Page 43 of Tide of Treason
Gold and cream. Lace curtains filtering the early morning sun. Mamma’s silk robe draped over the back of a chair, discarded without care. I skimmed past a man’s bare, tanned back, his expensive watch gleaming on the nightstand, and the very satisfied expression on Mamma’s face beneath silk sheets.
Stepping inside, I made my presence very known.
“Morning, Mamma.”
The crack of a perfume bottle being knocked over was almost satisfying.
“I trust you slept well?” I continued, strolling over to the windows. I tugged the curtains the rest of the way, flooding the room with pale light and leaving her hissing in dismay.
“Madonna Santissima! Kayla,che diavolo! What are you doing here?!”
“Looking for Viviana’s paint. You stole them, remember?”
Her jaw clenched. The man beside her stirred, shifting onto his elbows, his sleep-fogged gaze finally landing on me.
“Ah,cazzo!”
He scrambled, trying to pull the sheets around his torso, but only succeeded in tangling himself. He fell from the bedwith a thud. Mamma spat, “Che schifo!” and I stepped aside, giving him ample room to flee, which he did—shirt and trousers hastily tugged on, his bare ass leaving a print on the carpet in his haste. The door slammed behind him.
Turning back to Mamma, I offered her a smile. “He wasn’t your best, I admit. But then again . . . They never are, are they?”
She exhaled sharply, gathering her robe and tying it with a forceful tug. “You couldn’t have waited five minutes?”
“I thought I was being generous.”
“Your sister’s paints are in the vanity drawer,” she relented coolly, smoothing a hand over her hair.
I sauntered over to the gilded vanity, pulled open the drawer, and, sure enough, there they were. Burnt sienna. Cadmium red. Prussian blue. I scooped them up and headed for the door. Ghosting down the hall, I avoided the portraits of our ancestors as if their judgmental glares could reach across time and strangle me. The house was quiet, air thick with the heavy hush of pre-dawn stillness. Viviana’s room was at the end of the corridor.
I pushed the door open soundlessly. Soft morning light filtered through gauzy curtains, falling in delicate patches over the bed where she lay sprawled, tangled in her sheets. Relief filled me like the pull of a tide, low and mean. The kind that dragged shells from the shoreline and left behind the bones of fish.
Lucius didn’t sleep here.
The thought unfurled slow, greedy satisfaction down myspine—followed, of course, by disgust at myself for needing the reminder.
I dropped the tubes on her nightstand and left before she could stir.
I wasn’t a good sister. I didn’t coddle. Didn’t soothe. But I made sure she could paint, even if it meant breaking into our mother’s den of sex at six in the morning. That had to count for something. Rounding the corner, I was already regretting my decision to leave Viviana’s room so early.
A deep, wet slurp.
“Jesus Christ, Franky.”
He cracked an eye open. “Buongiorno,” he rasped.
Lola made a soft sound around his hard-on and kept sucking.
“Where’s Sophia?” I asked.
My cousin made a lazy sound in the back of his throat. “Sleeping.”
“Your five-year-old daughter is sleeping while you get your dick sucked ten feet from her room?”
“Would you rather I fuck her mother in there?”
I kept walking, already done with this conversation.
The smell of jasmine hit me first. Thick, sweet, alive. The garden was dewy with early morning quiet, the stone path damp beneath my bare feet. Sunlight spilled through the hedges in fragmented beams, pooling gold against the linen-covered figure standing near the trellis.
