The Consequence (The Evolution of Sin 3)

Seb scrubbed both hands over his face, absent-mindedly taking mine along for the ride as we were still clasping palms. He didn’t notice and I didn’t say anything.

“She was having dinner in the Bronx at this tiny Italian deli she likes even though the prosciutto tastes like shoe leather. According to witnesses, she was eating alone but she seemed to be waiting for someone, she even bought an extra sandwich and a bottle of Chinotto Neri--”

“She hates soda,” I interjected automatically.

“I know, and I can’t think of a single damn person in her life that would drink that stuff.”

“Only an Italian,” I said, because it was our version of Coca-Cola but bitter, the Neri brand quintessentially Italian too.

“Obviously,” Seb agreed, his jaw taught with agitation. “I was fucking useless when the police questioned me. She is my twin sister and best friend in the world.” His voice cracked and he cleared his throat. “How can I have been oblivious to this?”

I thought about the secrets our sister kept hidden close to her skin, closer even than her twin brother and best friend in the world could be.

“Continue,” I urged, because I didn’t have anything comforting to say.

“She had been waiting for about fifteen minutes when a black SUV pulled up in front of the shop and opened fire.”

I gasped, the scene playing out in my mind like a film reel. My beautiful sister sits at a table near the window and waits patiently for some unknown man like a heroine in a tragic romance novel when the gunfire starts.

I felt sure it was a man she was waiting for, not least of all, because Cosima didn’t particularly like woman and they didn’t particularly like her. It was clear to me too, that this wasn’t a random attack. Who would target a nearly empty Italian deli in the Bronx just for kicks?

If I rephrased the question - who would target a nearly empty Italian deli just to take someone out? - I knew the answer. The Mafia.

I swallowed hard and snuck a glance up at Sebastian who was absorbed in his own painful reverie. The face of Dante, the black-eyed mafia man who had appeared one day in Cosima’s apartment a few weeks ago flared to life in my memory. He had something to do with this. I knew it as surely as I knew that it had been wishful thinking by our family to think that Cosima had fled the confines of Naples unshackled. After she had left, and Seamus, our family had been left remarkably untroubled by the local made men. Mama had put it down to God and her devout prayer, Sebastian to the departure of our gambling, addict father but I had always wondered, and I knew Elena did too, if Cosima hadn’t signed away her soul for our freedom.

As we were standing in a hospital with her lying ten feet away, struggling for her life, I was desperately afraid I already knew the answer to that question as well.

“She was just sitting there,” Seb said quietly, almost to himself.

“Giselle?” Mama’s voice drifted out into the hall and my heart tripped over the familiar, tender notes.

I spilled through the doorway and tumbled straight into the arms of my mother. She pressed me against her breast, hushing my suddenly laborious breaths and random whimpers of pain. Now that I was there, in the awful hospital that was such a contrast to my vibrant sister, the reality of her situation came crashing down around me. Before I could lose it completely, I pulled away from the faint citrus and semolina scent of my Mama and turned towards the hospital bed.

Cosima under a thin white sheet, thin and pale as a cadaver used in medical school experiments. There were deeply purple bruises under her eyes and a brackish, yellow brown discoloration over the left side of her face. She had always been svelte but in the harsh light she seemed skeletal, impossibly dead.

I gasped and then choked on a bulbous sob.

Mama stroked my hair as I turned and threw up in a bin that Sebastian thrust under my chin.

“Bambina, bambina,” she crooned.

“What happened?” I whispered through the bile rising at the back of my throat.

“She was shot three times in the torso.”

I tilted my head to stare at Elena. She sat in an absurdly orange plastic chair beside the bed wearing a beautiful turtleneck dress. Her hair was still shiny and supple, curled around her beautiful face perfectly. Hatred rose with the bile to pool at the back of my tongue. How dare she look so composed when Cosima was practically dead beside her?

Elena continued, even though my glare should have eviscerated her. “She hit her head on the way down and they have her in a medically induced coma until the swelling goes down.”