Dark Shadows (Gia Santella Crime Thrillers Book 11), Kristi Belcamino [ereader with dictionary .TXT] 📗

“How?”

“She was drunk and I pushed her off this bridge we were on.”

“Why didn’t you kill Amanda when she was dating him?”

“Because she was my best friend, duh?”

“So, why did you kill her now?”

“She was going to go to the police. She told me.”

“I have a question. If you loved Lucas, why did you kill him?”

“It was an accident. We got in a fight. I drugged him. But I didn’t mean for it to kill him. Or maybe I did. We argued, I pushed him. He hit his head and fell in the pool. He might have still been alive. But I didn’t get help. I don’t know why. Maybe because he was sleeping with Amanda. Maybe because I just wanted him dead.” She shook her head. “I don’t know anymore.”

It was a lie. A good one, that I think she actually convinced herself to believe.

“But I needed to kill Amanda. I didn’t want to. I needed to. I used your gun to frame you.”

“I know.”

“Now I have nobody,” she said. “Now I want to die.”

Fuck. This was not where I wanted this conversation to go.

“Hannah, I need you to come over here and talk about this with me. I know how you feel. I’ve killed people before and regretted it. It’s not a great feeling. But it gets better. I promise.”

“I’m not you.”

“True. But we might be more alike than you realize.”

I was starting to panic. She was inching closer to the edge.

“Bullshit,” she said. “You’re fucking perfect. You have the perfect life. You are confident, beautiful, strong, and in charge all the time.”

“Not true.”

She made a face.

I swallowed.

“I never wanted to kill someone,” I said.

But I hadn’t been given a choice. Not really.

After I was raped in my late teens, it seemed inevitable that my attacker would die by my hands. The next person I killed really forced my hand. Literally.

It was his death that spawned a chain of events that would change my life forever.

Mateo Antonio Turricci. That green-eyed Sicilian devil. He’d killed my parents, my godfather, and maybe my brother. He was a monster. I didn’t know about him until long after my parent’s death. Then I learned that when my mother was orphaned as a child in Sicily, he had become her guardian. When she was a teen, he’d raped her. She’d managed to escape to America and carve out a new life for herself.

But he remained obsessed with her. For decades.

Shortly after I moved away from home, he killed my mother and father, thinking I was his child and my mother had never told him. When I found out later, I hunted him down to kill him.

Even though I am American-born, my Sicilian roots require me to exact vengeance on those who kill my loved ones.

When I found him, I showed him proof that I wasn’t his daughter right before the police arrived. Faced with this knowledge, he threw himself on the fireplace poker I was holding. As it slid into his chest and the life left his body, I saw in his eyes that he died with the realization that I wasn’t his daughter after all.

Later, his children came to kill me.

His daughter failed. And died.

His son took my boyfriend, Bobby’s, life before I managed to kill him in the Sicilian villa my mother had inherited from that evil family.

The Turricci family bloodline was finished. As far as I knew. But they’d still managed to mark me forever. They’d turned me into a killer. I hadn’t killed for years

And I didn’t want to return to that life.

Of course I couldn’t tell her all of this right then. Maybe later. Maybe it I thought it would help her to know. My focus right then was getting her away from the cliff’s edge.

“Come on, Hannah.” I said. She was still staring out at the sea.

I stared at her profile as she stared out at the sea. Tears streamed down her face. I took that as a good sign.

“Let’s talk about this over a glass of wine. We can get in my car and drive far away. We’ll find a chalet up in the Alps and make a plan…figure out how to handle this. Come up with a solution.” I wasn’t lying. Right then, I would have done anything, promised anything, to get her away from that cliff’s edge. She acted as if she didn’t hear me.

“Hannah…?”

Then she was gone. She simply stepped off the edge. The last thing I saw was a wisp of her hair floating in the air. She fell silently. She stepped off the cliff to meet her death without even a sigh or whimper. I walked slowly over to the edge, dreading what I knew I would see.

Hannah’s body was crumpled on the rocks below, a pile of clothes. A slash of dark hair.

I closed my eyes to stop the tears, but they managed to squeak out anyway.

I sat on the rocks with my legs dangling off the edge for a long time before I could force my fingers to dial the numbers on my cell phone. I sat staring at the sun shining down on the sea. It was a view I had taken in so many times before from so many other shores. It was a constant in my life. It didn’t matter if I was filled with joy or sorrow, the sun was there to remind me that I was alive, experiencing life and all its ups and downs. It was something. And I clung to that. My life wasn’t always easy. But I was alive. And the miracle and beauty of that was something I would never take for granted. It meant that there would be pain and sorrow, but also moments of joy and beauty. Living life fully meant experiencing all the contrasts that came with it. I was willing to experience the whole package. I had no choice.

17

Ryder was the first to arrive. Again. The authorities were right