Page 86 of Scorned Beauty
Dom looked at me strangely and I tipped my chin to where he’d poked me with a needle. “The incision site.”
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Do you want to do this some other time?” Because he looked as dazed as I was when Billy revealed the truth. Granted, I was miscarrying at that time too and suffering from blood loss. Sometimes I replayed it in my head like it was a bad dream. That for years, the three most important people in my life hadn’t instigated the lie I’d been living. That I didn’t waste those years thinking Billy was a worthless piece of shit of a brother when he’d been living with the guilt that he killed our father. That he let me live with that hole inside me that our father abandoned his family, and we weren’t worth it to stay. I was rewiring my beliefs with the way I’d made my choices because of them, and they were a tangled mess inside me.
“No, I want to get this thing out of you,” Dom told me gently.
And I didn’t know whether it was the sympathy in his voice that brought tears to my eyes. “I don’t know why I unloaded this on you when you hurt me, too.”
I hated how my voice warbled. Dom was the last man I wanted to see me at my most vulnerable.
Regret etched his features. “Because I was your person,” he said. “And I betrayed you.”
Chapter
Twenty-One
Dom
“Lie on the bed.”I cut the train of our discussion before we lost focus on the task at hand. Besides, I didn’t want to push her too hard. She was still fragile, and I didn’t want her ending up withdrawing from me.
Sloane took position on the mattress. I could feel the relief cloak her when we lost eye contact. We were feeling exposed with the bullshit still between us.
I was ready to confront it. She was still healing from the trauma I’d indirectly caused. Even if she said it was her fault, I was still responsible. Because if I’d taken care of Grigori when Sandro asked me about it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. In my desire to keep everyone happy, I played a balancing act I had no hopes of winning. Grigori was just dangling the properties in front of me, but I was lying to myself that there was a chance of getting them back, that I wasn’t going to fail the Moretti legacy, that I wouldn’t have to resort to an arranged marriage with their mafia princess in order to get them. It had to take losing Sloane in the most horrific way thatyanked the blinders from my eyes to see what was important. My sister’s entanglement with the Russians only made it easier. I was letting go of those tainted properties.
Picking up the scalpel from the night table, I prodded the skin where I’d injected. “Feel anything?”
“No.”
Without hesitation, I cut. I’d installed and removed subcutaneous trackers before, so this wasn’t new, but the haste was because I had to grit my teeth at having to mar Sloane’s perfect skin. I wanted that dreaded feeling over. If the person who put this tracker in her didn’t have her safety at heart, then there’d be retribution. I dropped the scalpel in the aluminum tray and picked up the tweezers.
“You’re set up well for life on the lam. You haven’t used your credit cards.”
“Is it a good idea to tell you I have a storage facility somewhere?”
I probed for the tracker and found it. I started the extraction. “Harriet said that you were planning to get the hell out of Dodge.”
“Things with Grigori were getting uncomfortable.”
I removed the tracker and showed it to Sloane before dropping it beside the rest of the used instruments. “Do you want stitches or will a butterfly bandage do?”
“It needs a stitch, since it’s in an area that will see a lot of friction.”
A needle was already threaded. I wouldn’t have had the finesse of someone experienced like Sloane, who would use a hemostat to maneuver a needle, but I wouldn’t have trusted anyone else to handle this except me. Like the cut, I executed the suture quickly. “I hope this doesn’t scar.”
“It might not leave one,” she said. “There are…wait…did you say you’ve talked to Harriet?”
“I met her at Billy’s funeral. But the girls talked to her more.”
She rolled off the bed and got to her feet. “You were using them to spy?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“I’m still mad at her, but I guess communicating with her in the forums brought you guys here.”
“Trevor was the shit.”
Her face grew sad. “I let her down about Ginger, but I’m glad someone took her in.” She walked toward the door. “I forgot to mention it to Bianca. Maybe she can track down?—”
