Page 55 of Spiteful Heart

Mail. Who the hell got snail mail these days? Everything was a scam, and any bills that needed to be paid you could usually just click on automatic withdrawals. When you had loads of money like I did now, after inheriting the DeLuca fortune, you didn’t worry about any of that stuff. And if something were to happen, you had more than enough money to make it go away.

Viper and Mike finished packing their vehicles. Maddox helped Sylvester. They came over to me, kissed me on the lips, and told me they’d see me at the house.

“You want to ride with me?” Sylvester asked, but I shook my head and told him I’d ride with Harvey. He also made it a point to go to the front door and lock it, like he still couldn’t trust me to throw the locks.

I said not a word, though I had uncrossed my one arm so I could reach up and touch the skull necklace I wore. The same one Sylvester had given me, the one with the tracker in it. As proud as I was, as kind of pissed as the thought behind it made me, even now, I also knew this necklace had saved my life.

Hard to be mad at that.

They pulled away, car after car, driving down the long, winding driveway as they left. I watched them go, knowing it wouldn’t be so bad to be back in that house. It was only for a little while, anyway. Not like it was permanent or anything.

It took Harvey another minute or so to come back to me, holding onto a handful of envelopes and whatever else was in the mailbox.

“It’s sweet they care about you so much,” he said, offering me the mail. As I took it, he sighed. “I wish I had someone who cared about me that much that they’d go out of their way to make sure I was alright.”

I met those pretty gray eyes and held his stare for a few moments. And then I said, “Come on. Let’s get going. They’ll throw a fit if we’re not right behind them.” I followed Harvey back to his car. “What about Giulia? Why don’t you reschedule your date with her? You seemed to have a lot of fun with her.”

He opened the back door for me, and once I was safely in the back seat, he went around to the driver’s side and got in. “Yeah, I did. She’s really nice. Funny, too. And beautiful.”

I chuckled at that. Three out of three. “She sounds amazing. Maybe once you guys are official, I can meet her.”

Harvey was slow to pull around and get us to the road. He didn’t pull out right away, instead throwing his head over his shoulder to look at me. “That might be fun, as long as your boyfriends don’t kill me before then.”

“Oh, stop. They like you now, sort of. You saved my life. Whether they like it or not, they owe you.”

He grinned at that, and he didn’t say a thing more as he began driving us to the Luciano residence.

I started shifting through the mail, the stack resting on my lap. I didn’t check it every day. Usually one of the guys did. Nothing important was ever in it. Spam, junk mail, scam… I set the pieces of mail beside me as I went through them, not really paying much attention to them.

Harvey said, “If there’s anything they didn’t bring you and you want, I can run back and get it. Or run out to the store and buy for you. And I can swing by the house every night to get your mail so they don’t have to—”

I opened my mouth to say I didn’t really give a shit about the mail, but right then I got to an envelope that didn’t have anything written on it. No stamp, which meant it had been hand-delivered. No return address. No addressed-to section. Just a plain white envelope, though it was pretty small, compared to a normal-sized envelope.

As Harvey said all that, I tuned him out. A sinking feeling swelled within me, and I was slow to pick up the envelope. It was thin, so no tape inside it, but something about it didn’t sit right with me, so I wasn’t relieved at the lack of tape.

I worked to open it, sliding a finger inside the seam and tearing it. A small card sat inside, and I pulled it out. The front had some kind of cartoonish design, flowers in the background while the wordsget wellwere bolded and centered. I swallowed, opening the card to see the inside.

Honestly, I didn’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t what I saw.

I read it once, twice, three times, and each time I read it, I didn’t want to believe it. There was still someone out there, someone watching me, and he wanted me to know I hadn’t eliminated him. Tony might be dead, but he wasn’t.

There was no way to know who left it. When Sylvester had cameras installed, I didn’t think he’d put any out by the mailbox near the road.

A single sentence filled the get-well card. Just one sentence. It shouldn’t mean anything to me, shouldn’t put a sick feeling in my gut, but it did. How many times had my parents told me I was their angel? That I, just like my brother, was the angel they’d wanted for so long? Tossed aside when they began favoring Aiden, but still their angel.

I’d become their angel of death, their angel of destruction. Of blood and gore and horror. I’d become everything they’d never wanted me to be, but with how shitty of parents they were, there never was any other future on the table for me. I became what they made me.

And yet…

My eyes fell to the card, reading the single line again. This guy, whoever he was, knew exactly what I was, that I pretended. What kind of angel could I be after doing what I’d done? The answer was no angel at all—and that’s why a chill swept over me as I read the line again. He was right, of course.

Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.

Yeah, you know what? He was right. I was no angel.

I was the devil.

Aight. Let’s pause this motherfucker, shall we? Let’s just take a moment to do all that OMG shit, because… damn.

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