Page 21 of A Game So Reckless

Maybe I am a little crazy. Or tipsier than I’d realized after the rosé inside. I am talking to actual stone, after all.

The angel doesn’t respond.

“Thanks,” I say quietly. I hike up the skirt of my dress and climb into the fountain.

The water feels incredible, but it’s much deeper than anticipated. It comes halfway up my thighs. I yank my skirt up higher to keep it from trailing down and getting soaked.

Screw it.

I pull the whole dress off over my head.

There are no lanterns out here, and I’m too choked by thick trees to get any light from the big, glowing restaurant. I squint, locating the heap of black on the grey gravel that is my shoes and tights, and I toss my dress over to it, taking care to note exactly where that pile of stuff is in relation to the fountain. The last thing I want is to need to make a hasty exit and not know where the hell my clothes are.

Dressed only in black panties and a bra, I’m tempted to sit right down in the water. Let it soak me completely. Rinse some of this day away. The water’s even deep enough to sort of swim around. I love swimming. I always have. It made me feel like a mermaid when I was younger.

I’m not a mermaid now. I’d just be a half-drunk mafioso’s daughter dragging herself back to her family with soaking wet underthings seeping humiliating wetness through her dress.

With that in mind, I merely wade around the fountain, watching moonlight catch on the silken ripples. My bare toes encounter coins along the bottom, and I wish I’d brought one myself. Does it count if you make a wish on a fountain while you’re already standing in it? Or do you have to be standing on the outside?

I guess it doesn’t really matter, since I don’t have a coin to begin with.

And what the hell would I even wish for, anyway?

None of my desires have ever really felt like my own. My life is forever shaped by the men around me. Papà, cousins, eventually a husband. I had a narrow escape with Dario, but there will be another to replace him.

I wonder who it will be. I wonder how long until he’s chosen for me. I rub my left ring finger reflexively, as if to check and make sure there’s no ring there.

I’ve travelled halfway around the fountain and I’m now standing behind the angel. Not quite ready to get out yet, I sit on the edge of the basin, holding the stone with my hands and gently kicking my feet through the water. I feel the satiny, cool roll of it over my calves, ankles, and toes as I trace the angel’s stone wings with my eyes.

It’s a perfect, breathless sort of moment. I feel soothed. I feel free. I feel like… myself.

But moments like this never last long.

A footstep behind me shatters the calm and sends every muscle in my body tensing.

And when a voice follows that footstep, I know exactly who it is without even turning around. Because this is a voice that bled through my oxygen starved thoughts on a roof two weeks ago. A voice that’s haunted both my waking thoughts and my dreams. A voice I’ve tried so desperately to recreate inside my head, only so that I could remember exactly what it said.

Smoke and whiskey. Ink and blood.

Goosebumps explode over my exposed skin.

I haven’t felt cold in the water until this moment.

“Hello, pet.”

Chapter13

Darragh

I’ve been here since the afternoon. Like a ghost at the edge of the graveyard, I watched them put Dario Fabbri in the ground. Normally, I don’t give two flying fucks about shit like this. Dario’s dead as a doornail and I don’t actually care about making sure whatever they were able to scrape of him off the pavement makes it down into the dirt.

But it’s my first chance to see Valentina again. At least, my first chance while she’s not sleeping.

Her daddy’s been keeping her very close to home these days.

But she’s out in public view again now. For the funeral of the man I’ve recently learned was her fiancé.

She’s somehow managed to slip away from her handlers. I keep to the shadows, following silently beside her on the other side of trees and shrubs until we reach a gravel circle with a big fountain in the centre.

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