Page 14 of Pray for Scars
He stares at me with those dead blue eyes that are just like mine. Sometimes I want to carve my own out, strip away all the parts of me that are like him.
But then I’d be left with nothing but bone, and with our similar build, I’m not even sure that would do the trick.
I shrug. “Decent.” A guess from the way her mouth closed around my finger, the way she twirled her tongue around me, her eyes never leaving mine.
But I didn’t fuck her. Her mouth, or anything else. Not because I didn’t want to. But because there’s someone else waiting for me back at home (or dreading my arrival), and I don’t trust her, and I don’t trust Maverick watching her. I wouldn’t have left her if I had a choice.
But when my father calls, I answer.
My father leans back, smooths down his tie. His hair is still thick, and thanks to dye, still black.
“You got the girl?”
The girl.
The same question he’s asked me nearly every day for the past two weeks.
I hate when he talks about her. I hate when he thinks about her. I hate the way he’s staring at me right now, as if he knows that I hate it. That I hate him. That I would rip him apart, limb from limb, if I knew the 6 wouldn’t immediately retaliate againstthe girl, as he calls her.
“No.”
He stares at me for a long moment. I wonder if Ria has snitched. If she was too shaken up from last year, when the Astors came to her apartment and forced their way in. Forced her to sign an NDA, effectively vanishing Sid Rain—not that Ria knew her name at the time—from her mind. Erasing Sid from the girl already too close to Maverick. Stopping the little historian from digging a little deeper. From finding traces of Sid’s existence in Alexandria.
Because, apparently, Sid Rain isn’t supposed to exist.
My father sighs, shakes his head. If Ria has snitched to anyone but Maverick, I’ll kill her myself.
“Andhim?”he prods me, and my chest loosens, knowing he’s bought the lie. “Have you seen him?”
“No.” The truth. If I had seen him, his body would be weighted down at the bottom of a river. Neither one of them are supposed to exist. I’m fine with slitting his throat. Getting his blood on my hands.
I’m fine with getting hers on me, too. I just don’t want her to bleed out just yet.
My father twists the silver snake ring on his index finger, looking at his hands as he does.
“She needs to be found.”
“Why?” I never ask these questions, not when I’m tasked with a job. But that was before Sid Rain.
He glares at me, stops playing with his ring. “Because we’re still cleaning up the Forgues’s mess. And I won’t stop until it’s fucking spotless.”
I roll my eyes, flexing my fingers. “That’s not what I’m asking.”
He knows it. I know it. I also know very well he won’t tell me shit. We’ve done this before. Gone round and round.
Ever since he put me up to finding a girl with silver eyes and a devil’s heart last year, nothing but a description and an address to go on for Unsaint’s Night, wanting me to bring her back to him. I’d planned to.
But she shattered those plans with her hand in mine. With the way she walked away, and I let her, let her try to save her own life, work through the shit in her head. But then Jeremiah had to find her, and I couldn’t let her go. If I couldn’t have her, he sure as fuck couldn’t either.
I should’ve let him have her. Saved me the blood oath, the trouble. In the end, he got her anyway, didn’t he?
My father stands, tilting his head as he watches me.
My spine goes rigid as I sit back in the chair.
He comes around the desk, slides his hands in his pockets—not before I catch sight of theXs carved on each palm—leans a hip against the corner of the dark oak.
“The more you know,” he says softly, “the more you feel, Lucifer.”
