Page 82 of Scorned Beauty
“That is, if Grigori became a rat himself,” Bianca said. “Sandro doesn’t see that happening.”
“Desperate people do desperate things.”
“Do they want you to testify?”
“I can only testify that Anton shot my brother and they hired me to clean up the mess. I didn’t see them kill Elyse.”
“It makes no sense that Grigori let you go.”
“He needed money. Someone took pity and bought me.”
“Maybe he had a deal with someone who takes his rejects,” Sera said. She was staring at her phone and didn’t see me wince. I knew what she meant, but I guess that word was triggering for me right now.
“Does she have an accent? Is she Italian or Russian?” she asked, looking up.
“No. Very cultured American. Highly educated. I would even say she might even know different languages.”
“Oooh, CIA,” Bianca suggested.
I huffed a short laugh. “Maybe a lawyer. They might be building a bigger case. But I’m free to move after September nine.”
“Why that day?”
“No clue.”
“You’re not in some kind of safe house or WITSEC? Are they even concerned if anything happened to you?” Bianca asked.
“I never thought about it until I was here a couple of weeks.” I’d been in a dark place. There was a time I didn’t shower for a week. One afternoon, a thunderstorm rolled in with a deluge and I had the urge to dance in the rain and I went with instinct. It helped me break through the cobwebs of my mind and forced me to soak in a warm bath.
Taking a brush to my hair was still optional. I resisted the idea of chopping my hair off with the kitchen shears and instead drove my ass to town and had a stylist detangle it. That was the first glimmer of my old self when I saw myself in the mirror. A flash of defiance appeared in my eyes. My mother’s voice telling me not to depend on other people. Never let a man control the money, and have my own.
Sera regarded me like a specimen under a microscope or a doctor who didn’t know how to tell me I had a few months to live. Or even days.
“What?”
“I wonder if you have a tracker on you?” Sera asked.
Bianca clapped a hand over her mouth before exclaiming, “Of course!” She started typing into her phone. “Sandro always carries a detector with him.” Sandro had been over at Dom’s for a couple of hours. He said Dom was drunk off his ass and Sandro had to make sure he didn’t choke on his vomit. It might have been meant to be funny, but it didn’t quite land that way to me. I was surprisingly apathetic. Maybe it was time to back off on the antidepressants and anxiety meds.
Bianca surged from the couch. “I’ll be right back.”
“I’ll get more chips,” Sera said. “Want another Coke?”
The girls didn’t drink in solidarity with my alcohol restriction. I forgot how Coke, chips, and queso were so addictive. Bianca, of course, brought her favorite—blueberry soda.
“No. I’ll stick to water. At this rate, I won’t be sleeping.”
With as much caffeine as we consumed, it wasn’t surprising why we were wide awake at two a.m.
Bianca bounced back through the door, holding a wand that looked like the metal detector ones you saw at airport checkpoints.
She turned it on and tested it on herself, holding it against her right thigh. It beeped. “Cool, it works.” After she got kidnapped by one of Sandro’s hidden enemies, she’d finally given in to being tagged when she’d resisted the idea for a long time even with the De Luccis.
Sera held out her left arm. “Try mine.”
The wand beeped somewhere along the middle of her forearm.
Bianca stood in front of me. “Okay, stand up.”
