The Proposition 3: The Ferro Family (2 page)

When he grins, I try to pull out of his grip, but he won’t release me. I yank so hard, my shirt tears. That awards me with another crooked smirk. I stare at him, without seeing him, as my eyes search the room for a weapon. I’m going to need one, but the only thing I see is that big clunker of a key ring next to the door where he set it down. It’s about a foot behind him.

“
I have my ways.” His voice is cocky and dangerous. He inches closer. “Like it or not, we’re in this shit together and your friend has something I need.”

“She was supposed to bring you a girl.”
I utter what Maggie told me last night.

“Yeah, something like that.” Victor relaxes a little bit, but he’s still trying to turn me into a whimpering, sobbing mess.

I don’t cave in. I won’t. “So where is she?”

“The fuck if I know. The last person I saw her with was you, this morning while I was taking care of one of my
employees who got out of line. I know you saw and the only reason you’re still breathing right now is because Maggie is worth more than you, and I intend on you leading me to her. Bring her back here sexy girl, or you’ll relive every part of your book with every guy on my payroll. You got it?” He’s in my face, snarling.

“I have friends in high places. Be careful who you threaten
, Mr. Campone, or you might find yourself on the wrong side of a bad day.”

He laughs and pulls away, like I’m hysterical. “Ther
e is no one that I can’t take, little girl.”

“You’re wrong. You’re clearly forgetting someone important.”

Victor smirks and leans back against the kitchen counter. The man is stupid enough to look at the floor, as if I’m no threat. I think he’s lying. No, I know he is. Victor knows where Maggie is; he just wants me to leave. The keys are a step away. I pick up the ring and flip through them like I’m examining the shapes. “Yeah, and who’s that sweetheart?”

“
Me,” I move before he can blink, I slam the brass keys into the side of his head. The shot connects with his temple and his eyes flutter once before he goes down. A stream of blood flows from his head like a red ribbon, curling as it travels down his cheek. His eyes close and I wonder if I killed him, but the guy’s still breathing.

I take the keys and run to his place across the hall. I thought I’d have to find the right key and can’t stop shaking long enough to do anything. That’s when the door opens. Maggie peers out from between the jamb. Her green eyes are glistening, like she’s been crying.

I rip the door open and a nail tears off. “Maggie!” I lunge for her, but
she holds up her hands, preventing me from hugging her.

“Leave, Hallie. Get the fuck out of here before he comes back.” Maggie’s eye is puffy with a circle darkening around it. One of her wrists is rubbed raw and the other one is bleeding. She’s wearing a tattered
piece of lingerie that’s damp. Her legs have black and blue bruises all over. The bruises are arranged in small clusters of four, like hands gripping too hard made them.

“Maggie.” I want to cry. He beat the shit out of her.

“Hallie, go, before he comes back.”

I tug on her arm
and she stumbles toward the door. “He’s not coming back for a little while. Come on. We’re gone. Never come back here. Ever.”

Maggie digs in her heels. “I can’t leave. I’m dead if I leave.”

I look her over once. “You’re dead if you stay. What the hell happened?”

“I didn’t bring him a girl.”

“So he used you?” She nods. My lips part as a breath slips out. “Oh, Maggie.” Rage is building inside of me. If I had a gun, I’d go back and shoot his nuts off. I don’t know exactly what she’s doing or what Victor did to her, but I know he beat her and probably raped her. The black and blue marks go all the way up her thighs. Her hair is a mess and her once perfect makeup is smeared across her face like she’s been drowning in tears.

Her voice is stern and cold.
“It was my choice.” Maggie’s face glistens with tears and snot. She meets my gaze almost defiantly. “This is my life, not yours.”

I stop in my tracks
and quit pulling on her. Turning back, I blurt out, “You’ve done this before?”

“Only when I had to. Hallie, this isn’t your pr
oblem.” Maggie’s jaw locks and her once vibrant eyes dart away.

I’m mortified and can’t conceal it.
I stand there and feel every ounce of grief, regret, and rage ripping from my body. It changes me and I can’t stop it. Maggie is the only family I have left. I don’t care about Neil, maybe I never did, but people can’t live alone. Being alone is a step away from being dead—it’s a pace from ending up in a place like this with my face covered in bruises and tears.

