‘OK.’

The guard was calling time on our meeting. All around us, chairs were screeching away from tables. We stood up. ‘I don’t know when I’ll get to see you again, Dad.’ I felt a sudden overwhelming sense of desperation at the thought of being so far away from him. My breathing started to hitch and I had the most unpleasant sensation in the backs of my eyes.

He pulled me into a hug. ‘I love you, Soph.’

‘I love you, too.’ They were wrenching him off me and pushing him into line. I stumbled backwards. I didn’t notice the tears until they started dripping down my neck. My palms were sticky and it felt like there wasn’t enough space in my lungs to inhale.

I ended up outside the prison without remembering how I made it there. The humidity enveloped me, creeping into my hair and underneath my clothes. My legs felt like lead as I walked.

I sat down on the bench and waited for the bus. The air was heavy and it wasn’t just the promise of rain. Jack and Donata were on the move, and that meant I had to be too. I couldn’t be a sitting duck.

I was so caught up in a stream of anxiety and fear, trying to come up with the right thing to do and the best way to tell Millie – how we would afford it – if we even could do it – that I wasn’t paying attention when the bench creaked and someone sat down beside me. He slid an arm behind him and lazily tilted his body towards me, until the sudden flash of black hair and olive skin in my peripheral vision, coupled with the familiar waft of his aftershave, struck me.

‘Sophie Gracewell, fancy meeting you here.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SPARK

‘So,’ Luca said. ‘Do you think you and I will ever run into each other in a movie theatre or a shopping mall, or will it always be prisons and cemeteries for us? Is that our thing?’

Where was that goddamn bus?

Anger surged inside me, but if I opened my mouth to say the things I really wanted to say I’d explode, and right now I just wanted to be at home with my mother, coming up with a plan. I folded my arms, like that could keep it all inside me. ‘I do not want to talk to you, Luca.’

I could feel the cold prick of his stare on the side of my face. I watched his hands in my periphery, picking at a thread in his dark jeans, settling and unsettling on his lap. ‘I didn’t kill her, Sophie.’

I turned away so my ponytail whipped out behind me and almost slapped him in his face. ‘You may as well have.’

‘No.’ His voice turned hard, and I imagined frustration drawing his brows together. ‘You do not get to paint me as a guiltless monster. Don’t give me a label I haven’t earned. I have enough deserved ones already.’

I didn’t answer. After a couple of seconds he got up, rounded the bench and hunkered down on the other side of me so I was looking right at him. His hands gripped the wood beside my thigh. Every time I tried to look somewhere else, he jerked his head and held my gaze. ‘Look at me. Listen to me.’

‘Don’t tell me what to do,’ I snapped. ‘How many times do I have to tell you: I don’t answer to you!’

‘I don’t care who you answer to. I just need you to know this.’ He raked a hand through his hair. ‘I tried to release Sara. Valentino wanted her as a bargaining chip, not collateral damage. She was still a teenager.’

‘She was innocent,’ I said, hearing the faintest quiver in my voice.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Una innocente. She wasn’t supposed to die. OK? I promise.’ His voice turned to a growl. ‘I promise.’

I swallowed hard. There was something earnest resonating in Luca’s promise – a realness that was always absent from the ones Nic made – but still, how could I believe him? Sara was dead and Luca was an assassin – convincing and dangerous. He was a rose with thorns, just like his brother. I had fallen for that before.

‘Did she jump into that lake by herself, Luca?’

He fell back on his haunches, a shadow falling across his features. ‘CJ just snapped. Delayed grief, or whatever. Felice had riled him up and then he had the gun pointed at her and she was gone and I couldn’t help her and I have her blood on my hands, and I know that. I know what Sara was at her core – she was nothing like the rest of us. Believe me, I hate myself for playing a part in her death, for not being able to stop a twelve-year-old with a gun, a twelve-year-old who shouldn’t even have a gun, the same way I couldn’t stop my brothers when they were twelve, so you can take your anger and hatred and pile it all the way up on top of mine if you want … but don’t for a second think it’s not eating me up inside.’

He got up and crossed back to where he was sitting, but this time he didn’t look at me when he dropped on to the bench. He dipped his chin to his chest and stared at his hands, and I saw in him the boy I had seen in Valentino’s portrait a long time ago. The person he really was – someone at odds with his life and trapped by a family much bigger than his dreams and desires. Grief surrounded him, and the only thing to do was keep on killing until the tallies were even. But that was the thing: they never would be.

I relented, not wanting to twist the knife any further, knowing now that he was already twisting it himself. ‘You’re not a monster.’

I caught the curl of his lip, the way his teeth nipped hard on it as though to draw blood. ‘What would you know?’ he said, his voice quiet.

‘I know you’re kind,’ I said, feeling a strange urge to comfort him, to soothe the emotional wounds he was inflicting upon himself.