Lawless - [13]

Compared to that, bank jobs paid peanuts.

No need to enlighten Vittore as to this new status quo though. Big brother might think he owned the world now that Tito had gone off to run heaven, but Fabio liked having this secret, hugging it to himself. He would make a fucking fortune and it would all be his. No way was the family taking a share.

11

Kit was on his way out when he saw the woman. There must have been a smash on the road; the traffic was crawling in both directions. He sat at the wheel of his Bentley, gridlocked, and stared out at the God-awful weather. It had stopped raining for now, but it was still as cold as a witch’s tit out there. He wondered when this bastard headache was going to let go. Occasionally he sipped out of the open bottle of Scotch on the seat beside him.

He was too drunk to drive, he knew that.

He didn’t care.

Places to go, things to do kept turning over and over in his mind.

That was when he saw her. Traffic crawling along in the other direction, his own car going nowhere fast. And there was her face, in the back of a big black limousine – she was pale as ivory, with huge turquoise-blue eyes and… hadn’t Marilyn Monroe said she had a body for sin? Well this woman had a mouth like that. Sensual, full-lipped, you could imagine her doing all sorts of things to you with that mouth. Her hair was so white it was almost silver, falling straight to her shoulders, a black veil pushed back from it. He couldn’t see any lower, only that she was all in black and it drained the life out of her features. Drunk as he was, he still felt the swift urgent tug of sexual attraction.

Her head turned a little, and her eyes met his. She didn’t look away, just returned his stare. This was no shrinking violet: her gaze was direct, intelligent. Then the traffic in her lane moved on, and she was gone. He turned in his seat, wanting to maintain the eye-contact, but that was it, folks: end of show. She was gone, off across the city, one more person moving around the vast metropolis.

He picked up the bottle again and drank.

This is a nightmare, thought Bianca.

Vittore had hired a trio of limos from the funeral directors. One, of course, for Mama and himself (he was her favourite, they all knew that), while Fabio would have a limo to himself, leaving Bianca to share with Maria, Vittore’s poor doormat wife, who didn’t comment but must surely notice that she had been relegated, separated from her husband by his overbearing mother, yet again.

Now the limousine Bianca and Maria were travelling in was stuck in the traffic, crawling along, prolonging the agony of this day. The other two limos, travelling behind the hearse, were lost to view. The driver had said he knew a better route to the church, and had turned the car around. He was sweating, the idiot, he didn’t know the way at all. Now they were sitting, unmoving, in yet another line of cars.

Inch by inch, the car crept along. Bianca sat there like wood, gazing out at the matt dove-grey of the sky, thinking This cannot be happening.

But it was.

Today the family was saying its final farewell to Tito, who had been murdered in cold blood by some piece of scum – she spat on them, whoever they were.

Tito was dead.

She couldn’t believe it, but it was true.

Her eldest brother, the one she’d loved so much, idolized, was dead and gone. She knew that it was mostly Tito’s doing that she had been entrusted – at last – with Dante’s. Vittore would never have entrusted her with any responsibility. Vittore had always seemed indifferent to her; he was secure in his position as Mama’s firm favourite. As for Fabio, he had mocked the very idea.

‘Bianca? What, you joking, Tito?’ he’d laughed when the possibility of her running a club had first been broached.

All her life, Fabio had mocked her. Resented her. Cuffed her around the ear, punched her when Mama wasn’t looking, because she was the interloper, the new baby, and she’d taken his privileged place.

Only Tito had loved her as a brother truly should, indulging her, showing her the noble old Italian ways, accepting her unstintingly into the family. He’d taught her everything, even how to shoot. She remembered how he’d taken her hunting rabbits on farmers’ fields, and how she had treasured that time alone with him.

Now, her heart was broken. He was gone.

A sleek Bentley paused alongside the limo, heading in the other direction. Her eyes caught and held the stare of the man sitting behind the wheel. Even sunk deep in grief, she was arrested by how amazingly handsome he was: dark-skinned, black-haired. And his eyes were a startlingly clear bright blue – but they seemed full of some private pain.

Then the limo edged forward and the man slipped out of her line of sight. She turned to look back, but he was gone.

Maria was taking her hand, squeezing it. Bianca snapped back to the present, looked at her sister-in-law, the poor cow.

‘He’s in a better place, you know. Tito, I mean,’ she said.

Bianca took her hand away.

A better place?

She knew that plenty of people would think Tito was destined for hell, particularly the one who’d killed him. And she wanted to know who that was; she was