Page 62 of City Of Thieves
He reserves his other side—the one with the murky past and a roomful of sealed police records—for those who hurt his family… And I’m only just getting started.
“Do you hate me for it?” I taunt, fighting back the tears. “Doesshehate me?”
“I think you’re fucking insane!” Tonight, his gray eyes are stony and sharp, ruinous and unforgiving.
There was only one clean way to sever the ties between us, but it meant hurting the person he loves just as much as he does his children...
“Let her go, Rick,” comes her soft voice from the doorway.
He curses under his breath and drops my wrist. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for her. “Can’t we just ship her off to Santiago’s private island and sink all the boats?” He narrows his eyes at me. “We’ll only rescue her when she’s outgrown the tantrums and overpriced tiaras.”
“You paid for them,” I retort. “You, and your dirty money.”
“You weren’t fucking complaining about it when I did, you ungrateful little—”
“Rick, please…don’t!” Mom’s fingers tighten around the door frame.
If devastation is a mask, she wears it with so much dignity. Even so, her face has no color underneath her make-up, and the corners of her mouth are pinched tight. She’s wearing a silver evening dress, but the sequins lost their sparkle the moment she saw what I’d done to her favorite painting tonight.
She doesn’t scream or judge as she walks toward us. She just kneels next to the jagged strips of canvas that used to be ‘Ines’ and starts collecting them up.
Dad and I stand like statues until she’s done.
“We need to take you to the hospital,” she says. “Your arm is bleeding.”
“Fuck you!”
“Tatiana,” my father snarls. “You’re close to eclipsing my record for teenage bullshit behavior, and that’s really saying something.”
“Why don’t you make yourself useful,Daddy, and go buy some new voters?”
He spins away and buries his hands into his black hair, muttering more curses under his breath.
I think I’m winning…
For the first time ever, he’s perilously close to losing his shit with me.
Good.
But never has a word felt so contradictory and so wrong.
“I hate you, and I hateher!” I turn back to my mother, and then I let it rip.
She doesn’t deserve my vitriol, but I throw it at her anyway, spewing the worst kinds of things, about how she was a bad mother for fucking a bad man like my father, how her adored older sister, who I was named after, would be ashamed of who she’d married.
Her first tear is what seals my fate. It catches in the light as it glides over her flawless cheek. I’ve never seen her cry before, but I know right then and there that I never will again.
My father doesn’t actually say the words, “get the hell out of my house,” but the air is infused with them like one of those cheap car air fresheners you buy at the gas station, which overpowers everything.
As I go to pass her on my way out, I slap my hand down onto hers, and the strips of canvas go flying. “You always loved that painting more than me. Now, you’ve lost us both.”
She doesn’t answer because she knows it’s not true, but my words are my arsenal tonight and sharper than blades.
It's only when I go to slam the front door that I realize ‘Ines’ will never be sad again.
I’ve stolen that emotion from her, the same way I’ve stolen all the happiness from my mother.
The sharp ringof my phone jolts me back to Renzo’s suite. When I reach for it, my cheeks are wet with tears.
