Page 111 of Tide of Treason
“Trying to make a kept man out of me,principessa?”
We never bartered in English alone; affection was exchanged in smuggled dialects and minor sins. A Portuguese endearment murmured against my ribs. The mineral bite of his cologne threading my lungs until my head tipped with it. The man made me greedy, and now I craved more. I wanted, so much it nearly gutted me, to taste the parts of Lucius he still hadn’t offered. The ones locked in bone and blood and half-remembered screams. The rooms he never let me into.
I flicked my hair over one shoulder, brushing the silky strands against his chest. “Say something nice.”
“I made you come three times.” Statement of fact.
“That was for my benefit. Now give me something selfish. Something just for you.”
His gaze held mine captive, searing in its intensity. “You bruise easy. And I like leaving marks.”
“I’m not a fucking peach, Lucius. Takes more than a brush to bruise me.”
“No.” His thumb ghosted along my neckline, dipping into the hollow where my pulse played fugitive. He seemed distracted by the idea of it. “I thought about leaving marks here,” he mused, “but I prefer higher. Where your clothes can’t cover them. And your makeup can’t hide them. I want every pair of eyes to know—” He pitched his voice so low I had to chase the words, heart stuttering, “. . . mine.”
Gooseflesh prickled my skin, heat climbing to my cheeks before my well-trained cynicism could ice it away. Playing it cool around him was becoming a full-time job I’d never asked for but somehow couldn’t quit.
“Are you ever going to tell me why that anger of yours settles right there, at the base of your spine?” I was changing the subject to something that made my gut clench with anxiety, though I wasn’t sure I could handle much more of this. Each time we trespassed into new territory, the rest of the world paled to background noise, and the terror of needing him full-volume scraped my ribs. Because once I believed in us, who would drag me out if he ever changed his mind?
Lucius’s jaw set in a dark line, gaze flicking to the hallway. Instinctively, I turned to look, but he yanked me back, hand sliding over my nape, grip gentle.
“You have your secrets, and I have mine, Kayla. I haven’t asked you to give those up.”
It was a warning, yes. Also confirmation enough. A piece of me settled with the knowledge that we both carried burdens. Maybe I could share the weight if he would let me. Whatever it was, it haunted him the way Mamma’s girlhood haunted her. But the steel in his posture eased, and he said it quietly, words flung across the gulf of memory.
“That’s where they used to kick me.”
My pulse thudded, quiet and shattering.
“I grew up in a favela outside Rio. My mother—she was Black, beautiful, fierce. She cleaned for a family with more marble in their bathroom than we had in the whole church. Used to bring home scraps, stories, things she saw through their windows. She had dreams, but not for herself. For me. Told me someday I’d leave. Become something more. She said God had big plans. But God never saw the look on her face when I brought the Cartel to our door.
“I didn’t know what I was doing. I’d seen them skimming product off a shipment. Drugs, I figured. Thought I’d be a good kid and report it to the authorities.” He chuckled without a trace of humor. “Didn’t know I was snitching on Braga’s men. Didn’t even know he was my father. I was twelve,principessa. Still had milk teeth and a hero complex.” He ran a thumb over my thigh, the movement rough and absent. “They came to our shack in the middle of the night. Six of them. My mother fought like hell, tore one of their faces open with a rusted spoon before they got her down. They made me watch. Told me if I screamed, they’d kill her slower. If I looked away, they’d start over.” He was far away, lost in a place only he knew. “I didn’t look away once.”
“Lucius . . .”
I closed my eyes.
I was chewing on the taste of rusted spoons and milk teeth. Of twelve-year-old boys trying to save the world and mothers who fought too hard for sons who got swallowed by it anyway.
“I remember how one of them wore a crucifix,” he continued. “Kept slipping down while he held her down. She bled on it. It glinted red.”
The tattoo.
I think my heart cracked then. I think it fell, seed and all, into his hands and decided it wasn’t mine anymore. He’d never said that aloud before. I knew that for a fact. Lucius wasn’t the kind of man to spill secrets willingly. So in a way, I was proud, but in another, far more insidious way, my heart splintered open and kept splintering every time he spoke.
“You were twelve.”
He didn’t look at me. “I was dumb.”
“You weretwelve, Lucius.”
His silence breathed down the back of my neck. Shifting slightly on his thigh, the soft brush of my dress caught his knuckles. Lucius caught a fold of it between two fingers. Rubbed it, slow. Thoughtful.
“God’s never done me a single favor, but He won’t let that man walk away from this. I don’t know how I know it . . . but I do.”
“You say you’re not religious,” I breathed.
“I’m not.”
