Page 98 of A Taste Of Darkness

I hung up the phone before my sister could even finish my name.

Handing Arlo back his phone, I stormed past him. Milo kept a gun in the living room, and though I wasn’t the most confident in my gun skills yet, I knew how to shoot and that had to be enough.

As I entered the living room, Arlo’s wife looked at me with sympathy all over her face, but all I cared about was that gun she was holding in her hand.

“May I have it?” I asked, nearing her.

Dahlia nodded, but she didn’t hand me the gun. “Milo has ten minutes left before we should get concerned,” she spoke. “Then we have another hour before we should do something. If he doesn’t show up at ten, I’ll go check the house with you, okay? But please, Sterlie, if Milo means anything to you, wait this last hour and ten minutes.”

“How does that even make sense?”

“Should he still be in the office with his family, discussing his sudden return, your appearance is more likely going to make everything worse,” she told me, sounding a bit too confident for my liking. “Your name is a sore topic, and while most of our family doesn’t remember your face, Milo’s reaction to seeing it or even hearing you’ve come to help him gives away how much he loves you. The last thing Milo needs is to be betrayed by his feelings for you.”

My shoulders dropped, eyes closing at that tiny piece of information I so badly wished Milo said to me before anyone else could.

My hands balled into fists as I took a deep breath. Tears welled in my eyes, and a Milo-shaped hole burned itself into my heart.

In theory, I knew he loved me… at least I felt like he did. I just wish he told me and not Dahlia.

“A sore topic? But I didn’t even do anything,” I said as I finally swallowed past the lump in my throat and reopened my eyes.

“You may not have, but Milo did. If it weren’t for you, he would’ve never cared about what his uncle did because he was trained not to care. Only because he somehow instantly fell in love with you did he intervene. Saving you resulted in consequences for him, which made him kill his own family. He never wanted to leave the Cosa Nostra until he met you. While none of this is your fault, they’re all blaming you.”

That wasn’t fair.

I wasn’t oblivious to the mafia’s immorality, even before I met Milo. However, blaming someone who was an innocent child at the time it all went down was more than wrong.

“Okay.” I sat down on the sofa, staring at the clock. “We’ll wait. But if he isn’t here at ten, I’m storming that fucking place.”

49

TIME’S TICKING

Sterlie Adams

9:57.

My leg was bouncing, hands shaking. All I did this past hour was stare at the clock. Sometimes I’d check the door.

He didn’t show up.

Since Dahlia said I was allowed to be worried after nine, I’d been practically dying more and more with every passing second he didn’t come home.

9:58.

I was holding my breath, watching the seconds pass by.

9:59.

I was mad that he left me here without saying goodbye. How could he do this to me?

Did these past weeks mean nothing to him after all?

Perhaps I was right all along. I disgusted him.

He had me, and now that our time was running out, he got sick of me.

In a world made for men, all women were good for was to fuck, right? To birth an heir to keep up the man’s legacy. Love was too much to ask.

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