Toward the morgue, where she would find her father, and her sister.
With each step, Lia’s feet were heavier. No amount of bright light, gleaming floor wax, or soothingly tinted paint could ease the truth that she was walking toward the morgue, the place where her sister had been put. Her sister’s body.
Elisa was dead.
It made no sense. Elisa was the most cautious of them all, by far—the one who’d lived her whole life by the ocean and never gone more than thigh-deep in the water, who’d been so afraid of the horses she’d sat on the sidelines during riding lessons, who’d hated trick-or-treating because she was afraid to knock on the neighbors’ doors. How could she have died violently?
Because there were not two worlds. There was only one world, and in that world their father was a violent man with violent enemies. He was a criminal. A Mafioso. More even than that.
Her father was Don Pagano. And no one near him would ever be safe from his violence.
Lia stood before the steel double doors and shook those thoughts away. They had no place here or now. Or ever. They were irrelevant, because one truth nullified every other:
Don Pagano was her father.
To love one was to love the other. Only one world, and in it, he was both. Both were one.
Only one world. Only one man. Her father. Papa.
She pushed through the doors.
Beyond them was another, narrower, even quieter corridor. Still brightly lit, still not horror-movie foreboding. But the smell here was different. No hospital smell was pleasant, but this had a deeper, darker aspect. Beneath the usual mingle of disinfectants and the germs they fought was a thicker chemical tang of preservative, and something even deeper, more organic. Decay, maybe. Shuddering, Lia shoved those unhelpful notions away and focused on finding her father.
To one side of the corridor was an office with a half-wall of glass. A man in green scrubs sat at a utilitarian desk covered with papers and other detritus of work. A laptop sat atop the spread of papers, and the man was typing busily. He looked up, met Lia’s glance, opened his mouth, and then seemed to understand who she must be. With a nod toward the other side of the corridor, he answered the question she would have asked.
Across the way was another set of double doors, this set not as substantial as the heavy set she’d just pushed through. There was no sign that she could see identifying its purpose, but she knew.
A square window was set in each door, the base of the glass just about at Lia’s eyeline. With her fists clenched so tightly they’d gone numb, she went to the doors and made herself peer in.
This room looked like she’d expected, with a wall of stacked steel doors at one end, steel counters and cabinets along the other walls, and two steel tables in the center, a large disc-shaped light fixture above each one. Those lights were dark, but the regular fluorescents in the ceiling were lit. Other kinds of equipment were bolted to the ceiling, with colorful cords clamped in rows and tubes dangling between the fluorescents.
The table nearest the door was empty.
The other held Elisa.
Her shoulders were bare above a hospital-blue sheet, and her long hair dangled off the edge. When they were young, Elisa’s hair had been auburn, like Lia’s, but eventually Elisa’s shade had deepened to a sable brown almost as dark as Carina and Ren’s, and Papa’s. Remnants of red showed only in the brightest sunlight. In this room, bright as it was, her hair was only brown.
Her head rested in a way that it was clear it wasn’t directly on the table, but her hair blocked the view of whatever was holding it up. Lia couldn’t imagine they’d given her a pillow, but she rested like that—as if she were comfortable.
Papa sat on a stool between the two tables, hunched toward Elisa’s cold bed. Lia saw that he’d pulled her hand from under the sheet and held it in both of his, pressed to his forehead.
When Lia pushed through these doors, her father looked up, and Lia felt a sudden shock of déjà vu—she remembered vividly walking into her father’s hospital room after he’d been shot, seeing him lying comatose in the bed, buried in wires and tubes, pale as the sheets around him, and being struck broadside with the realization that her father was mortal. He was