Alle Kapitel von The Mafia Boss Came For My Son: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 9

(Laura)The ceiling is the first thing I see. It’s high and white, with a plaster rose in the middle and a crack running out from it like a road on a map, and I lie there and stare at it because it isn’t my ceiling and it isn’t the ceiling in the holiday flat, and my brain refuses to tell me whose it is.My head is pounding. My tongue is glued to the roof of my mouth and swallowing hurts. When I try to sit up the room tips sideways, so I lie still and wait for it to settle. The sheets are dark grey and expensive, and they smell of a man’s aftershave with something sour underneath.I’m naked.I lift the sheet to check, as if I might be wrong, and I’m not. Giulia’s emerald dress is on the floor beside the bed with one strap torn clean off. My bra is hanging over the arm of a chair. I can’t see my underwear anywhere. I push myself upright and my thighs ache, a deep, wrong ache, and there are bruises on the insides of both my arms, four small purple marks on each, lined up in a row like f

(Laura)Giulia sits me on the couch and puts a glass of water in my hands, and I tell her. I don’t do it well. I keep stopping and starting, and some of it comes out in the wrong order, the stairwell before the champagne, the cufflinks before the bruises. I show her my arms. She looks at the marks and then out towards the balcony doors, and the longer I talk, the stiller she goes.When I’ve finished, she says nothing for long enough that I wonder if she heard me.“You were drinking a lot,” she says at last.I stare at her. “I had three glasses. Maybe four. I’ve had more than that at uni and walked home.”“You were dancing with him for ages. Everyone saw. You were all over each other, Laura.”“We were dancing. It’s a wedding. That’s what people do at weddings.” My voice is climbing and I can’t stop it. “I don’t remember leaving. I don’t remember getting in a car. I woke up in his bed with no clothes on and I don’t remember any of it.”“So you don’t know what happened.”“I know what hap

(Laura)The Corolla takes two tries to start. I talk to it nicely and it forgives me. The after-school care program at the primary school shuts at six, and I pull into the car park with seven minutes to spare, which for me on a Thursday counts as early.Chris is the last kid left. He’s at the craft table with Mia, one of the educators, and when I walk in he spins around on his stool and beams at me. He has drawn a curly black moustache on his top lip in permanent marker.“Mum! Look! I’m Antonio when he was young.”“Antonio’s never had a moustache in his life.”“He did in the photo. The one on the boat.” He twirls one end of it between his fingers. “Mia said it’s art.”Mia gives me an apologetic look over his head. “I said it was a choice.”“A big choice,” I agree. “You know it’ll still be there for school photos next week, mate.”He considers this with great seriousness and decides he’s fine with it.He talks the whole way home. He tells me Lachie got sent to the office for licking a

(Laura)I don’t answer him. The tap is still running in the bathroom, and I can hear Chris humming the theme song from the cartoon he isn’t supposed to watch on school nights, and the sound is so ordinary I want to scream.“Wait there,” I tell Matteo, and shut the wooden door in his face.I lock it. Then I stand in my own hallway with my palm flat against the door and count to five, like I tell the residents to when they get up too fast and the room starts to spin.Chris has toothpaste on his chin now instead of crumbs. I wipe it off with my thumb, steer him into his blue bedroom and tuck him under the doona with the book he’s picked, the one about a shark who’s scared of water, which he has picked every night this week.“Who was that man?” he asks.“Nobody you need to worry about. He’s got some grown-up stuff to talk about, and then he’s going.”“He talks like Antonio.”It takes everything I’ve got to keep smiling. “A bit, yeah.”“Is he Antonio’s friend?”“No, mate. Read your shark b