Page 37 of Unlawful Lies

And I know how that feels. An unfortunate accident when I was ten with a kitchen knife and a neighbor.

Heart pain is so much worse, especially because there is no place to throw the blame away. There is only me.

I’m avoiding every single mirror in the house. There’s no use looking in them, knowing I’ll only see a phantom.

Edward is a gambler. A cheat and a liar. He owed Arden money, and now my father is dead. Where does it leave us? I know where it leaves me, and it’s right up shit creek with my paddle burned for good measure.

The cops have been trailing me. Cunningham keeps them at heel-nipping distance, but Mary isn’t making any strides at the facility, and no one is willing to help me find Scott. Edward assures me he’s been working hard to track down the fedora hat killer, but it feels like a dead end.

How do you find a phantom?

How do I trust that Edward actually saw who he says he saw?

The questions add up to another brick in the wall between the life I wanted and the life I’m stuck inside, and I wonder if there’s a way to chip away before it gets too high or if I should just give up.

Another day and another grueling interview with the cops.

They’re getting nowhere with me, which only makes them hungrier to take me down. They scent blood in the water. Rather than suffocate inside, I blindly tear my way out into the rose garden.

Grief, a palpable wave of it, crashes down and catches me by surprise with its ruthlessness.

I used to pray to God for peace, where I wasn’t living in fear. Now that I’m alone, the threat is gone, but more of them rose up in the emptiness They’re worse than the beast I knew. It might hurt to be reprimanded, verbally and physically, but the unknown face of what’s underneath my bed is something else entirely.

Summer has always agreed with me. The flowers perfume the night air, heavy and cloying and familiar.

I’ve run here every time things go south.

My own private world, cultivated by the gardens like a fantasy just for me. Here, with the roses, with the lupine and the lavender and the peonies, I’m myself.

Louisa can’t do anything for me anymore. Not when she went to bed for the night and left me on my own and not in the light of day when she’s full of misplaced optimism.

The house is a cage, and the walls close in around me, melancholy and oppressive. The house isn’t a home anymore. Not like it’s been a home for a long time.

The rose garden sleeps under an oppressive cloud of pure scent and sweetness. The humid night air glides like velvet along my skin and I stumble along the path, breathing in deeply, absorbing the heaviness.

I let my feelings for Edward grow and intensify into something impossible to ignore.

There is no room for feelings in a feud of this magnitude. Wars happen. They are the danger of being involved with organized crime. The best thing for me to do at this moment would be to send our men, Daddy’s men, to take down Edward and end the reign of the Balestras for good.

It’s been three days since I’ve seen him.

I drop onto a stone bench covered in lichens with beds of Russian sage, hyssop, and echinacea on either side. Why can’t I bring myself to do it and accept him for who he really is?

If this is the price of being a leader, then I’m not ready for it. I never wanted it in the first place, and my brother should have been here. It was his place, not mine, the oldest child and the son to boot. That was the way things worked with the Salvatores.

The roses are distasteful and tedious, the scent intoxicating and bringing back with full strength the memories of my first kiss with Edward. I stumble off the bench toward the fountain with a statue of Neptune gurgling a steady stream from the clamshell in his massive hands. Waterlilies float in the basin, and the ripples of starlight reflect over the top of the water.

This place is no longer a sanctuary but a little less like a prison than the house. At least out here, the humid breeze is a balm.

Shit, it wouldn’t even be a comfort to have Scott here. It’s one of those realizations so large they appear small, almost inconsequential. Rather than the two of us against the world, it’s every man for himself, to the point where we don’t have a relationship together.

If I ever live long enough to be a mom, I’ll never let that happen to my kids.

Just like I’ll never let their father lay a finger on them.

I head for a line of flat rocks positioned on the opposite side of the fountain and fold myself down cross-legged, skirt flowing over day-warmed stone. This will do nicely. There’s no better place to mope, really, and what I really want is a second to do exactly that.

To hide out and feel sorry for myself before I have to go back to being strong.

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