There are time
s in life that creep up slowly, like shadows extending across the earth as the sun sinks below the horizon. Other times it’s quick like a breaking twig. My life changes in that moment and I feel it. The walls go up, higher and higher, until there’s no one above them, not even God. I’m alone in my misery, and there is no way I’m letting Maggie go. I’ll do what I have to do and the consequences are of little importance.

I snatch her wrist and tug her after me,
explaining, “Victor’s knocked out in your apartment. We’re leaving and never coming back. You’re not allowed to leave and you work for me now. This shit is over. It’s over, Maggie, and we’re never coming back.”

Maggie is gasping for air and nearly falls to the floor. “I can’t!” She bellows. “Don’t make me! Hallie, he’ll kill me.”

I release her and feel the twisted smirk inch across my lips. I’m not myself, because I’m offering something that I’d never suggest. “Then I’ll take care of it. Go to the car.”

“Hallie!” Maggie lunges for me, trying to grab my arm.

I round on her. “Go!” Her green eyes meet mine and she knows. She sees the pain has fractured me in two. I’m no longer the same and we both know it. “You’ll never see him again.” It’s a promise.

Maggie nods as she stands there, shivering. She wraps her arms around her middle and looks up at me like we’re children again.
We stood in this spot before, but last time we didn’t fight back. “It’ll be all right. It will be.” She utters the words more to herself than me. I smile, and holy fuck it practically breaks my face to do it, but I manage. Before she walks down the hall with her clothes in her arms, I touch her shoulder lightly. Maggie nods once at me, then pads down the stairwell and disappears from sight.

My mind is
etched with darkness. It’s like I’ve fallen into a pit and can’t find my way out. Victor is there, smothering me and if I don’t release him, if I don’t cast him out, he’ll always be there, waiting. Three slow, silent steps back to Maggie’s apartment and I see the man still lying on the floor. He’s rousing, moaning curses and touching the bloody spot on his temple. Will anyone mourn him? Will someone buy him a tombstone and a cemetery plot? I couldn’t afford those things. I couldn’t give them to the best man in the world, so why should Victor Campone have them? He’s death incarnate.

Before I know what’s happened I’m gripping a dull kitchen knife in my fist, slowly approaching
him from behind. Victor sits up and nearly falls to the side. “That fucking bitch.” He grips his skull like it’s pounding.

This isn’t real, is it? My life has come full circle. I’m back at the mercies of the heartless and I refuse to let them rule. I’d rather die, so here I stand
. My hand doesn’t shake, and the girl I had been vanishes. She’s dissolving like an image left in the sun, fading forever until there’s no trace remaining.

Victor senses me standing behind him and turns to look over his shoulder. That’s when I act. The surprise on his face, the flash of the silver blade on the knife, and the river of blood that runs
down his throat like a red river all flash as if they were happening somewhere else. Victor’s eyes widen with shock as his hand lifts to his neck and comes away covered in scarlet.

Those eyes, I’ll remember the way they looked at me with admiration and anger until I die. His lips part to speak, but I don’t care.
I drop the knife. It clatters to the floor as I turn on my heel and walk away, leaving Victor dying on the floor.

Time crawls to a stop the same way it did when my father died. Maggie and I drive in silence. I know what we have to do, but I don’t want to make her suffer. I tell her what I’m thinking and she agrees. We stop at Target and grab some clearance clothing and change in the car. I take my old clothes, coat, and gloves and put them in the white plastic bag before tossing them in the dumpster behind the store. It’s overflowing. They’ll come and take away the bloody clothes before morning.

Maggie and I do our make-
up in the car. That’s when she stops and looks over at me, ready to cry. “They’ll find out.”

“No, they won’t.
No one saw us.”

“Victor had the place empty so there’d be no one around to hear what he was doing this evening, but his guys don’t always leave. What if they saw you?”

