Page 16 of Hell Hath No Fury

A Painful Truth

Lilith

Itdoesn’ttakelongfor the room to empty, and I linger there, looking over the walls that are jam-packed with pictures of our people.

Beginning on the far side of the room, I slowly loop my way around, chuckling as I realize the pictures have been placed in date order, oldest to most recent. Upon realizing this, I quickly go back to the beginning, taking a closer look at the faces there. Then I laugh because I’m almost certain that quite a few of these images were candid in the sense that they likely came from a surveillance camera. Or a hired one.

Agatha appears at my side and asks, “What’s so funny?”

I lift my chin toward the wall as I respond, “Pretty sure that picture of Antoinette didn’t come from some random vacation.”

She leans in closer, squinting at the image before smiling and nodding. “That seems like an educated guess. And it looks to be a few years old, so it’s probably from Darius’s old collection.”

We walk along the wall, intentionally pointing out all the ones resulting from nefarious activities. We’re all there, and we both have a laugh as we come across picture after picture of ourselves in various states of criminal and not-so-criminal activity.

The moment where Antoinette and Darius fell off the radar is evident, but the pictures continue, a testament to our refusal to quit living our lives even though part of it has been ripped to shreds.

I stop at an image of Declan and Issa back when he was doing his farewell concert. At one point in his final song, he had grabbed onto her, yanking her close in a searing kiss, and while their lips are locked together, and they’re obviously in the middle of a passionate embrace, it’s the expression on their faces that is the most enthralling. Rapture and devotion, mind-altering passion and obsession. It’s all evident in that split second.

Agatha hits me with her elbow. “Whatcha lookin’ at?”

I lift my hand, touching my finger to the glass of the image. “What do you think it’s like?”

“What is what like?”

I tap my finger on the glass again. “This. This feeling right here.”

She raises her brows at me and laughs lightly. “You mean love?”

I roll my eyes, wanting a real answer, even though I know she’s mocking me. “Yeah, I guess. What’s it like to be loved like that or to love someone like that?”

Her lips twist, and then she shrugs. “How the fuck would I know?”

I stare at her rather blankly and then laugh because, for a brief moment there, I almost forgot who I was talking to. “Okay, but have you ever wondered?”

“Nope,” she answers as she turns away, walking out of the room. Giving the picture one last fleeting look, I sigh, then follow her, finding her waiting at the beginning of the hallway.

Walking side-by-side toward the stairs to the upper-level bedrooms, she says, “It all seems like a big inconvenience to me.”

“An inconvenience?”

“Yeah, always having to think about someone else. Always worrying about someone else. Knowing you can never fuck anyone else.”

I grab her arm, stopping her in the middle of the hallway, and when she turns to face me, I respond, “But don’t we do that already? The worrying, anyway.”

“Well, sure, but it must be hugely different when you feel like your soul is tethered to another person so finitely.”

She doesn’t wait for me to reply; she just continues down the hallway and up the stairs, stopping on the second level. Heading down the hallway, she stops in front of a door. I look at her and then at the door as I ask, “Is this you?”

Turning my gaze back to her face, she gives me one of her super smug smiles that makes me want to slap her in the face, and I groan, knowing what she’s going to say before she even opens her mouth. “Nope.”

I turn to leave, ready to book it down the hallway, but I’m a few seconds too late when she pounds on the door and then takes off at a dead run in the other direction.

I stand there, frozen, like a deer caught in headlights. It only takes me a few seconds to control myself, but no sooner have I turned to escape when the door opens. “Lilith?”

I curse under my breath, slowly turning to face the one person in the entire fucking world I’d rather not speak to. “Antonio.”

He continues to stand there with the door half-open, his eyebrows rising higher and higher until he finally asks, “Did you need something?”

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