Page 104 of His Pretty Little Duet

She sighs. “He has some...tax issues. I can’t believe you don’t know... This bitch from the news was going to go public with it. He’d do time. We’d go broke. He won’t handle prison; he’s too old now.”

I stare, deadpan. “Keep going.”

“That’s it.” Kaya looks around, her gaze coasting between Vinny and me. “That’s all there is to say. I did it to keep the stuff about my dad out of the press.”

“Fuck,”Vinny bites out, knowing what I know, but I need to hear it from her and not jump to conclusions.

“Who blackmailed you?”

“I don’t know her... A lady.”

Irritation rolls up my back, hitting my ears, burning them. “What did she look like, girl?”

“Red hair. Stuck up. She never said her name.”

Lorna.

Vinny scoffs, saying, “Why would she want to start a fire in the boss's city?”

“I don’t fucking know. I thought he was behind it the whole time...” Her eyes bounce around my tight face, searching for a hint of the truth she believes I’m withholding. “Aren’t you? I mean, you got a lot more attention after the fire,District Daddy.”

"Vinny, stay." I nod at Vinny's associates. “You take the girl home.” I walk to the warehouse window, taking in the wild ocean sprawling beyond the glass. The thick smoke from the bushfires hazing the horizon, making the stretch of coastline nothing more than a grey abyss.

Fucking Lorna.

She’s taken this campaign to another level with this one. Risked lives. I knew her morals were rickety, and I’ve never denied mine are, too, but I have held on to the last slither of humanity in this business of mine, in me, that we—I—don’t hurt innocent civilians.

I retrieve my phone from my pocket, calling her cell. It rings several times and then she picks up, her voice breathy as she says, “Lord Mayor, what an honour.”

I cut to the chase. “I have the girl,” I state monotone, and where her deep, husky cadence used to stir my cock, knowing what the lips that produce that sound can do to it, I feel nothing at all. This relationship is over.

She isn’t pleased by the end of our conversation, leaving me with a “Fuck you” after I suggest we re-evaluate our relationship. That it has been beneficial, suitable, and appropriate, but has run its course entirely.

All the while, I think about a far sweeter cadence, a soft voice that murmured, “Will you ever belong to me?” Outwardly the reason to end this sporadic engagement with Lorna is the fire, the lies, the arrogance, but stoked low beneath those situational facts is a little deer who wants all of me for herself.

I slide my phone back into my pocket, turning to find myself alone with my capo. His face tells me he's not sure that was in my best interests, as if I don’t already know this. "I know."

"This is why I'm single, Boss." He smirks, though something in his expression betrays that display and I wonder what it is. Perhaps he's concerned about her leaking information to the news.

"She won't do anything too stupid. I'll have my wife smooth things over with her," I assure his silent protest. The distance between us creates an echo every time we speak, so I walk to meet him in the empty room. "They are very close."

He nods, knowing the dynamic between my wife and my lover—ex-lover. "Feminists."

"Indeed." I stop in front of him and reach into my pocket to retrieve my tin. He flinches before realising that I'm drawing a cigar and not my Glock.

"Jesus, Boss!" He rubs his chest. "You ask me to stay back, and then you act all shady," he states, and I chuckle.

"Shady?" I contemplate his misused word. Not shady... peculiar, yes, given I just released young Kaya with a slap on the hand and cut ties with a dangerously powerful women who is respectfully a large part of my campaign. I had no choice. "Tell me—" I light my cigar, sucking the tension-releasing essence into my lungs and speaking around my exhale. "In all the years I have known you, you have never had a relationship. Was there ever a girl for you?"

He sighs. I hand him the tin and watch him light his own. As the cogs in his head churn, he smokes it. "Well, there was a girl. Yeah. In Timor. I met her when I was serving. She was the most beautiful islander-looking girl. No English at all. Thank fuck. She had no idea how dumb I was."

I laugh once. "Did you ask her to marry you, and then she said no?"

He shakes his head. "She said yes, and then she took a bullet to the back."

My smile falls, and I have no further words for him. There is nothing to say to a man in his position; any small phrases of sympathy would be an insult to his experience.

We smoke our cigars in comfortable melancholic silence. I drop the roach and blunt it out with my shoe.

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