Inferno (Page 47)

‘I got involved with an assassin. And I guess I never realized how messed up he was until he made me that promise and then killed Sara anyway. She was his cousin, Mil. I can’t get my head around it. How could I have been so blind?’

Millie shrugged, her eyes trained on a spot on the floor. ‘I went out with Dom. The warning signs were there for me too. But I don’t regret it, Soph. I learnt from it.’

I raised my eyebrows. ‘What did you learn?’

She huffed a sigh. ‘That I’m painfully shallow.’

Her candidness roused a small smile, a spark of amusement inside the darkness that surrounded us. ‘I wish I could tease you about that, kettle.’

‘Sorry, pot,’ she said, her smile as small as mine.

I flopped back into the couch and looked up at the flecked paint on the ceiling as I voiced the realization that had been unravelling in the pit of my stomach. ‘I don’t think I ever really knew Nic at all,’ I said quietly. ‘If I really understood him, I would never have walked out of that house and left Sara behind. I romanticized him,’ I admitted, the painful truth almost choking the words out of me. ‘And it killed her.’

Millie tugged my arm so that I looked at her. ‘They killed her. If we had tried to do more, there might have been three bodies in that lake and not one, and that’s the hard truth, Soph.’

‘Maybe.’

Millie’s tone turned low and dark. ‘And there’s something else, too.’

I could feel my face going pale, the faint prickles of nausea from earlier coming back in full force. ‘What?’

‘When I was at work earlier, I found the safe. After what you told me Jack said in Eden, I knew there had to be something to it. So I went looking for it.’

‘We’ve always had a safe.’

Millie shook her head. ‘Not that safe. A different one. A bigger one. It’s in those giant cabinets above the stove in the kitchen – you know, the ones that are really high up?’

I nodded. We never used them – they were too hard to reach.

‘I wouldn’t have noticed the actual safe except it’s hidden behind a sheet of lino inside the cupboard. It was peeling at the corners so I pulled it away. It’s massive, Soph, and old. It’s all fancy around the edges too, so you just know it’s chock full of stuff that shouldn’t be in there. I’m guessing you need a big fancy key to get in, from the look of the lock. We don’t have any like that at the diner.’

‘He probably carries it with him.’ My head felt very light all of a sudden, but I didn’t really feel surprised. Jack had said there was a safe – only a small, naïve part of me had thought he meant the one we always used. Of course there was another one – a secret one, full of things only he knew about. ‘That’s what the Falcones are watching the diner for.’

Millie nodded. ‘I’d bet anything that whatever Jack needs is still in there. That’s what he wanted you to help him with. That’s what he’s bargained to Donata.’

‘I don’t have the key … or the desire to help him,’ I added. ‘He’s poison.’

‘Have you heard from him?’ Millie was looking at me with cautious interest now. She was a little paler than usual. Her hair was greasy. Millie’s hair was never usually greasy.

‘No.’

‘Do you think you will?’

We both knew the answer. I thought about that crimson card, about the stuff he’d yelled at me at Eden. He knew I was the one who gave their position away, but how could he have known it was an accident? ‘Yeah,’ I said, pushing my answer through a sigh. ‘He’ll be back.’

Millie’s eyes grew wide with fear. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘The question isn’t what I’m going to do. It’s what he’s going to do.’

I remembered the clawing feeling of Donata Marino’s grip on my arm, how she had dug in as though she never wanted to let go. How Jack’s anger at my betrayal had surged through the crowds that night. I remembered Sara Marino, nose pressed to the grass at Felice’s mansion as it glistened with her blood. Images of her waterlogged corpse pressed against my brain, demanding to be seen. I already knew what my course of action would be when Jack came back.

Deny deny deny.

CHAPTER TWENTY

THE CONVERSATION

The Kardashians played on a mindless loop in the background as all the things we had seen in the last week choked the conversation from us. There was more to come, and yet there was no predicting any of it. All we could do was stay away and hope against hope that when the storm came, it would pass us by.

The house phone rang, and my mother’s footsteps sounded in the hallway. I strained to listen, noting the rarity of the phone ever ringing at all these days. A new client? I hoped so. My mother dropped her voice, so I lowered the volume on the TV. Millie was scrolling mindlessly through Instagram on her phone, looking at pictures of someone else’s food.

‘… left it all to me and it’s not fair.’

OK, definitely not a client, then. She was never usually rude to clients. In fact, my mother, interminably polite, was really only rude to one person.

I muted the TV.

‘… just up and leave like it’s nothing!’

Her voice had risen, her pitch rousing Millie from her scrolling. She snapped her head up and I put my finger to my lips.

‘I have to clean this up again, and how am I supposed to do that? There’s no money.’