor where Antonio’s head had been. Every surface on my body got red hot as I realized I’d almost shot him.

“You’re aiming over my head,” Paulie said, taking my moment of surprise and using it to shift the gun back to Antonio. His hands were hot on mine, and once Antonio rolled, the sweat poured off them despite his cocky words. “You got blood in your fucking eye.”

“Let her go, Paulie.”

“When you’re dead, brother. When you’re out of my way. You been a drag on me from day one, and I’ve had it.” He squeezed my hand. My palms were dead dry. How did I do that? How was my body an icebox in the face of so much menace?

But Paulie’s hands were greased, strong and slick with sweat. I fought against him, and he tried to force me to shoot Antonio, moving the barrel across the room when his target moved. The pressure was too much. The trigger snapped, Antonio rolled, and a bullet landed in the wall in a
pop
of plaster dust.

Antonio’s gun went flying and a line of blood opened up on his arm. The bullet had grazed him before hitting the wall.

I screamed, and an ice-cold, thoughtless panic took hold, because that man was my only chance at life, my one last gift of happiness and intimacy, and I’d shot him. I couldn’t feel myself breathing.

Paulie moved me with Antonio, so the gun stayed pointed at him. But he had to move his elbow off my shoulder to do it, and I yanked myself away. His hands slid over mine, and I twisted, the pressure on the trigger still hard enough to discharge the gun. I took out a lamp.

Paulie and Antonio dove for Antonio’s fallen weapon, and Antonio lost, rolling away as Paulie stood and pointed his gun at him.

“How do you like this, you fucking dago wop motherfucker?”

Antonio had his hands up, sitting akimbo, one shoulder to the wall. “You do this, you’re going to have to answer for it.”

“Fuck you!” he moved the gun when he spoke with his hands, pointing at his ex-partner with his unladen hand. “You leave us, you leave me, for her, and who answers for it. Huh? You don’t. You dropped everything we had for a little pussy.”

“We had business.”

“Business? I loved you!” He blurted it out, and before he even got to the third word, I saw the shock and horror on his face.

He wouldn’t let Antonio live after admitting that. It was all over his face. And after half a heartbeat, his body responded, leveling the gun at Antonio and pulling the trigger.

“No!” I heard my voice but didn’t feel the shout in my breath. I swung to Paulie and squeezed my weapon. And after the very raw memory of almost shooting the man I loved, I did something in the ice-cold emotionless place I dwelled in.

I knew what I was doing.

It was not an accident.

And as if he saw my intention on my face, Antonio yelled my name.

But it was too late. Of my volition, I squeezed my fist more tightly, by an infinitesimal amount, and shot Paulie in the head. A bloom of red broke out under his wide-open eyes, and his head thunked down.

Sweat broke out in my palms, and the gun clanked to the floor, splashing in the growing, comma-shaped pool of blood.

My corruption was complete.

antonio

 moved, and he missed. And when he went down, it took me a second to realize why.

I played at standing straight, but my eyes had fog in front of them, and my balance was uneven. Even with my senses at fifty percent, I knew what was happening, and I gathered what dexterity I had to stand. To yell her name. Then, I had to hope she’d missed, even at a meter from his face.

Theresa, my Contessa, who stood straight and aimed her words like arrows, didn’t miss. I didn’t know it from the drop of Paulie’s body because I wasn’t looking at that. I was looking at her, only her. My grace. My sweet olive blossoms rotting on the branch.

She dropped the gun, and the sound cleared my mind.

I scooped it up.

“Capo,” she whispered. Whatever cold, collected woman had shot Paulie was gone, and she shook from elbows to fingertips, eyes wide, lips parted. She had a sentence to finish, but apparently not the breath to do it.

“Get back to the truck,” I said, putting my hands all over the gun. “Be seen. Wait. Just wait. For once…”

I sounded angry. Maybe I was. I grabbed the gun by the trigger and pointed it at Paulie, who looked like a mannequin. A bleeding one. The blood still poured out of him. He wasn’t dead.

Gesù Cristo;
that man was always thick. I used to think it was funny. I used to think it was good to be the brains of the operation.

He was impulsive. Stupid.

And I was muddled.

He’d helped me. He had a big heart that hurt. He’d helped me do wrong and right, and of course, he’d made everything balanced in an unbalanced world for a little while.

What was happening to me? I straightened my arm to finish him off. Behind me, Theresa sniffed. I turned. Her face was wet with tears, and the careful makeup she’d done for the wedding was smeared down her cheeks. She pressed her lips together.

Would shooting him save her? Would it make her happy and bind her to me, or would it break her?

That was my only concern: how it would affect Theresa, her heart and her life. I didn’t even care if it would make her love me less, because it didn’t matter anymore.

“Don’t leave me,” she whispered, her mouth wet with tears. “Please.”

I wanted to say I’d never leave her, to hold her shoulders and say the thought had never crossed my mind. I wanted to say I’d never lied or snuck around or given up on her. But I had. In the guise of making her life easier, I had.

