‘Something’s wrong with Ariana,’ Nella said.
Max snorted. ‘Yeah. Her DNA.’
‘No. You weren’t there in Italy. I know I don’t know her at all, but I think what we got over there was Ariana-Original. She was pissed off but I think that’s her normal setting. But something’s changed. She—’
Wants me dead. Like, more than usual.
Max folded her arms, and Nella could tell she hadn’t convinced her. ‘You said you wrote her a letter. You told her the truth?’
Nella’s stomach twisted. She’d felt an instant tug of regret as she’d slipped the letter under her door outlining everything Forrest had done. But the door had been locked and there was no way to get it back. Daisy said she’d been in the bathroom when Nella dropped it off, but when she’d come out, it wasn’t there, so Ariana had clearly opened it.
‘And?’ Max prompted. Would her bloody cop instincts ever fucking die?
‘Imayhave mentioned the fact that I think she used to love my brother.’
‘I’m sure everyone at one point has been in love with your brother. Before they get to know him, that is.’ Max shrugged, but Nella held her gaze.
‘I know it was a big risk, but I just can’t see how anything I said could make her react like—’
‘Like a human? Nella, you told her the man she loves murdered a girl. Then you accused her of loving Luca, a man who, if her father ever found out she so much as smiled at, would be fed into a meat grinder. Of course she’s going to want to behead the messenger.’ Max stepped around the table and put her hands on Nella’s shoulders. ‘Sometimes good shit happens.’
Nella stepped back. ‘Not to me.’
She was saved from the confused hurt on Max’s face as the sounds behind Max’s door became too loud to ignore. Guilt bubbling like the insides of a crack pipe, Nella shoved past Max. ‘What the fuck’s all this?’
As she opened the door, Tom stormed in through the main entrance to the firm, his eyes tracking from Daisy’s highlighter stack to Max’s ajar door and back to Pearl’s portable speaker, which was pulsing out Adele’s greatest hits. Nella would swear his eyes were angry enough to burn through the wall to see the screen paused on Forrest’s face. ‘We’re due in court tomorrow and you’re having a fucking party?’ Tom whacked the speaker onto the ground. It landed with a thud but did not deter Adele.
‘Another coffee, mate?’ Tom gave Ian a viper smile. ‘I recognise the takeaway cups – that’s fromToast & Roastdown the road, right?’
Ian nodded like he was confessing to a terrorist attack he did not commit.
‘Pretty busy at this time, at least a ten-minute wait, am I right? Plus all the time it took you to walk there. Are you including those minutes in my bill?’
‘Tom.’
‘Think of all the prep you could have done for my case in that time. What if the one piece of legislation you need to get us over the line could have been found in those, let’s say, twenty minutes you took ...’
‘Tom.Outside. Now.’
Ian looked like he was going to cry. And to be honest, he probably was; he hadn’t been right since finding Clarkson. Nella shoved her seething brother out the back door into the cool dark of the red brick alleyway, stopping next to the bins outside the bakery. Some self-centred part of her was beating her skull in– he’s found out about you and Jett, he’s found out about ... he’s going to kill Jett ... he’s going to ...
‘What the fuck was all that?’ he spat.
Nella explained, omitting Ariana and Forrest’s names and focusing on Grey and Max’s vendetta against the wine poisoner to try and appeal to the human part of her brother’s robot brain.
‘I don’t care about Libby Fucking Johnston. Or Polly Raven. What good will you be at getting justice for those women if Matteo La Marca takes everything from you – from us?’
Caustic flames roiled up through her throat. ‘Poppy.And he can’t take everything.’ Everything tingled; she felt alive. The emotion she’d pushed down after finding the photo, after Jett pushed her away, after she’d opened up a part of herself to Ariana La Marca only to have her pull the artery from her veins and splash her blood all over the walls – it had all been simmering, but now it was boiling over. ‘He can’t take everything, because unlike you and Luca I’ve made my own money, my own way in this world. The La Marcas can shoot down everything Dad built, butmylife is fucking bulletproof.’
‘You naïve little bitch.’ Tom’s black eyes were pits of hell. ‘Think you’re so high and mighty? Above the rest of us? Independent Antonella who doesn’t need her family or their money? You do realise every time you called Jett in the middle of the night, blubbering about whatever mess you’d gotten yourself into, you were using Dad’s money. Poor little damsel in distress, too stupid to see through the plays of a psychotic stalker. Reckless nights trying whatever drug, whatever drink because you always knew you had a safety net. You used him – Greyson, too – to your own selfish little advantage before you swanned off whenever it suited you, back to your little brothel of a share house when you got bored of Daddy’s comforts back home. Don’t talk to me about your immunity from this colossal fuck-up. You’re a Barbarani, Nella. You’re in this with us. Your blood has already decided your guilt, not your fucking delusions of grandeur, just because you flipped a few burgers and cleaned a toilet when you were in university.’
Siblings. They knew where all your wounds were. Where your armour was weak, the cracks their knives would slice through easily. Tom’s attack left her heaving.
‘At least I haven’t spent my entire life trying to please a narcissistic sociopath who dangled love in front of me like a fucking dog with a stick,’ she spat back at him. ‘You’ve almost made your full metamorphosis, Tomaso, you’re almost him. I bet you wish you could have gone to Italy instead – maybe you would have missed the evidence, maybe you would haveneutralisedAriana, let the secret of Nonno’s betrayal die with her.’
Something in her words unlocked a block. Something she might have considered in the dark depths of the night when she wasn’t completely awake. Something she’d never wanted to ask herself but now, looking in the soulless, bottomless pits of her brother’s eyes, the thought slipped into daylight.
‘Did you kill Clarkson?’
