Page 73 of Tide of Treason
The list went on. Kayla didn’t want anything I could buy. She’d take it, wear it, and never once let it make a dent in the darkness behind her eyes. The only thing she’d ever wanted from me was the piece I couldn’t cut out. Maybe the last sliver of soul I hadn’t figured out how to kill.
I turned a pointed glare toward Crispin. “You’re the same butcher who patched Brando? How’s the walrus now that half his leg’s been turned to fondue?”
Hand stilling, he swallowed visibly. “I’m . . . not allowed to share. Patient confidentiality.”
I let that hang in the air. “Fifty grand says you can break your Hippocratic oath.”
Viviana cleared her throat, but I caught the subtle note that she wasn’t truly objecting. She was a Sforza, after all. Her sense of right and wrong was as warped as mine.
Crispin surrendered with a grimace. “Substantial. The wound’s holding, but infection’s a toss-up. Smelled like a dumpster outside a butcher’s shop in July. Grease and rot, you know? Couldn’t tell if it was the wound or just him.”
My stomach rolled with disgust. Now, I regretted asking.
The needle snapped free, a ruby bead blooming before Crispy wiped it with more zeal than required. I let my head tip back against the chair and closed my eyes against the burn of the kitchen lights. Behind me, pages rustled softly, Viviana playing at indifference while I corrupted her family doc right in front of her. Secrets stacked higher every day in this fucked-up alliance.
“That’s it,” he muttered. “Try not to get shoved into any more fountains, yeah?”
I cracked an eye open. I wasn’t in the habit of making promises I couldn’t keep, and getting shoved into shit seemed to be a recurring theme in my life.
Shoved into crime.
Shoved into marriage.
Shoved into a fucking fountain by a woman whose hands I shouldn’t know as well as I did.
Crispin packed up his kit, adding something about “no strenuous activity,” like I was going to take up yoga instead of hunting down the next prick who crossed me. I flexed my hand and imagined wrapping it around Kayla’s throat—not to hurt, never to hurt—but to feel that pulse jump under my thumb, that wild, untamed thing she kept caged behind her ice-queen glare. She’d pushed me into that fountain, sure, but I’d let her.Because somewhere in the wreckage of my soul, I liked the way she broke me open, spilled my guts out for the world to see.
A sick fuck like me didn’t deserve clean hands, and she was the dirtiest mirror I’d ever stared into.
“Lucius.”
“What,” I muttered, shifting against the chair.
Viviana sipped. Paused. Studied me.
Then, more to herself, she murmured, “What the hell have you done tomy sister?”
21 | Kayla
30 years old
Present day
I turned thirtyunder a sky that looked like it’d been dipped in tar and left to rot.
I’d counted on a cinematic milestone. A lightning-bolt epiphany, maybe, or at the very least a meteor flaming through the terracotta roof to squash Papà and three decades of Sforza dysfunction in a single, sizzling exhale. Instead, the universe delivered quiet, a temple-splitting migraine, and an existential crisis wrapped in birthday-cake pink.
Upstairs, the bathroom mirror hurled back a pallid, wide-eyed stranger as my thumbs shredded the shrink-wrap off a pharmacy-brand pregnancy test. My period was late. Not by much, but four days was enough to turn my blood cold and my thoughts rotten. It wasn’t that I was careless. I’d been religiousabout birth control for ten entire years, the tiny white pills tucked away in the mirrored cabinet behind expensive night creams. The ritual was baked into my bones: always at 7 p.m., right after evening meetings, before the second glass of wine.
But lately, the world had spun so fast that days blurred and routines snapped.
One minute.
Two.
Somewhere beneath my feet, the band Papà had flown in for the occasion massacred a Dean Martin classic while half the New York underworld toasted my new decade. Shame their hostess was busy dismantling her life in a marble-lined water closet.
I raked shaky fingers through my hair and scoffed at the list of potential fathers. There had been a time when I could pick a new face and a new fuck with the same cold efficiency I used to order flowers. Except . . . wait. Shit. My pacing halted, bare feet squeaking on chilled tile, eyes on the ceiling searching for any flicker of another body inside me, and—
