Page 57 of Cruel Existence

I trembled. It was too late to go back now. He was gone. He had become untouchable. As haunting as this damn hotel. There was no way for him to know I couldn’t sleep. I drank at Marguerite’s during the day. Huge goblets of red wine. I couldn’t tell him how big my regret was for not taking the first plane ticket he offered to Bali. I should haveaccepted all the tickets. Did it matter if we ended up in Scottsdale, Arizona, or Portland, Maine? We would have been together. We could have left this behind us.

I couldn’t rewrite history, but I learned there was something I could do. Something that pushed Luka into the farthest corner of my mind, and only released when I felt the pearl between my fingers. I could work. I could study under the mob boss. I could take advantage of my front-row access. Soak up his knowledge. Charm his contacts. I could become the smartest, richest, and most admired woman in New Orleans.

I would be the one to make the acquisition of the Vieux Carre worth the suffering it caused Luka.

“Okay. I’ve got the lower-level access ready,” Ciro announced. “We can go down to the tunnels now.” I jumped when he walked briskly from the dark hallway. I had lingered too long thinking about Luka.

“Great.” I smiled.

I brushed over the pendant once more. Maybe one day Luka would know what I had done. Maybe one day he would know it was for him. Maybe there was a way we could heal our families. Make the changes no one else could. Modernize the organizations. Right now, he had to pay his penance and I had to pay mine.

It was hard to imagine a time when I’d ever be able to tell him. I knew he had flown home for Katya’s wedding. His picture was posted everywhere in the wedding snaps. I stopped looking at my phone for a week, just to avoid seeing his eyes in someone else’s snap story. It didn’t keep me from waiting for him to call, but I never heard from him. Not a text. Not a DM. Nothing. Neither my father nor I received an invite to the ceremony or the reception. It was obvious that the Amatoswere sending a clear signal. There was no way it could be muddled. We weren’t welcome. The damage was done.

I didn’t sleep the night of the wedding. I thought Luka would show up in a red sports car and try to convince me to leave one more time. That didn’t happen either.

It was over. He was gone.

The elevator door closed, and I descended beneath the street. Absorbed by the darkness and the cold. Shielded from the sunlight and plunged into the damp earthy scent of the tunnels. For now, I knew this was where I belonged.

Twenty-Four

LUKA

Istared at the phone resting on the table. It was new like the other parts of my life. There weren’t many numbers saved in contacts. One in particular I had made sure not to add. It was better this way. She was better off not hearing from me. False hope was a dangerous poison. I’d done enough to her.

I had been in Europe for two weeks.

Two weeks while Lorenzo Amato still walked and breathed. Maksim had begun to worry he wasn’t as sick as I reported. I told him to keep surveilling. I knew the man wasn’t well.

I moved into the family castle in France. Did it matter where I lived? My baby grand was delivered last week. I hadn’t had the stomach to open the keyboard yet. Every time I looked at it, I thought of Amara and nothing else. How was I supposed to play the fucking thing with that kind of memory haunting it? Her legs. Her whimpers. Her lips. I’dalmost torched it the first night it arrived. I sat on one side of the room with a bottle of bourbon, the piano on the other. Even if I burned the instrument into a pile of ash, I wouldn’t be able to erase the memories of what I had done to Amara. Those images were seared in my mind permanently.

I used the underground portion of the castle for sparring training. The Novikovs had a new line of recruits interested in joining one of our Bratva crews. Nikoli was interested in expanding his team from five to six.

The training was supposed to be a distraction.

I took the train into town at night for dinner. A woman pranced past my patio table in red high heels speaking impeccable French. She smiled casually as she ducked into the café. Her lipstick matched the shoes.

I lit another cigarette. Nothing about my decisions in New Orleans made a difference now. I should have enjoyed the freedom. Instead, it felt as if I was imprisoned in someone else’s life. A life I didn’t sign up for.

I checked the time on my phone. I had thirty minutes before the train left for Epernay. I paid my server and stepped away from the café. There were fifty more just like it on the way to the station. I dodged waiters straightening chairs back into long rows. I decided to walk around the block to kill time.

As soon as I turned the corner, I saw a flower cart. It happened before I could stop the onslaught in my head. I knew which ones to buy Amara. The ones that would make the corners of her lips turn upward. Make her eyes sparkle. She could carry them while we walked the crooked streets and ate croissants, drank red wine, and talked about where to make ten o’clock dinner reservations. I’d look for a hole in the wall. She’d wantsomething elegant. I saw the entire scene play out in less than a second. It happened that fleetingly.

Fuck. I glowered at the flower cart worker while I snuffed out the cigarette only a few feet from the wheels. I quickly moved on, trying to forget that in an instant I had fallen off the wagon again.

When would she move out of my head? Maybe I needed to burn the piano after all. It was the only way to save myself from the constant torture.

I jogged down the steps to the train platform. A gust blew through the tunnel with the arrival of another train. I hopped onboard and found a seat near the window. It wasn’t long before I was headed to Epernay. The city walls whizzed past, transforming into the French countryside. There was something restorative about seeing the vineyards, the abundance of grapes, and the green and brown vines twisted together in long chains. During my first trip through the champagne fields, all I thought about was how to move more bottles. How to maximize production. How to fill the time I had that didn’t involve weapons training and hand-to-hand combat drills.

The new recruits were eager, but no one was ready to be sent to Nikoli.

So I invested time in the family vineyard. It gave us a leg in European markets that was a stronghold for shipping nearly anything we wanted. I could fit a shit ton of weapons in champagne crates.

Within an hour I arrived at the small station. There were occasionally a few women selling postcards outside. Sometimes, a man asked to shine my shoes. But it wasn’t busy. It was quiet, almost eerie. The Novikov vineyard was ten minutes beyond the village. I paid a cab to take me to the main entrance, askingto be dropped off at the front gate. I needed the walk to the castle.

The moonbeams cast silver light on the path as I swung my jacket over my shoulder and rolled up my sleeves for the walk. I didn’t mind the dust or the dark. Maybe I was numb to my surroundings. I existed, that was it.

My phone rang. “Maksim, tell me you have something.”

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