Page 38 of Twins for the Mafia Heir

God, the guilt for my snide accusation last night is hitting me now, all too late-

“Piers?”

I whirl toward the door, which I left open in my exhaustion. It seems that even when I’m trying to avoid my sister, she’ll find me.

Fantasia stands there, her nightgown pulled around her too-thin body, her black hair mussed and her eyes in shadow. I cantell by just the shape of her shoulders that she’s disappointed to see me.

“Achilles- What are you doing in here?” she asks. Her words are a little fuzzy around the edges, but I’m inclined to think it’s because of sleep instead of alcohol.

I don’t have a good answer, or any answer at all, really. So I turn the question on her.

“What are you?”

Fantasia pulls her dressing gown even tighter. “I… was going down to the kitchen and I noticed the light.”

If she was actually heading toward the stairs from her room, she’d have walked in the opposite direction and never seen anything. I’m too tired to point that out to her, though. It’s obvious that she not only visits this room often, but that she has it looked after.

“Odd way to keep a trophy room,” I tell her.

“Where’s the trophy?” Fantasia asks, her tone instantly bittering. “Piers is still missing.”

“He’s going to stay missing, Fantasia. He’s not ever coming back. You won the feud, remember? It’sover.”

“It’s not over,” Fantasia insists, stepping into the room. “As long as another person who can claim to be the heir to the Warwick family is still alive,it’s not over. How do you not understand that, Achilles?”

For the first time, she sounds just as tired and desperate as I feel.

“He was adopted, Fantasia. You can claim the Warwick bloodline-”

“Tell that to my fucking father-”

“I can’t!” I snap, losing control of my temper at last. “He’sdead, Tasia. You killed him yourself, remember? You killed him, and then I had to clean up your fucking mess.”

She turns away from me and sits heavily on the edge of Piers’s bed. “Why did he pick Piers over me, Achilles?” she asks. Her voice breaks in a desperate plea, and despite my fatigue and my irritation and my confusion, I wish I could give her an answer.

There were probably a thousand reasons Marcus Warwick passed over his daughter to select a boy adopted into the fringes of the family to be his heir. I can guess at them, but unfortunately for Fantasia’s sanity, her father took those reasons with him to his grave.

“I don’t know, Fantasia,” I sigh. “Does it even matter anymore?”

“I don’t know,” she echoes. “Just leave me alone.”

Shebarged in onmychildhood ruminations about my former best friend, but very well. There’s something else between her and Piers that I can’t even fathom, something deeper than friendship and even deeper than hate.

I close the door behind me as I step back out into the hall. For the first time tonight, I feel like my problems are not as bad as I thought they were.

After all, unlike the ghosts that plague my sister, mine are already dead.

Chapter 20

Emma

Achilles doesn’t touch me again after that night.

I try to provoke him by repeating my questions about why he wants Thomas’s money, but he doesn’t even try to distract me from them with sex. He just meets them with stony silence.

I’m equally disappointed that he’s failing to answer me… and failing to distract me. Instead, he disappears into his office more days than not, only coming out for meals with Sidony and I, and to sleep fitfully in his armchair.

A few days after our big shopping trip in Covent Garden, my new wardrobe arrives at Wesley Hall as an endlessly refreshing pile of brown packages. I let Sidony help me open every one, like Christmas has come a few weeks early. Then I celebrate by wearing my new warm and soft pajamas the entire day. I expect Achilles to make some comment about how he’s provided me with these clothes, and I should show my gratitude by shutting the hell up… but he doesn’t.

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