“We can argue all day about who hurt who worse, but the fact is you provoked me first. You think I would’ve come anywhere near you otherwise?” Calvino takes two big steps forward. “You kidnapped my girl, Vincent. You stole her and bagged her and tossed her into the basement like she was some gutter rat you needed to interrogate. But she’s mine, you hear me? You don’t touch what’s mine.”
Vince bristles. I feel his anger like a blast of hot air from a furnace vent and this isn’t going anywhere good. These two will measure dicks and we’ll find out which one is biggest, but whoever loses won’t go down easy. There’s still a way through this situation that doesn’t end with everyone dead, and I want to find it.
I step forward. “Charlie told us everything, Vince. You can stop pretending that you’re some misunderstood good guy now. We know what you made her do.”
His eyes dart to mine and for one brief moment, I imagine there’s surprise or pain or something else hiding behind his expression. But it doesn’t last, and he turns back to Calvino.
“And what did my mentally unstable wife say?”
“She told us about Riley,” Calvino says evenly. “About how she couldn’t get pregnant and you made her go away.”
Vincent waves a hand, dismissing the memory of my dead cousin like she wasn’t a person but only an inconvenience. “She was running her mouth and you know what happens to people who can’t keep their lips sewn shut.”
“You killed her, you piece of shit.” I stride forward, fully intent on grabbing the gold Eiffel Tower paperweight from his desk and beating his skull in until it’s nothing more than mush. Runny oatmeal, drenched in red. “You murdering piece of trash.”
Calvino holds me back. “Grace,” he warns.
Vince seems amused. “Maybe I was right to take this one. Look at how mad she is. Tell me, Grace, do you think I should’ve let your cousin live, knowing what she knew?”
“Fuck you,” I spit at him.
“Grace,” Calvino says, speaking soft, lips near my ear. “He’ll pay. Just wait.”
My desire to smash Vince into tiny atom-sized pieces, to parade his corpse around town just to humiliate him further, to kill him and tarnish the memory of him forever, it nearly outweighs my trust in Calvino. But his words hold me back. For now.
“All of this could’ve been avoided if Grace had been up front from the beginning. If only you would’ve explained why she drugged and searched me, maybe none of this had to happen.”
Calvin grunts like someone kicked him in the spleen. “You’re so full of shit, it’s like a latrine in here. Come on, Vince, if we told you that Grace is Riley’s cousin and she drugged you to find out information, you would’ve lost your damn mind.”
Vince hesitates and shrugs. “All right, that’s true.”
“And you know the worst part of all this? It’s not what you did to Grace, although that’s bad, but I think the two dead soldiers was a good payback. It’s not even what you did to Riley, although that was monstrous. It’s that you forced your wife to fuck another man just so she’d get pregnant, and you kept bringing her around him. You dragged her in front of him again and again, until one night he went upstairs while Mom and Dad were in their bed and tried to sleep with her again, only to start a fire. The same fire that consumed our goddamn parents.”
Vince leans back and I expect a snarl of denial or some kind of argument, but instead his face is etched in confusion. He tilts his head like he’s trying to hear a distant noise, and his lips tug into a deep frown.
“Who do you think was sleeping with Charlie?” He speaks slowly and methodically.
“Vincent,” Charlie says and everyone looks at her. “Don’t. Please don’t.”
“Louie.” Calvino looks between Vince and Charlie. “She told us it was Louie, the trigger man.”
Vincent’s confusion breaks. He throws his head back and laughs, and Charlie looks green like the underside of a welcome mat stuck in shadow. I extricate myself from Calvino’s grip and take her hands between my own and squeeze them hard—this was what she was trying to tell me in the car—and try to make her feel the strength I want to give her.
“Who was it really?” My voice is a whisper. It hurts to talk and everyone’s still except for Vince, who’s laughing like he just won the lottery.
“I was too ashamed,” Charlie says, crying again, and I have to wonder how one person can have so many tears. “So embarrassed and ashamed. I’m so sorry I lied.”
“Enough of these games,” Damon says as he finishes his drink. For someone that didn’t want whiskey so early, he sure is guzzling it down. “What the fuck is happening?”