‘But,’ Nella continued, ‘Daisy got angry because she thought I was asking Ariana to be my friend. She wrote a new letter, saying I’d kill Ariana if she didn’t find a way to get the footage to us. Daisy had been poisoning her on the trip – not enough to do serious damage, but enough to convince her the Barbaranis would make good on their word if she didn’t comply.’
Her youngest brother blinked, his top row of teeth biting his bottom lip like he used to do when he was much younger. ‘You better tell her it wasn’t you,’ he said eventually.
‘Antonella has other priorities right now,’ Tom said.
‘I never saidnow—’
As she listened to her brothers bicker, Nella curled up across three lime-green waiting chairs. The heavy feeling that there was still no word about Jett made it impossible to get comfortable, but somehow, she fell asleep. And when Grey shook her awake hours later, a ridiculous, crazed grin on his exhausted face, she knew she must have a different sort of guardian angel somewhere.
42
Jett
The bullet had ripped through his shoulder, but it was a shallow wound. Only because Daisy – Sally Sue – had used a handheld .22 calibre shotgun.
Only because he’d been standing exactly where he was.
Only because the wind had been blowing at that exact velocity and the sky had chosen to open up and pour with rain during a February drought.
Only because Nella had been there, throwing her weight against Sally’s arm (in her non-dominant hand because Razor had fought back), so the shot went wide.
That was what kept him alive. And that was what kept him awake all those nights in the hospital. Not the wound itself, not the memory of the pain and the cold and the blackness of nothing. But the pieces. Everything that had to be exactly as it was for him to survive. Every piece of his life had led to this moment, and every piece he chose from now on would shape the trajectory of every bullet.
It could be far more crippling than a bullet wound, this knowledge. The impossible weight of probabilities. The uncertainty of where each decision would go, which bullets he’d be straying in the line of if he chose a certain path.
His mind went round in this merry-go-round each night as he lay in the cool sheets with the filtered air and the never-quite-dark room. But his last thought, before sleep took him, was of that one thing that the rest of the pieces fit into.
It was the one thing he’d gone for so long without, trying to fit everything else together in its absence. But he couldn’t kid himself anymore. He always drifted off trying to picture the strange shape that all the pieces of his life would have made if he’d never met Nella Barbarani.
She hadn’t come to see him. The disappointment throbbing through him prompted him to question if the surgeon had missed some bullet fragments and now he was slowly dying of a secondary infection. He resisted asking the others where she was. He didn’t know how much they’d guessed about the depths of his feelings for her. Grey told him she was sorting out the particulars of the deal she’d made with Matteo La Marca. Matteo was being difficult, shockingly. He had no right to feel any sort of hurt over it. But it ...registeredthat she hadn’t come to check on him once, and now he was home. Well, the home he’d known for the last fifteen years.
The knock on the garage door came as he pulled a black garbage bag tight. He’d packed up a bunch of clothes for the Good Sammy’s – he’d have no use for the nice shirts and pants Giovanni had bought him for driving to black-tie events up in Kevin’s workshop.
He was expecting Grey or Max or even Tom, who’d been inexplicably popping in every day to list all the different ways Jett could die in the hotter parts of WA further north.
It wasn’t any of them.
It was like being shot, all over again, if he was being honest, every time he saw her face.
He’d trained himself by now to not look down, to not let himself even skim his eyes down her body. But he hadn’t been expecting her. So now he unfortunately knew she was wearing her goddamn black satin pants that were offensively tight around places he wouldn’t think about and a white long-sleeved blouse that fell open at the wrong buttonhole.
‘Hey,’ she said, like the last few weeks didn’t exist, like the wound in his upper arm wasn’t there, or the stake through his heart that no surgeon would ever be able to remove.
‘Hey.’
Her eyes went to his wound – he’d been letting it breathe between dressings – and he went to turn away, to hide the ugly, fresh scar, but she reached out, without asking, her fingertips a breath away.
Jett had rarely seen Nella cry up close except for the moment in the car in Italy. She’d cried in the backseat of his car plenty of times, drunk crying, angry crying, frustrated crying, silent crying when she thought he couldn’t tell, but he could always tell. But now she was crying openly in front of him – completely raw and unfiltered.
‘Jett ...’
‘It’s fine.’ He fixed the new bandage on and took her shaking hand, placing it on the part of his arm unscarred by bullets or cigarettes or glass.
‘Your tattoo.’ Tears slipped between her lips. ‘It’s gone.’
He followed her gaze to the surgeon’s scar. The bullet had ripped clean through the tiny letters he’d branded on his skin at eighteen to always remember, to never forget.DCT.Now there was just a snarl of a scar and a tiny black line that used to be the top of the T. ‘Random happenstance,’ he said, his voice rough.
‘No.’ Her thumb brushed close to the tail of the scar. ‘I don’t believe that.’
