Page 52 of Heartless Game

He smirked, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “That’s because you haven’t had my pasta.”

* * *

Dinner was quiet,broken up by my helpless moans as I ate the best spaghetti and meatballs I’d ever had in my entire life. And each time I moaned, Isaac watched me, a dark look in his eyes as he gripped his cutlery so hard, white showed around his knuckles.

“You know,” I finally said, patting my stomach. “If hockey doesn’t work out, you could easily become a chef. This was delicious.”

His eyes shuttered. “Hockey’s not going to work out,” he said.

I sat up. “What do you mean?”

He hesitated, like he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me. Then he shrugged. “You might as well know. I’m going to have to take over for my father one day. Can’t really be the head of a criminal empire and play for the NHL at the same time. I made a deal with him a while back; he’d let me go to college and play hockey as long as I came home to take up my position in the ‘company’ after…and agreed to run Vice and Vixen distribution in Gehenom.”

I digested his words, almost feeling guilty for the assumptions I’d made about him in the past. “So that’s why the hockey team oversaw the dealers,” I guessed.

He nodded, watching me. “We’re out of the game now,” he said. “We’d always known how dangerous it was, but what happened with Aviva and Jack really drove that point home, so we decided as a team to be done.”

“How’d your father take that?”

He snorted. “The old man was pissed. He hasn’t acted on it yet—and I’ve been avoiding him anyway. But there will be retribution. There’s always retribution,” he added darkly.

I swallowed, hating that I felt bad for him, but I did. “Is what happened to your mom partially why you don’t want to work for your father? Is that why you want out?”

Isaac rose, taking my plate and his.

“I can wash up,” I said.

“I’ve got it. Can’t have you thinking you’re here for your maid services. And no. It’s because unlike my family, I’m not a killer, and I’d like to keep it that way. Unfortunately, that looks like it’s not in the cards for me. Sometimes you just don’t have any control over your own fate.”

I sat there quietly, because how did you respond to something like that? Or how devastatingly resigned Isaac sounded to his future?

“I’m sorry,” I finally said. “That fucking sucks.”

Because what else was there to say? I might hate him, but Iwassorry.

He shrugged. “It is what it is,” he said. “What about you?”

“What do you mean, what about me?”

“Why do you want to be a journalist so badly?” he asked. “Does it have anything to do with the way you lost your mom?”

Because Isaac thought my mom was dead.

“Something like that,” I said.

He watched me from where he stood, plates in hand. “That’s it? I just told you all sorts of deep, dark shit about me, and you can’t even be bothered to share beyond a ‘something like that?’”

But I couldn’t tell him more.

So I shrugged, getting up from the table. “I really can help with the dishes.”

He shook his head back and forth slowly, placing the dirty dishes back on the kitchen table.

“The dishes can wait. If you won’t use your mouth to talk, you can use it in a better way. Get on your knees, Tovah.”

I glared at him. “No.”

He raised an eyebrow. “No?”

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