Page 99 of Tide of Treason
Something feral and feminine purred at the admission. I ignored her. If I indulged every pathetic part of myself, I’dnever get anything done.
“And how else has your mood been affected?”
Apparently, the grocery store had stopped stocking the brand of coffee he liked. His favourite barber had moved out of state. Now, he tapers his own hair, and according to him, he’s better at it than half the barbers in New York. Tadeo crashed one of his cars. Again. Blamed it on black ice, but Lucius had the sneaking suspicion it had more to do with the fact that his trusted enforcer had been FaceTiming his side piece at the time.
He started ticking off grievances on his fingers. “And I may have told a CIA agent to suck my—”
“Lucius.” My warning.
He shot me a cherub’s grin. “Toe. Suck my toe. Much less vulgar, no?”
Elara’s session wrapped with the same gentle insistence as always—well-meaning words Lucius would forget before we hit the lobby. He signed his release forms with a swipe of his pen, didn’t glance at them once. I suspected that, one day, he might be signing away something more permanent without realizing. The thought itched. I wasn’t sure where.
Outside, the city pulsed, an unfeeling, indifferent thing, the very air steeped in the weight of our conversation. The first cool breeze of autumn whispered through the city, threading between my fingers like the early whisper of an old love affair. Crisp but not biting. Sun-warmed concrete balanced by a cool breeze. Somewhere above, a line of pigeons shuffled across the ledge of a brownstone, disinterested in the way power movedpast them.
The convenience store wasn’t far, only a few blocks, close enough that we could have taken the car but didn’t. I didn’t ask why, and he didn’t offer an answer, but the truth sat between us: we just wanted the extra time.
Halfway down the block, we passed a homeless man slumped against the crumbling brick of a bodega, his limbs arranged with the slack acceptance of a person who had given up rearranging them. The same could not be said for his shopping cart, which was fastidiously organised. A plastic bag of toiletries, a stack of newspapers, a neatly folded Mets hoodie.
Lucius withdrew a thick roll of bills, peeled off a couple, and let them drift onto the man’s lap without so much as slowing down. I clamped my mouth shut, and he mirrored me, that silence holding until we stepped off the curb and I noticed the tension winding through his shoulders. I should’ve known he had a tell. For a man who played his cards close, it wasn’t in the face or the eyes—it was in the body.
“Good deed for the day?”
He smiled, sad and dark. “I don’t believe in good deeds.”
No, I didn’t suppose he did.
“Abel used to call it the ‘cosmic balancing act,’” he continued. “That if you take from the world, you have to give something back, or it’ll take something from you first.”
He made it sound so simple, as if the scales were actually balanced, as if all the suffering and blood and bone had an even trade-off. I wasn’t sure why that irritated me, but it did.
The automatic doors hissed open, spilling the scent ofwaxed tile and stale refrigeration into the humid city air. I grabbed a basket, swiping a canister of tea off the shelf, then another, then two more, because Mamma drank through them at an alarming rate and claimed that store-bought tea was the equivalent of dirty water filtered through a stranger’s sock. (Though she never actually stopped drinking it.)
If I needed justification, I’d tell the family I dragged him along because he could reach the top shelves. Which was true, technically, but an incredibly weak defense considering every male Sforza had a habit of being freakishly tall.
He was inspecting a bag of imported Italian roast, his thumb stroking the shiny foil, when the first shot roared through the store. The sound sliced the moment in half: Before, I was wondering if I’d let him pick my coffee without being unbearably smug about it; after, I was watching a bullet tear right through that espresso bag, spraying roasted grounds into a fine, bitter mist.
Burnt coffee scorched my nostrils the exact moment Lucius collided with me, caging me against the nearest shelf. Heat radiated off him, his body a living fortress. A second shot took out the canned soup display. A third shattered the front doors. Glass rained down, and somewhere in the background, someone let out a reedy scream.
I breathed against his collarbone, voice wry enough to pass for humor. “Tell me you didn’t just take a bullet for coffee beans.”
His mouth was close enough that I felt the warmth of his answer. “They were organic.”
“Oh. Then by all means, throw yourself in front of a cart next time.”
Some people clipped coupons; others unloaded nine-millimeters in aisle seven. Binary thinking. The Mexicans always preferred the ballistic option.
“Stay here,” he told me firmly, and I made a sound of irritation.
“I hate when men say that.”
“Then you’ll love this. Shut that fucking mouth, too.”
He left, not for long, but enough for a cool draft to sneak beneath my skin and settle there. It was more than him shielding me from flying bullets. It was the knowledge, dangerous and addictive, that I was safer with Lucius than I’d ever been with anyone, family included. Safer and maybe even a little bit . . . whole. The thought made something soft and furious tremble behind my ribs, something I pressed down until it settled unreachable.
Time warped and stretched, my thoughts dragging behind the world. I stepped out from behind the cereal display just in time to see Lucius introduce someone’s head to the refrigerated section. The glass webbed around the impact, a white spider blooming across blue-lit shelves. The Mexican slumped, gurgling.
Arching a brow, I flicked a token glance at the dented bag on the ground. “Tell me you didn’t just kill a man with a pack of frozen gnocchi.”
