Page 69 of Masked Don

“How long?” I ask.

“Since his fingers.” Her voice is flat. “I heard you go down. I followed you.” Her eyes come up to mine. “He said the girl in the green dress. He said alive. He said the man had plans for her.”

“Yes.”

“Luca.”

“Yes.”

Below us, Dario’s screaming has broken down into something wetter. She flinches at it, once, and then she doesn’t flinch again.

“What’s the river?” she asks.

I could lie to her. I’ve lied to better people about worse things. But she’s standing at the top of my father’s stairs in her bare feet, and she has seen the house under the house, and a lie now would be the last thing I ever got to say to her.

“It’s what it sounds like,” I tell her.

She looks past me, down into the dark. For a long moment, I think she’s going to run. I think I’ve finally shown her the thing she ran from once, and she’s going to take my son and go, and I’m going to let her.

Then she looks back at me.

“He was going to hand me to Luca,” she says. “That boy. For money.”

“Yes.”

She breathes in, and out. When she speaks again, her voice doesn’t shake at all, and that is the most frightening thing I have heard tonight.

“Good,” she says.

Then she turns and walks back toward the stairs that lead up to our son.

I wash my hands in the kitchen sink until the water runs clear. Then I wash them again. When I turn around, she’s in the kitchen doorway. She came back down.

“You missed some,” she says. She takes a dish towel off the rail, wets it under the tap, and wipes a fleck of red off the inside of my wrist that I didn’t see. Her hand is steady. Mine isn’t.

“Stevie.”

“Don’t.” She folds the towel and pushes it down into the trash, under the other trash, like a woman who has done this before for someone. Maybe she has. “I said good. Now I need to go upstairs and figure out what kind of person says good.” She looks at me. “Don’t follow me.”

I don’t.

Upstairs, the hallway is dim and silent. Her door is open a crack. It always is now. She leaves it that way so she can hear Matthew, and because some part of her is testing me, I think. Seeing if I’ll walk through it without being asked.

I don’t do that either.

I pull a chair from the end of the hall and set it against the wall across from her room. I sit. I lay my pistol across my knee.

She knows about the basement now. She knows Dario Ferrante’s face, and what Luca Santini wanted to do with her once he had her alone, and what I do to men who try to hand her to him. Tomorrow, she’ll wake up and fight with me about all of it, and she’ll be right, and I’ll let her be right, because she has to keep choosing this house for the choice to mean anything.

But tonight she said good.

I sit in the dark outside her door until the windows go gray. I don’t close my eyes once.

CHAPTER 24

STEVIE

Two days have passed since the worst night of my life, and one since the strangest, and I’m still reeling. Luckily, the garden is the perfect place to decompress.