Page 15 of Ivory Oath

“I think he’s still alive,” I drawl as I turn and do what I came into this room for in the first place—get a drink. “In case you want to try to save him.”

Raoul leaps over his twitching legs and stops me mid-pour. “Are you okay?”

I shake him off roughly and top off my glass. “I’m not the one bleeding out on the floor. I’m fine.”

“What happened?”

He asks the question like it’s simple. Like I can draw a line from dot to dot and end up with some crystal clear picture of this night, this week, this whole cursed life.

What happened is that my father murdered my daughter and first wife and kidnapped my second. And right this very moment, watching his chest convulse, I’m still not sure if he did it because he loved or hated me. Maybe both.

I settle on an easier explanation. “It’s complicated.”

“No shit,” he snaps. “Your father is dead on the floor. That usually comes with some complications.”

Raoul has always taken everything in stride. It might be a vestige of the fact that he was technically given to me to be used as a slave. Since this is the twenty-first century and I don’t own a powdered wig, I never took Raoul’s family up on the offer in full. But still… the dynamic lingers. Raoul jumps when I say jump and he doesn’t ask questions.

Until now.

When I called him last week to tell him Anatoly had been shot, he was shaken. Then the dominoes kept falling. Pyotr betrayed us; Stella died; Viviana and Dante were kidnapped. The last week has been a shitshow and now, even the most dependable person I know is in shambles.

I take a long drink and drop down into the leather chair in the corner. The gash in my father’s neck is bubbling now, a slow leak compared to the deluge a minute ago.

“My father killed Alyona and Anzhelina.”

Raoul blinks at me. He doesn’t look surprised—he looks worried. It’s well-documented that Ruben Falcao, Raoul’s father, ordered the hit that ended with my family slaughtered in their own home. He probably thinks I’m crazy to suggest a different version of events.

“No,” he says gently. “My father killed them.”

“Your father picked the—hell, it wasn’t even low-hanging fruit. My father tossed it on the ground. He rolled it to your father’s feet.” I take another drink, not entirely sure if it’s exhaustion or the alcohol making my head spin. “The night they died, my father sent me to the other side of the city and withdrew guards from the property. He might as well have put the key under the mat for the cartel. He wanted Alyona and Anzhelina to die.”

Saying it out loud makes me want to stand up and kill him again. Maybe I should ask Raoul to revive him after all.

“I always wondered,” Raoul mutters.

That wakes me up. The world around me solidifies as I stare up at one of my oldest friends. “What the fuck does that mean? You always wondered what?”

Raoul’s face shifts from pity to guilt and back again. He sags like the truth is physically weighing him down. “My father was a brutal man, but he did what needed to be done to protect his family.”

Rage rises up in me, fierce and swift. “He protected his family by killing mine! Don’t tell me he did the right thing.”

“That’s just it,” Raoul continues. “My father never hurt a child. Not once. I grew up hearing stories about him mounting the heads of his enemies on his wall like trophies. Men whispered about the way he would chop off someone’s leg for accidentally stepping on his foot. But in all those stories, he never hurt a woman or a child. Ever.”

I frown. “He made an exception for Alyona and Anzhelina, then.”

“Maybe.” Raoul shrugs, his head sinking deeper between his shoulders. He looks like a turtle trying to hide away. “Or… maybe he didn’t know who was in the house that night. Maybe he had bad information and called that hit having no clue that your wife and daughter were home alone.”

Would my father have gone that far to kill my family off? He could have taken them out himself, but I would have traced it back to him. If there hadn’t been a common enemy to point to—an imminent threat that needed to be dealt with—I might have realized the hand my father played in their murders even sooner.

“Your father offered you as a sacrifice,” I remind him. “He told my father that we could torture you, kill you, enslave you—whatever we wanted to do to make things right. He did that to his own son, but you think he would draw the line at killing one random woman and child he didn’t even know?”

Raoul thinks it over, choosing his words carefully. There is no good outcome here. At the end of the day, Alyona and Anzhelina are still dead. Raoul was still used as a bartering chip by his father. My father is going cold in the corner.

Everything is fucked up. But if we can untangle this knot, maybe the future doesn’t have to be.

“Your father orchestrated the murder of your wife and child and then kidnapped Viviana and Dante,” Raoul says gently. “He did that to his own son… Do you think he’d draw the line at feeding bad information to his enemies to get them to do his dirty work?”

Raoul looks at me and I remember the first moment we met.

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