Page 7 of Kings & Carnage

I wished we were on the other side of the windows where I could suck in the cold winter air, or at the very least, near a coffee machine so I could down a coffee or three.

Anything to clear the cobwebs from my brain so I could find the right combination of words that would make my mom believe what I was about to say next.

“I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Emma ever since I got to Aventine,” I said. “Turns out, she’s not the only girl who’s gone missing from Bellepoint over the years.”

“Get to the part about Roberto,” she snapped.

“Someone was sending me creepy letters, threatening me if I didn’t stop looking for Emma. Then I got a different kind of letter, one that told me to go to a cabin in the woods if I wanted to know what had happened to her,” I said. “So I went, but when I got there, two men tried to kill me. One of them was Dean Giordana.”

Now I had her attention. She sat straighter, her forehead furrowed as much as her Botox would allow. “Dean Giordana is dead.”

“I know. He died that night, the night he tried to kill me, along with another man who got away,” I said. “The Kings — Neo, Oscar, and Rock — saved me, and then they told me Emma had come to them for help before she died.”

“What kind of help?” The sunlight slanting in through the windows was harsh. It made my mom look older and tired, and I suddenly wished I didn’t have to be the one to tell her that her new husband was a killer.

She’d been through enough.

“She’d been looking for the missing girls and she needed help. The Kings thought she was in some kind of trouble, and I started wondering if the same person who’d been threatening me had been threatening her. And the thing is, Mom, I know who that person is now. I know because the same person who’s been threatening me — the one who sent me the letter telling me to come to the cabin — sent people to run Rock and me off the road, shoot at us, do the same to Neo and Oscar.”

She stood, two bright spots of color standing out on her cheeks. “You need to tell the police!”

I was relieved to see the alarm on her face, to hear it in her voice. Alarm meant she hadn’t known, and deep down I’d been worried she might, that she might have known it was Roberto all along and covered for him to protect herself and her new lifestyle.

Now I knew that wasn’t true. My mom wasn’t above lying, but she’d never been very good at it. She really was as oblivious as she seemed, and while I didn’t love that about her, it was better than covering for a killer.

“It’s… more complicated than that,” I said. “That’s why I was coming to talk to you.”

“I don’t see what’s complicated about it, Willa.” Her trademark disapproval was back in her voice. “If someone is trying to hurt you, it’s time to call the police, especially if you know who that someone is.”

I blew out my breath, trying to get up the guts to just spit it out. “I did some digging and it turns out that cabin? The one where Dean Giordano and the other guy were going to kill me? It’s owned by Roberto.”

Okay, I was stretching the truth a bit. We didn’t know for a fact that the cabin was owned by Roberto, but come on: it was named after Neo’s probably dead mother. It was way too much of a coincidence and I needed a compelling argument to get my mom away from her psychotic husband.

She blinked like I was speaking a foreign language. “I don’t understand.”

“Roberto owns the cabin where those men were going to kill me, and the Kings have suspected for a long time that he was involved with the missing girls. I was coming to warn you when we were run off the road. You have to leave him. You’re not safe with him.”

Skepticism was written all over her face. “I think you hit your head harder in that accident than the doctors realize, Willa. You sound insane.”

“I know,” I said, trying to throw her a bone. “But it’s all true. You can’t go back to him. You have to leave town for a while, hide out somewhere or something.”

“Why would Roberto hurt those girls?” she asked. “Why would he hurt Emma?”

“He hurt Emma to keep her quiet,” I said. “The other girls… I don’t know yet. We’re still figuring out the details.”

I hated to admit it, to give her any opening to discount what I was telling her, but it was the truth, and telling her that maybe there was no motive, that maybe Roberto was just a psycho fuck who liked to hurt people, seemed like a bad idea.

She tipped her head at me like I was a little girl with crumbs on her lips claiming not to have raided the cookie jar. “Willa, you can’t seriously expect me to leave my husband over some half-baked accusation with zero proof and even less motive.”

“I expect you to believe me,” I said. “I’m your daughter.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to buy in to some ridiculous conspiracy theory about Roberto.”

“Tell me one thing,” I said, switching tactics. “Did you tell Roberto where we were? Did you tell him about the lighthouse?”

Her gaze slid away from mine and for the first time, I thought maybe I was getting through.

“It sounds to me like you ran into some crazy driver with road rage,” she said.

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