Page 27 of Unlawful Lies

But she’s reaching for me, and I’m falling into her arms, cradling her head against my chest.

“I’m so sorry. I’m sorry, little fox.”

There’s no sex that night.

Nothing except a few stolen kisses. Nothing except her suffering and my lies. Nothing until the paper in the morning, delivered with my morning coffee after I sneak out of her house with the first rays of light.

Three days later, I’ve drained half a cup of coffee with my first three gulps when Gio strides into the room. He knocks me down two feet with his biting glare of distaste.

“Where were you all night?”

I shrug, setting the cup on the counter. “Out. Does it matter?”

I expect him to launch into a tirade about the gambling. The past two nights, I’ve gone back to the den, pressing the others for information about Arden and his contacts. As I thought, most of the guys are tongue-tied.

Instead, the sides of Father’s lips twitch upward before completing their insidious curl.

“What’s wrong with you?” I ask.

Despite the early hour, he’s already dressed in a three-piece suit with his grandfather’s pocket watch tucked neatly into his breast pocket. “Wonderful news,” he says evenly. “Arden Salvatore has been murdered.”

I stiffen. Did Father take a trip to the mortuary? “You don’t say?”

“It takes care of a number of our problems, Ed,” Father continues. “Especially considering the police are on the way to question his family. The daughter specifically, so my contacts tell me.”

My spine frosts over in dread at his words. Somehow, the murder has been leaked, and I’m willing to bet it’s a purposeful move by the man in the fedora. Now Nicola is under the butcher’s knife.

Nicola

Sorrow is a really strange thing when it's tempered by delight.

My dad is dead, and the thought of never having to navigate the halls to avoid his fists again…In Edward’s arms, I sleep well for the first time I can remember.

There’s only the dull ease of liberation. Even Mom doesn’t bat an eye when I deliver the news to her in the morning. The usual gray cast to her face doesn’t lift, and she hardly smiles, yet something in the air releases the longer we stand in the kitchen.

She doesn’t ask me if I’m sure or how I found out. She doesn’t insist on overseeing the funeral arrangements herself when I assure her it’s being taken care of. There’s only the habitual pat of her hand on the top of my head and a hastily muttered “good girl” before she zombie-walks to the fridge.

She stills only on her way to the stove to make the same breakfast she always does for Daddy, as if realizing she never has to slave over it again.

For the rest of the day, things are calm. Blissful. The rooms are silent even when Scott stumbles back from his party, his smile blossoming like sunshine after a week of rain.

Families shouldn’t be happy when a husband, a father, dies, especially not when it’s murder.

Yet we are.

Edward will handle things for me. For us. For the first time in my life, I feel like I can lean on someone without terrible effort. The blissful feeling lasts for a handful of hours. Until it pops.

Until the newspaper shadows my downfall and police slap handcuffs over my wrists, tightening them to the point of pain.

“You have the right to an attorney,” the young cop on the left drones.

The one on the right, hardened to the point he is way past his prime, only glares at me as though he is hoping to pin every unsolved murder of the last five decades on my shoulders.

“If you cannot afford an attorney, then one will be?—”

Mom is somewhere in the background screaming at them to stop, telling them they’ve made a huge mistake and our lawyers are going to fight them tooth and nail.

I hold the other cop's stare with one of my own, and say nothing about the cuffs. This isn’t the time to break. My father might have been a drunk, a liar, and a slave master when the occasion called for it, but he taught me well. Better than he would have thought, considering I was the girl and thus someone to shrug off.

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