I shrug. “Then they can take over and run his drug empire. No one cares about me. He’s gone, Maggie. I’m sorry I didn’t get there sooner.” Our eyes lock and I want to cry, but the tears don’t come. Something inside me broke tonight. I know what I have to do, what my life will be like because of this act. I accepted it before I dragged the knife across Victor’s throat. I’ll sign my contracts, marry Neil, and be the demur wife everyone thinks I am. That will allow me to look after Maggie and make sure this never happens again. Money is power and now I have plenty.

Maggie nods. “So, we go into your party and just pretend that you were offended that the prick didn’t invite me?”

“Yup.” I smack my lips after reapplying my make-up. “And tease him about not telling me.”

“So yo
u grabbed me and went to change?”

“Exactly.”

They buy it, even Neil who claims he can spot a liar from fifty feet away. It’s all in the eyes, he’s told me, the stance, the sweep of the shoulders, and position of the arms. So I do the opposite. I remain poised and smiling. I laugh at his friend’s bad jokes and let Cecily tease me about being bitchy about excluding my best friend from the festivities.

I act like I’ve had too much to drink and poke my finger into her over inflated chest. “If you ever leave her out of any celebration again, you’ll be sorry. She’s a sister
to me.” I smile at Maggie who is standing across the room. She’s wearing dark tights to cover the bruises on her legs. A thick layer of concealer hides the dark circles under her eyes. She touches the gash on her cheek and goes into a crazy story about how I dared her to slide down the railing on the staircase.

She’s laughing. “So, Hallie doesn’t think I can do it. Well, screw that. So
I get up on the old rail and push off. I was fine until I hit the landing and hurled myself into the wall. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever done. I thought I’d land on my feet, like on TV.”

“And that’s why TV isn’t real.
”

“No fuck.” She giggles and clicks her glass to the tall, dark, dorky guy standing next to her.

The man gasps like she said the crudest thing he’s ever heard, so Maggie turns on the charm. She bats her eyes and touches his arm lightly, laughing into him, like he’s the funniest man alive. His demeanor softens and the two of them wander off into the backyard where it’s darker.

Cecily and her smoky self is standing next to me. Her boobs are trying to escape from her low cut neckline. “I thought you were having a panic attack or something.”

I stare ahead looking at the sea of people, but seeing no one. “Nah, just PMS.”

“I’ll make sure your friend is invited to every even
t with you from now on.” Cecily clears her throat. “Is there something you want to tell me?” I turn and arch an eyebrow at her while holding a half empty glass of wine in my hand. “Come, come now, you can tell me. Someone with your, let’s say tastes, may find one sex boring after a while. It wouldn’t surprise anyone to know—”

I take a sip while she’s talking and my heart pounds hard. I wonder if I have blood on my face, until she goes into that last sentence. I nearly choke on my Merlot and set the glass down, hushing her. “No, of course not!”

“Because if you were gay, it wouldn’t be a big deal.” She blows smoke in my face.

Grabbing her arm, I steer Cecily away from the massive amount of ears and over to the hallway. “No! I’m not gay and if you give Neil that impression I swear to God—”

She offers an amused grin and touches my forearm. “Come on now, Hallie. I didn’t mean anything by it. You two are close and it would make sense, with your background and hers.”

“Yeah, well, you’re off
base here and the man who just stuck this ring on my finger will have a stroke if you even mention the idea.” Neil has his natural order philosophy and that would scare him off. I need him to stay. He can’t leave, and a suggestion like this will send him running the other way.

She raises her pink claws and smiles. “Oh, I won’t, but if you ever need someone to confide in, I’m here. That’s all I wanted to offer. I won’t judge.” Her old eyes hold mine for a moment. She can sense the secret
buried deep within me, but there’s more than one. So even if she discovers Bryan, she’ll never know what I did tonight.

Being
defensive is making her think that there’s something to defend, so I lean in close and say, “Listen, I’d tell you if that were the case. I know I can trust you,” When did I get so good at lying? “But Neil is weird with stuff like that. He’s okay with my book since it wasn’t real, you know? It’s not like that stuff is part of our life. You do understand, don’t you?”

She understands all right. Cecily nods slowly and I know I’m fucked. She knows there’s a story there, another lover. Fine. It’s better than knowing I just slashed the throat of Victor
Campone.