Page 58 of Tide of Treason
I didn’t sound convinced.
Francesco made a thoughtful noise. “I don’t know . . . If anyone’s gonna lose it and take us all out with a semi-automatic, my money’s on Andrade.”
“Don’t talk about him like that.”
He raised both brows. “Touchy.”
“Don’t test me.”
I pulled my sunglasses off and pinched the bridge of my nose. It was barely eleven a.m., and some pervert had already been assaulted with janitorial equipment. Across the lobby, a wet floor sign had been kicked over, abandoned next to a mop that looked just about used in a murder scene. A red-faced hedge fund manager was cradling his skull where Carmela had introduced it to a steel bucket.
Female rage was having a renaissance, and I, for one, considered it a public-health initiative overdue for NIH funding.
“She’s got good form,” Elio muttered beside me, arms crossed like a proud little league coach.
“Excellent follow-through,” I agreed.
Vito’s grunt said he’d seen better, but not bad. For Vito, that was practically effusive praise.
So yes, all in all, a perfectly normal day.
Right until the cockroaches crawled out of their dark corners.
Three men emerged from my father’s office with cigars in their mouths and misogyny in their veins. Investors, probably. Or legal counsel. The lead cockroach spotted me first, and his mouth lifted into a grin made sinister by a pair of overly white veneers. Botox had paralyzed his face into an uncanny imitation of a Madame Tussaud exhibit.
“Little Kayla. Every day you grow more beautiful. Just like your mother.”
A phantom sensation curled against my ribs, as foreign and familiar as the rough press of liver-spotted hands on my bare thigh at fourteen years old. Aged past strength but not cruelty. The humid, bourbon-stained breath against my temple. The understanding—slow, nauseating, as sticky as the cherry cough syrup he’d pressed to my lips—that I’d have to let my soul drift out of my body to survive that room. Pretend, I’d learned, and you might wake up somewhere else. Even if the only place you landed was the dark behind your own eyelids.
My gaze flicked to the mop again, briefly tempted. After all, Carmela had proven it was good for something. And if one more person dared to compare me to Mamma, I’d sharpen the edges of my smile and gladly use it to slit their carotid. I carved my name into men’s nightmares, not their fantasies.
Francesco nudged my shoulder, voice surprisingly sincere. “Prick got balls, calling you little. You’ll be the one running this place soon, won’t you, Kay?”
“You’ve got it backwards, Franky. I already run this place.”
“Damn straight, girl.” He pulled a gold coin from his pocket, flipped it in the air, and caught it with a grin. “I’m gonna go blow off some steam at the tables. You coming?”
“Perhaps,” I drawled, already half-distracted.
The lackey beside Botox Boy sidled up, and I immediately placed him as Jack Montelone. He was in my year at Brown, son of a legacy don, heir to one-fifth of the city’s white-collar extortion pipeline. If memory served, Jack had capped his Ivy League stint by drunkenly plowing a rented yacht into another off the coast of Montauk, sinking one and leaving Daddy Monteleone to clean up the mess with a check and a scowl.
Handsome, sure, in that blandly All-American, Ralph Lauren catalog kind of way made worse by a lazy grin that said he thought himself invincible. However, I’d studied the human eye long enough to tell when someone was dead behind theirs. And let me tell you: the three of them? Pupils dull, souls rotted, not a single sign of real life in those tinted, vacuous stares. Fitting they ended up in bed with my father’s empire.
After a few minutes of excruciating small talk about the economic forecast and how great it was to “see more women in leadership these days,” Jack twitched his cuff links into placewith performative gravity.
“Shame about Viviana,” he mused.
Elio, who’d been texting under the cover of his palm, stilled. He rolled his head on an exhale, jaw set in the telltale way it went when he was about to take offense on my behalf. Vito shifted beside me. Cracked his neck. If men had the capacity to understand subtext, they’d have run screaming.
I angled my head, smile crystalline. “Shame about what, exactly?”
A conspiratorial glance passed between Jack and his friends.
“Word is,” Montelone continued, “her husband is known for a violent streak. A girl like Viviana, chained to a brute like that?” He shook his head, tongue clicking against the roof of his mouth. “Tragic.”
I gave him nothing, my smile frozen in place as my pulse drummed louder, hotter. They thought they knew Lucius? They didn’t even know his fucking name.
“Bipolar, isn’t he?” Botox Boy chimed in. “Tough disease. My wife’s cousin had that. Nearly ran his truck off the Brooklyn Bridge. Would’ve taken a whole family with him if the railing hadn’t held.”
