Page 3 of Little Deaths

She hadn’t known jack.

After that, he’d made a point of giving her big statement pieces, Tiffany bracelets, diamonds big enough to put someone’s eye out. As if he was saying,This is what real jewelry looks like. He’d swapped his Norse gold ring out for a showier piece made of platinum, which was what his watch was made of. He got her a new ring, as well, but she couldn’t bring herself to play so matchy-matchy with her husband. Not when they no longer matched inside. Plus, a part of her had liked seeing the annoyance in his eyes whenever they caught on her ring.

Eventually, he stopped giving her jewelry at all.

Her brown eyes drifted out to the tranquil waters of the heated pool, where steam curled up in lazy tendrils. She found herself with the perverse urge to call up her mother, which she hadn’t wanted to do in a while. Anh was briskly pragmatic. Instead of doling out words of comfort, she would ask Donni if she had informed Marco’s next-of-kin yet, and whether she had started to make arrangements for the funeral. Anh had already lost her husband and she had lived through it, so she would expect the same poise from her own daughter. Lyra, her younger sister, was exactly the same way.

Her jaw tightened and she stared harder at the pool. Who did Marco even talk to in his family? He came from Italian Catholic stock, which usually meant an explosion of relatives, but Donni herself had never laid eyes on any of them, except for a sexist pig of a cousin who had pinched her ass at a Christmas party.

And Rafe.

Yes.Rafe.

She had to call him. Marco was the boy’s father, even if they were no longer on speaking terms.

And if I don’t call him, one of his friends sure will, and then he’ll sound surprised and word will get around that Adonica Blake didn’t even call to inform her poor stepson of his own father’s passing.

She could imagine how that would go down, the looks she’d get. They’d say that she was a monster because they didn’t know what he was like.

Maybe he’d gotten over his strange obsession with her. Ten years was a long time. For all she knew, he could be married now with kids of his own.

I’ll call Rafe, she told herself, like it was already decided.I’ll put on some tea and then I’ll call him.

Tea would be good. It would steady her nerves. A bit of whiskey in the tea would steady them even more, but that could be dangerous. She’d already accepted an Ativan from one of the paramedics who had come to wheel Marco away, playing up her nerves just so she could get something to take the edge off. Drugs had been plentiful at the parties she had used to frequent, but one of her first roles had been a hooker who died of heroin overdose (credit was literally “Dead Hooker #2,” creative), and that had been a quite literally sobering experience.

She shivered and reached for her robe, then belatedly remembered that she’d left it in the living room where Jenna Corcoran had been needling her.

Her late husband might have been too proud to reach out to his estranged son and beg for financial assistance, but she wasn’t.

She knew what rock bottom looked like and she was never going back there again.

???????

Rafe was watching a woman getting tied to the wooden bars of a St. Andrew’s cross when his phone began to vibrate. He began to reach for it but remembered the rules of the BDSM club just in time: no phones.

The woman’s male partner glanced over at him in irritation when he moved. Rafe grimaced in apology and the other man turned around again, adjusting the cuffs. Rafe took casual note of where the cuffs were placed, and what the straps were made of, and how the forced pose of supplication lifted the woman’s full breasts and forced her thighs apart to show the pink softness between.

He watched for a few minutes longer before quietly slipping out. The couple didn’t even notice his exit; they were already making low, urgent sounds. “Bye, Mr. Nicastro,” the bouncer called after him, and Rafe lifted a distracted hand, already slipping out his phone. It was a cold autumn evening and the wind battered him with a force he could feel, even through his leather jacket and the long black coat he’d layered over it.

A Tesla roared past, forcing Rafe to jump back to avoid getting splashed by the gutter water. Fall in Portland was cool and rainy, a far cry from the arid, volcanicterroirof the quasi-desert he’d fled from when his father had kicked him out. He’d moved up here to go to Reed college—paid for by his trust—and then stayed because he had liked how rugged and green everything was, and how the trees actually changed colors in the fall.

“When I was a little girl in New York, my mother took me to celebrate T?t Trung Thu, or the Mid-Autumn Festival. It’s also called the “Children’s Festival,” because in Vietnamese culture, people used to believe that the innocence of children made them see the world as a magical place.”

A magical place. Rafe smiled bitterly, recognizing the number.Oh, the fucking irony.

He still remembered that night. She had given him a red lantern shaped like a carp, taking him by the hand to lead him into the garden, while holding on to her own plain one. The night had been still and cold, and her hand had been a pulse of searing warmth.

Carefully, she had flicked out one of his father’s lighters and lit first his lantern and then hers.

“To family,”she had whispered.“And good fortune.”

He wondered what his stepmother wanted. Because it would be Donni calling, not his father. He had seen an article reporting that his father had gotten arrested for selling bad wine. No, that was too generous.Poisonedwine. Wine he had poisoned himself—for profit. Diethylene glycol didn’t just get into wine by accident.

Rafe’s father was out on bail now, but the prospects certainly didn’t look good. People didn’t take kindly to murder even under the best circumstances, and murder for pure greed’s sake carried a moral weight of its own. He had followed the case as it developed with mild interest, taking a vicious joy in the poetic justice of it.

They were probably short on money, he guessed. Apparently, they had cycled through several lawyers because of his father’s temper. At this point, Rafe felt like they were just postponing the inevitable outcome, but maybe that was worth a few months of freedom. His father would have thought so, with his fondness for rich living. Perhaps that was why he had sent Donni hands out, to beg him for money. To buy more time.

And if he were being perfectly honest with himself, he had conjured up many similar scenarios in his mind. He had worshiped her once, and he could think of no better punishment for her betrayal than knocking her from that gilt pedestal and making her crawl to him for the desecration she now deserved.

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