Page 48 of Broken Princess

The stilted cadence of her words makes it obvious how affected she is. She starts to fiddle with her hands inside her pocket nervously.

Zo takes a deep breath and kneels before her. “I’m sorry, guerrierotta.”

I don’t think I’ve ever seen him apologise like this. Like he feels it with every fibre of his being. It feels wrong witnessing it.

Rory shakes her head. “You don’t need to be sorry, Zo. You just need to realise that while you guys know a lot, there’s always more to family business than you are aware of. Whatever we do next, we cannot do it without more information. We need to talk to Manny and Stefano, and you’re right—I need to go with you. I can promise you, whatever it is you think we know—we don’t know everything.”

Zo starts to interject, but she’s off the gurney and covers his mouth delicately with two fingers.

“And whoever it is you think we can trust, we can’t.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

SINCLAIR

We’ve been driving for about thirty minutes, but we’re not far out now.

“How’d you find this place?” Benedict probes.

“It’s a target for a Syndicate job. I found a job to demo some outbuildings a while back, and I noticed the contract hadn’t been picked up by any of the crews yet. The building schematics show they have an incinerator on site. When you mentioned testing your latest designs, it occurred to me this way we could get paid, and you would get to blow shit up while we dispose of our little problem. Win-win.” He shrugs.

“Your knack for details worries me sometimes.”

I smile and tease him back. “Just be thankful you’ve never pissed me off, Benny. There are so many ways I could dispose of your body.”

He laughs at my harmless threat, and it reminds me how fond I am of him. I’ve known him most of his life, although we’ve only been working together for a few years. He’s eleven years my junior, so unlike me and Zo, we didn’t get to hoon around together as teenagers. We’ve had less time to cement a firm friendship, but it’s there.

I respect Benedict. He had a rough run of it for a while and it took guts to hold his head high when his father disowned him. Made Men aren’t known for their forward thinking and acceptance. Mateo was an exception to the rule, and I’m thankful he encouraged us to bring him into the team. That’s why I find it hard to believe that Mateo did nothing to help Aurora.

There’s no way the Mateo we all knew would forsake his daughter, no matter what obligations he had to The Syndicate or duty he felt to the family. She was all he had left. It makes no sense.

While I mourn Aurora’s loss, I curse that Benny is still being haunted by his sonofabitch father. It guts me that Marco is involved in this. I thought Benedict had caught a break and was free of him.

“You doing okay with all this, Benny?” I try to ask as nonchalantly as possible, very much missing the mark as I watch his posture stiffen. Before I have the chance to prompt him about his father, he punches the steering wheel and I’m hit with an unexpected tirade.

“You’d better do right by her, Sinclair. I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re playing at, but that woman has been through enough. She’s not some nameless fuck. You better look after her or I swear to fucking Christ, Nico will have to pull me off of your cold dead corpse when I’m done with you.”

Where the fuck did that come from?

“You about done?”

Benny looks just as surprised by his outburst as I am.

“I meant, are you okay with the fact we’re going to go after your father? But it would seem we have something else we need to discuss.” I bristle at this. Like fuck do I wanna sit with a twenty-something and discuss my sex life. I’m too old for this bullshit. However, we are brothers-in-arms, and it would seem I underestimated Benedict’s interest in Aurora.

So did he, apparently.

His face is bright red. I'm unsure if it's rage or embarrassment, but either way, it appears to grip him tight and render him speechless. He keeps opening and closing his mouth, like he has lost the thread of his previous rant.

“Okay then.” I draw out my words, trying to figure out where I’m going with this. “Look, I don’t know what your problem is,” he makes a move to interrupt me, but I hold up a hand to stop him in his tracks, “but you have every right to be concerned about her safety. However, it is not your place to question my honour. You know me better than that.”

He doesn’t speak and I see him nod out of the corner of my eye as I glare at the white lines whizzing past the window as we drive.

“I know I would never intentionally hurt her, but I don’t have a clue what she wants from me…” I can’t think of what else I can say to convince him of my intentions.

“Are you guys, like, together now?” he asks in a meek voice.

His question takes me aback. It's not because he asked, but rather because I'm unsure how to respond. So, I hedge. “Look, I don’t know. It’s not like we’ve had a moment to talk about it. When I woke up this morning, the meeting had already started, everyone was there and then I had to come straight out with you. I don’t know what we are, and I’m not being funny, but the person I want to talk to about it first, ain’t you.”

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