Page 46 of Wicked Prince

The reply is almost instant.Seven o'clock. Bring a photo ID.

Wow. They really must be desperate for help.

Not as desperate as I am for money, though, so I haul myself out of bed and into the shower. Once I feel reasonably human again, I start blow drying my hair and then put on enough foundation to hide my puffy red eyes.

I hate myself for spending all night and most of the day crying over a guy. An asshole like Lorenzo Rossi, nonetheless.

I told myself I wasn't going to let this place change me. That just because I had to move to New York and play Dad's game, I wasn't going to let it make me into a different person, but it has. Maybe not in the ways I feared, but even worse ones.

Enough is enough.

I've learned my lesson the hard way, but it's learned all the same. No more Lorenzo. No more tears. No more even entertaining the possibility that this place could hold a life for me.

The only thing waiting here is what was waiting for my mother roughly two decades ago.

Misery.

Shame.

Regret.

As I comb through my hair, I can't help but recall one of the last times we spoke to each other. I was with her in her hospital bed, my head resting against her shoulder as she stroked my hair. We both knew the end was coming. We knew it was inevitable, but until that night, we'd both managed to avoid actually voicing it all the same.

"I never wanted that life for you, Mia," she said quietly. She rarely called me that childhood nickname. Not since I'd decided I was too grown for it as a teenager. But I wasn’t about to complain about it. Even then, I knew one day soon I'd be wishing she was around to call me anything. It was rare enough that she talked about Dad those days, or the world she had left behind with a newborn in her arms, so I listened closely.

"I never wanted you to grow up surrounded by those people,” she had continued. “To be another commodity to be bought and sold."

Her voice had hitched. It sounded so frail, even if she'd managed to bear everything else in stride—including the chemo that had ravaged her body, and the endless trips to the doctor just to eke out a little more time, knowing it would all lead to the same result in the end.

I remember what I’d asked her, too. "Was it really that bad?"

Her only answer was a knowing smile, but it was the look in her eyes that makes my chest ache when I think of it. The look of resignation. The look of acceptance that the life she'd been promised was anything but the one she'd been given.

"Your father isn't a bad man, Mia," she’d said softly. "He's just a product of the world he was born into. If there's one gift we both could give you, it's that you weren't."

Those words settled like a lead weight in the pit of my stomach. Even on her death bed, after twenty years of being treated like trash, she was still defending him. Still pretending like his abandonment was some noble effort to keep me safe and sheltered rather than what it was.

A desperate attempt to hide the truth.

To hide the lover and daughter he was so ashamed of.

Maybe she really believed it, on some level. Maybe that was how she got by. Letting herself pretend like the love of her life saw her as anything other than a burden to be stored away on a high shelf in the back of the attic and taken down only when it was convenient for him.

Guess I'll never know. All I know is that I refuse to take anyone's bullshit. Not my father's, and certainly not Lorenzo's. I'm not going to stay where I'm not wanted any longer than I have to.

With that motivation in mind, I get dressed in a nice pair of jeans and a shirt that's nice enough, but not I-don't-actually-need-this-job nice, and head out the door.

There's a bus running downtown that I manage to catch, but I doubt it'll be available on the way back, so I have my pepper spray with me in my purse just in case.

And hey, if Lorenzo gets pushy again, maybe it'll serve a double purpose.

The thought is enough to put a smile on my face, even if it lasts only a few seconds.

When the bus lets out at my stop, I realize the restaurant isn’t quite as attractive as the picture I’d seen made it look. It must have been taken a long time ago.

The restaurant is bustling, though, so that's a good sign. There will be plenty of work. It's actually pretty nice on the inside with low, ambient lighting and nicely set tables. It's the kind of Italian restaurant my mother would screw up her nose at, since it probably only serves pizza with cheese and wine from a box in the back, but from what I saw of the overblown menu prices, there's a decent enough opportunity to earn good tips.

As I make my way over to the bar, I realize the only person who seems to be working there is the bartender himself. He's a nice-looking guy in his mid-thirties, with long hair pulled back in a low ponytail and a red vest with the restaurant's logo on the left breast pocket.

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