Page 58 of Killer Kiss

“Don’t tell me what I did was okay.”

She cocked her head to one side. “Why? Because you like living with the guilt of making a mistake?”

“It was a bit more than a mistake, Ophelia!”

“Maybe so, but you regret it, don’t you?”

“Every fucking day. I cost myself the only family I ever knew. The only one I ever fucking wanted. So yeah. I fucking regret it.”

“Did you apologize?”

I scoffed, “And say what? Oh, sorry I tried to drag you into prostitution because I thought that was all men like us were good for?”

She lifted one shoulder. “Not the most eloquent apology I’ve ever heard, but it’s a start. I suspect it’s one your brother and his partners might need to hear.”

I shook my head and pushed back on the chair to stand. “Banjo has made it more than clear he doesn’t want me near his family. I respect that.”

I turned and walked away, heading toward the door.

“You’re scared, Augie,” Ophelia called. “Scared that if you try to reach out to him again, you’ll get rejected.”

I kept going, not wanting to hear her bullshit wannabe-therapist crap. I wasn’t scared. I just didn’t deserve Banjo’s forgiveness and I knew it.

I stormed across the road to my car, rummaging through my pockets for my keys because my car was so damn old it didn’t even have a central-locking remote. I shoved the key in the lock and got the door open before turning around for Ophelia.

My heart stopped when she was crouched at the fence line of the daycare center with a little dark-haired girl.

Who jumped up and down when she spotted me and shouted, “Uncle Augie!”

16

AUGIE

Those two tiny words hit me like a freight train. I couldn’t describe the feeling any other way, other than it hurting so fucking bad I actually glanced down at my chest, expecting to see it ripped wide open, my internal organs all falling out onto the sidewalk.

Ophelia twisted around and smiled at me.

“Did you tell her to say that?” I snapped at her, my fingers trembling.

Ophelia’s face fell. “What? Of course not. I just saw her watching you and…”

I knew she was telling the truth. Ophelia didn’t even know what Luna looked like. She wouldn’t have been able to pick the three-year-old out from the thirty other kids running around the center.

Like I was walking through fog, I edged around the car and onto the sidewalk, stopping a few feet away from the fence. “We shouldn’t… We should go.”

Banjo and Lacey wouldn’t want me talking to their daughter. I knew that. Hell, at any minute, the daycare center staff would notice us standing there at the fence and probably call the cops to report us.

There was every reason to leave.

But one brown-eyed little girl staring up at me with the widest smile that forced me to stay.

“Uncle Augie!” she called again, reaching her pudgy hands toward me through the bars of the fence. “Hi, Uncle Augie!”

There was no walking away. She held a thread to my heart I hadn’t even realized was loose, and every smile, every time she called me uncle, every reach of those small fingers drew me in until I was squatting beside Ophelia so all three of us were the same height.

“What’s your name?” Luna asked Ophelia.

She smiled easily at the girl. “Ophelia.”

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