face and brushed the tears from her cheeks. “You need to get out of this place, Lia. Go back to up to your mother.”
“Come up with me, Papa. We need you.”
He sighed deeply and looked past her, down at Elisa again.
Lia put her hand on his cheek and turned him back to her. “Elisa doesn’t need you now. We do. Mamma does. I do. Please come up. Don’t go away, too.”
His strong hands framed her face, and he pressed his lips to her forehead. “I love you, Lia. My good girl.”
She could see that he wouldn’t come with her, but she tried again anyway, before her heart simply broke. “I love you, Papa. No matter what. Please come up.”
His hands dropped from her face, and he turned back to Elisa.
When he sat again, Lia’s heart cracked a little more, but she left him alone, where he wanted to be. She went away, alone as well.
But Alex was waiting right outside the heavy steel doors. When he opened his arms, Lia sagged into his embrace and let him protect her as she cried.
~ 16 ~
Alex brought Lia back upstairs. She was quiet, leaning on him as she had before, but it was different now. Finding her father, seeing her sister in the morgue, had taken some of her strength. She felt sort of empty under his arm.
The chairs they’d occupied before she’d taken that stupid trip to the basement were still empty, and he tried to lead her there again, but she pulled up at the edge of the waiting room and wouldn’t go farther.
The scene was more or less the same as when they’d left. Lia’s mother and younger siblings still sat in a cluster at one side of the room. Donnie’s wife and a couple other women from the party—Pagano family, Lia’s aunts or cousins—had pulled chairs from their places to form a circle around them. Other family were still in little groups of three, four, and five. Donnie stood with Angie Corti and a few others, a mix of Pagano and Sacco men, in deep conversation in the farthest corner of the waiting room.
By the look of things, Alex guessed there had been no word yet on Trey or Donna Sacco.
For his part, Alex’s heart was still racing, hours now after the attack. He’d been in firefights before, but what had happened on the don’s front lawn on Christmas Eve—Christmas Eve!—was not that. At the distance the shots had been fired, they should have heard something, he thought. Such powerful rifles would have had to make a lot of noise, more than enough to be heard at that distance. Unless they were silenced.
They must have been, because the shattering glass of Angie’s car window was the first sign of trouble, and by then the trouble was almost over.
As soon as he’d realized it was a sniper, he’d known. He remembered standing on the catwalk with Lia, feeling romantic, looking down at her house.
The front lawn and street shouldn’t have been a clear shot. Maybe with the exact right positioning they could get a wedge of sightline, but it must have been at least two shooters to take three people down so quickly. It would have taken at least a few seconds to get a good sight lock from that distance. He couldn’t imagine how they managed it.
‘They’ being, no doubt, the Sicilians. It had to be them, or their allies. Alex wasn’t high enough on the ladder to know any details, but it had to be the Sicilians. Attacking the house of a don on Christmas Eve. Killing his daughter.
So Alex’s heart still raced, and he felt sick.
A thin vein of guilt throbbed, too. The lighthouse had become his and Lia’s place, their little home away from home. Intellectually, he knew nothing they’d done could have been a factor—right?—but he couldn’t settle that throb of guilt. If nothing else, he’d stood on that catwalk and seen the don’s house. Should he have said something? Should he have realized it was a place the don was vulnerable?
He didn’t know. His heart raced.
But he could focus his energy and attention on Lia and try to give her what she needed right now. He didn’t know what that was, but he could try.
Her eyes—God, she was so sad—were fixed on her mother and siblings, so Alex tried to lead her that way instead, but she resisted him again.
“What do you want to do, Lee?” he asked, feeling helpless.