Page 116 of Tide of Treason
“Don’t say it.”
“You look—” he paused, pressed a hand to his throat. “Like an emotionally frayed, second-trimester housewife with unresolved trauma and a personal vendetta against contour.”
Not inaccurate. I was the tragic intersection of heartburn and insomnia, missing rough hands that hadn’t touched me in fifty-three days. Today, I’d stepped in a puddle the size of Lake Cuomo in kitten heels that had no business being anywhere near a sidewalk. New York was a filthy bitch, and I was herchew toy.
“At least your ass is bigger,” Antonio breathed. “God, I’m so hard right now.”
“I’m growing a small dictator.” I pulled my hair out of the knot it had tangled into and let it tumble down my back in wet, curling defiance. “We’re accepting it.”
The shampoo girl was new. I knew this instantly, not because she introduced herself (she didn’t), but because she tried to sneak up on me. She looked about nineteen, with lashes like tarantulas and a name tag that readGEMZin glitter sticker letters.
“‘Lo.”
“Hi,” I murmured, taking my seat and sinking into the soft, faux-leather with the heaviness of a woman carrying Lucius Andrade’s child. My spine hurt. Ribs felt bruised from the inside. And my breasts . . . they were trying to secede from the union. Enough to make my cousin’s stare a little too long at dinner, then glance at each other in a wordlessDo you see that?before Vito dropped his fork and Francesco muttered something in Sicilian that made Nonna slap him across the back of the head.
Her rings left marks. They always did.
“Wait—are you, like . . .Italian?” Gemz squinted at my face.
I tilted my head back over the basin. “Sicilian.”
“Oh my God, is that in, like, Italy?”
Antonio groaned audibly from the other side of the salon.
“Well, it’s not like they teach geography in high school anymore, is it?”
“They never taught it in yours,” I said mildly, as Gemz turned the water on.
She wet my hair in silence for a second. Then:
“You talk so . . . hot.”
“Grazie.”
“Posh but dangerous, innit? Might stab someone but also drink champagne after, yeah?”
I let my eyes slide closed, the ghost of a smile curling at my lips.
While she scrubbed my scalp, I floated in and out of my own thoughts. One of them, somewhere between the lavender rinse and the passive-aggressive head massage, was how long it’d been since I felt fingers in my hair that didn’t smell like drugstore conditioner and cheap nicotine. Lucius had loved to tug. Especially when I bit. He said I snapped like a puppy. Then fucked me like he was trying to domesticate me.
I hadn’t gone to the vote.
The thought bloomed again, stubborn as ivy, curling through the cracks of my ribs and squeezing.
My whole life, I’d been trusted to tip the scales when it mattered—final tallies, estate negotiations, silent wars drawn in gilded ink—and they’d trusted me again. One hour after Lucius had laid his chest bare for me, bleeding stories of rusted spoons and crucifixes glinting red, Vito texted: tie. My hands shook so badly I almost dropped my phone. I couldn’t fucking watch. Couldn’t sit there in my thousand-dollar heels whilethey laid my entire existence between a father and a son and told them to spin the chamber.
The first click would’ve sounded like a starting pistol.
The second, the slam of a coffin lid.
I heard later that Sergius hadn’t passed the gun.
“You ever think about getting bangs?” Antonio mused, flouncing over in linen trousers. “Long and feathery. Soft. Sensual. Something to match your new,” he lowered his voice theatrically, “state of being.”
“I’ve committed worse crimes.”
He clapped once. “Done.”