“I have to.” I dropped the gun on the floor. It was stained with my prints. The whole mess would land in my lap, but I’d be dead, gone, and she couldn’t step in the way of it. “Tell them you were hit in the head. Unconscious for the whole thing.”

“Don’t.” Her voice was no more than a breath.

“You probably have a concussion.” My voice was hard and distant. I didn’t know how else to speak to her. She’d shot a man. She’d swung her arm to aim at him and squeezed the trigger. Her face had been as cold and hard as my voice, and she made no mistakes about the gun being loaded. She knew, and she’d shot to kill. Would I see anything else from now on?

“Were you seen coming in here?” I asked.

“Maybe? Probably? I don’t know.”

“Go back to the truck. They’ll be here soon.” I didn’t want her to see me go to the closet. She knew where the tunnel was better than I did. “Go.”

“There was no C4 under the chassis.”

“Just go!”

“You think you’re leaving without me.”

“I was, I am…” I looked over Paulie’s slow bleed then back at her.

We had to move.

No.
I
had to move.

I was leaving to protect her. She didn’t have so much thrown at her that she couldn’t manage. Daniel would never prosecute her if I were out of the picture. I was the one with the problems. I was the man with the baggage, and she was…

She wasn’t innocent. Not anymore. Not with her running mascara and red eyes. Not with the bruise bubbling above her ear, or her grass-stained dress, or the powder burns on her hand.

I prayed God would forgive me for loving her, and feared only the devil would answer.

I picked up the gun and put it in my waistband.

“Antonio, no. I—”

“
Basta,
” I said, opening the closet door. “I love you, Contessa. Your madness is silent and your sanity makes a racket. Now is time for madness.” I pushed the hangers out of the way.

I found the false wall where she and her brother had described it. I ran my fingers over the edges but couldn’t find a way to open it. She came up behind me, reaching between my legs and wedging her fingers into the corner between the floor and the wall.

“You have to go where children can reach.” She pulled, and the false wall shifted. I took the edges from her. We were hit by a blast of air that should have been stale and dusty but wasn’t. I knew she noticed from the deep breath she took.

She opened her mouth, and I sensed an objection coming out of it.

“Listen to me. I bought it the way I bought everything. It’s not traceable. And yes, I was going down this tunnel. Alone. And I was never coming back. That was the plan, but it changed. I have to get something, and I will come back in a few seconds.”

I put my finger to her lips. We had no time for explanations. “Be mad,” I said. “Your sanity is there.”

I ducked into the tunnel and down the stairs.

theresa

 must have been crazy. I’d intuited that he was leaving me when I was under the truck and couldn’t lift the grate. No one could. It had been locked or bolted since I was a kid. And the C4 smelled like Play-Doh, which was made of wheat. C4 couldn’t smell the same. Wheat didn’t explode.

Stupida.

Standing in front of the tunnel with the fresh air coming from the other side, probably the result of Antonio reopening the basement, his plan became clear. He was going to leave me there and escape through the tunnel across Ludwig without me. But Paulie intervened. Damn Paulie, and bless him, because without him, I’d be under the truck, waiting like a good girl.

Paulie bled in the other room. I steeled myself against the horror of what I’d done. If I stood in that dark closet another minute, the steel was going to melt, and my madness wasn’t going to be so silent.

I stepped into the abyss. It led to a wooden stairwell with steps higher than they were wide. I remembered that.

I put my other foot on the step.

He’d said to wait under the truck, and I hadn’t done it.

I should wait now.

God, please let him come back to me.

Let.

Him.

Come.

Back.

Please.

I waited, and because I waited, I heard them coming. Maybe someone had heard shots, or maybe they’d seen the break-in of the florist’s truck without a loving couple rocking the back. Maybe Daniel’s minions went looking for me to thank and, discovering I wasn’t there, came looking. I didn’t know. But I knew there was a traitor’s body in that room, and I knew I didn’t want to explain what had happened.

I closed the closet door and shut the panel behind me.

It was pitch black, and if I remembered the stairs correctly, they were treacherous and rotted.

“Antonio,” I whispered into the darkness. Was he gone?

Above me, I heard the clopping and shouting of people entering the carriage house and doing what needed doing. I wondered if they knew about the tunnels and whether there was someone from my world who would check.

My fingers grazed the stone walls. I’d seen them in the light. They were made of big rocks, cut into cross sections of multifaceted dark-grey ovals and mortared together with beige cement. To the hand they were rough and sharp, not cut but cracked.

Prepared to be in the tunnel under the grate, I snapped my keys from my bag and juggled to find the little LED light. I clicked it.

The service tunnel was five feet wide with a concrete floor cracked to dust and rock. The ceiling joists were thick, bare wood under slats and below them, Antonio stood, pointing a gun at me. His head had stopped bleeding, and in his other hand, he held a silver suitcase.

“Theresa,” he said, lowering the gun.

“Antonio? Where are you going?”

“On my way back.” He must have seen me look at the suitcase, because he held it up for me to see. “This is the C4.”