Page 129 of Tide of Treason
“VIVIANA.”
Papà’s voice boomed from the front steps, framed by the gilded rot of Il Cigno’s columns. Sunlight caught on the silver at his temples and etched every vein on his hand in stark relief. He shot a blistering look toward Evelyn’s clenched passports. Damn that squeaky little hamster box.
At Viviana’s falter, a bitter, acidic fear gutted my stomach.
Not now. Not when freedom was five inches from herfucking hand.
“Vai,” I snapped. “Go. Now.”
“You walk out that gate—” Papà started.
But Viviana had never been good at following the script. In one breathless second, she bolted—envelope, shoebox, and Evelyn’s hand bundled together. The car roared. Tires squealed, gravel scattered, a final, messy goodbye to tradition as the hydrangeas shook in protest. Through the open window, her face glowed with that frantic rush of freedom, and I held my breath until they disappeared over the horizon.
The world didn’t cave in. Not yet. But Papà’s quiet condemnation stalked me all the way to Lucius’s Chevelle. The late-afternoon light scraped over every hard edge—jaw, collarbone, the ropey lines of his forearms—until it found the one place he was soft: the eyes that cut straight through my rib cage. I reached him on a single breath, heart ragged, and pressed my forehead to his chest, letting the heat of him bleed through.
A rumble of satisfaction traveled under my palms, deep as a purr.
Every night that week, I fell asleep in his arms.
He was so impossibly big and smelled so absurdly good I wanted to bottle it and spray it on my pulse points when he wasn’t around. That particular brand of comfort had rewired my brain somewhere between my sixth ecstatic moan and the day I caught him flossing. I don’t know. Something about seeing Lucius Andrade do mundane shit, folding his shirt sleeves, humming near the stove while the news blared warcrimes, made the female inside me curl up and sigh.
By morning, he was still there.
I’d made a conscious effort not to romanticise it. Truly, I had. But the truth was . . . I slept better wrapped around this man’s sins than I ever had alone with my virtue. Worse, I started doing?things: dragging him to prenatal visits, asking him to kill the spider in the shower, parking myself on his lap while he rerouted Cartel shipments on my laptop just to feel his exasperated breath when I stole a kiss.
“Jesus . . .” He scowled after one such theft. “You just made me accidentally authorise the delivery of six thousand pounds of Russian-grade ammonium nitrate to a banana farm in the Catskills.”
I blinked, head heavy against his shoulder, watching his fingers freeze on the trackpad. The way he said “banana farm” almost sounded like a euphemism, but the look on his face promised an entirely different disaster.
“Don’t worry. I’ll eat the evidence.”
His hand caught my nape. The weight of it melted the bones in my spine. “Gonna get my ass indicted.”
I didn’t say it, but I liked the idea of Lucius getting indicted if it meant he had to list me as his emergency contact. Something about belonging by legal obligation appealed to the rotten core of me. As though he could feel my thoughts crawling across the back of his neck, he nipped my bottom lip in warning. Grip tightened, the slow, possessive drag of rough skin against mine, and the sheer certainty of it, ofhim, drove the splinters of my old life a little deeper under my nails.
By Tuesday, he’d fixed the Maserati.
By Wednesday, I’d decided I might never drive it again if it meant he’d keep fixing things around the house shirtless and annoyed.
Lucius didn’t talk much when he worked—only grunted, cursed in Portuguese, and occasionally wiped grease down the front of my thighs because his hands were too filthy for his own jeans. After the third time, I started to suspect it wasn’t an accident.
“You’re not a rag,” he said once, catching my glare. “You’re better. You’re mine.”
I tilted my head, let my lashes do the heavy lifting. “Yours, hmm?
“You got a problem with that?”
I had many. Most of them unrelated to the grease and more to do with the fact my internal organs were collapsing like a dying star. I wasn’t built to receive affection in the form of territorial smearing, but, apparently, I could adapt.
A few minutes later, with his head buried under the hood, I found myself asking, “How do you know so much about cars?”
Lucius straightened, wiping his palms with a rag. This time, mercifully, he picked his jeans. “After my mãe died, I started hanging around the port garages. Tadeo had this uncle who let me sleep under his lift in exchange for scrubbing brake pads. One day a guy pulls in—federal plates, probably DEA. His engine was whistling like a kettle, and nobody else would touch it. So I did.”
“You touched a DEA car?” The idea of Lucius, young and already unbreakable, elbow-deep in some fed’s engine made something brittle shift in my chest.
“Yeah. But I didn’t know he was federal until he came back the next week with a second one. Said he’d pay double if I made it ‘purr like the last.’” His voice roughened. “He offered me a job.”
“You took it?”
