Page 103 of Brutal Legacy

I stopped on the street, only jerking forward when he tried to keep walking and found my weight pulling against the cuff.

He frowned at me.

“Even prisoners get more yard time than this,” I snapped at him, barely holding it together.

He tilted his head to the side. “What the fuck do you know about prisoners and their yard time? The closest you’ve ever been to being inside is watching a drama on TV.”

I snorted. “Okay, fine, and you’re an expert?”

It had just been a comeback, some kind of response to the shots he fired at me nonstop, but this one struck.

I could see in his eyes as soon as the words left me, that they were true. I felt it in my gut.

Elio had served time. The man who’d never wanted to end up like his father, had ended up in prison at some point after all.

He stared at me, and I stared right back.

“When?” was all I could manage. My questions had formed an impossible pile of dry kindling, and any second, a struck match could light the thing on fire and burn down the life that I’d known.

“Ask your father,” Elio said.

Scratch. Hiss. Whoosh.

What the fuck?

“What do you mean?” I asked, wanting to know but also scared to find out.

Elio broke eye contact first. He peered down the street. His free hand pushed through his hair. It was shorn short these days, precise and no-nonsense. But the movement was the same as the past, when he had chocolate-brown waves to tumble across his forehead.

“There’s a pizza place down the block.” His voice was quiet.

Then he tugged me forward, and we were walking.

“What were you talking?—”

“If you want to walk, drop it,” he told me in a tone that brooked no argument.

I did want to walk. I didn’t want to drop it, but it seemed I had little choice in the matter.

We walked in silence, my cuffed hand tucked in the small of his elbow, like we were any other couple out for a stroll down a pretty tree-lined street packed with boutiques. I tried to ignore the screaming questions in my head. There was a display window on the way that caught my attention.

I hesitated at the glass, and Elio stopped, too, following my gaze.

“All that time married to a millionaire like Conti, and you never made your designs available for sale.”

“I never finished any of them.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You had over ten years.”

I sighed. “Things didn’t really go to plan. I take it yours didn’t either.”

“What makes you say that? I’m rich, as you pointed out, powerful, second in line to New Jersey and a good chunk of New York.”

“And yet you’re so happy you play Russian roulette with yourself at night,” I blurted out before I could think twice.

Elio continued to stare at the window display. The only sign he was bothered that I’d seen his little hobby was that ticking muscle in his solid jaw.

“Yeah, well, take comfort,topolina. One night, maybe you’ll get lucky. Being a widow suits you. Maybe one day soon, you’ll be mine.”

---