Page 72 of Vicarious

If she had told me this back when she was pregnant or even before it, I would have been livid that she was trying to leave me after everything I’d done to be acceptable to her. Even at the risk of casting Dele aside. Now, it’s just a curious fact.

“Were you?” I finally ask from the opposite side of her without looking away from the window.

“I saw in you the same thing I’d seen in all the other people in my family. Ruthlessness. A mean streak. A certain callousness that was perfectly suited for this lifestyle. I didn’t want anything to do with it, but it was all I knew. So I was attracted to it. Especially when you gave me the hope that it could be used for good,” Phae explains. “But then I found out you murdered dozens of people in Dele’s name.”

“They deserved it.”

“And who were you to determine that?”

“They hurt Dele.”

“Some of them were teenagers. Children.”

“So was I by the time I’d made my hundredth kill. I knew exactly what I was doing and getting into then. So did they.”

Phae doesn’t argue with me anymore on that and continues, “When I found that out, I knew there was no amount of good worth the kind of cruel lengths you were willing to go to and indulge in. That no matter whose side it was for, it would always be evil."

I have no interest in her philosophical opinion about that and ask, "What made you change your mind?"

“I got pregnant with the children. I was going to abort them at first. I set up the appointment for it and everything. But then I thought that maybe they were what you needed to see that your cruelty wasn’t worth it. That this life wasn’t worth it and make you turn your back on it. On the Soles. My Uncle. Anything to do with the criminal underworld. But that just made it worse.”

“I wish you’d just told me. Maybe I would have gotten all this straight with Dele a lot sooner.”

I see Phae turn to look at me through the reflection in the window, but I still don’t turn to look directly at her.

“That’s really all you have to say?”

“It’s like you said before. It was always Dele. It was always going to be. And right now, I’m pissed off that you’re the reason I can’t even be with her as limitedly as I was with her before you tried to blow all this up,” I say in a quiet, even tone. A warning tone. “The only reason I’m not killing you is that Dele doesn’t want me to. But other than that, you and I are finished Adelena Fantoni.”

Phae doesn’t miss a beat when she asks unsurprised, “How’d you figure it out?”

“Wasn’t hard. I’m sure your family will be pleased to see you. Even if you want nothing to do with their business.”

“My mother, father, and sister especially.”

She thinks she’s telling the truth. She really believes Stephen Pray is her uncle and doesn’t know that she’s the secret daughter that he passed off to his younger brother and his wife when he didn’t want anything to do with her.

Good.

“We can arrange something with the children when everything is over with Pray,” I say to get off the topic while I’m ahead.

“We don’t have to arrange anything. I rotted in a prison for seven years thinking they were dead or in Pray’s grasps. Now I’ve met and held them once, and though I don’t agree with you or Dele or anything you’re into, I know they’re loved and cared for and that you’ll ensure they don’t become a casualty in this. As long as you do that, I’ll stay out of your lives. You can tell the children what you’ve been telling them. That I died and that I gave them over to Dele to take care of.”

She turns back to the window and remains in silent the rest of the drive.

There are no words between us as my most trusted men escort her onto her flight to accompany her all the way to Italy and make sure she stays there. There are no more words to say between us even if I had the desire to.

I stay long enough to watch the plane get in the air, and then get back in my car and immediately begin to deal with all the business I have from the last few days.

Phae feels more dead now than she ever did in the last seven years, and, this time, it’s going to stay that way.

33

Dele

“You are just as fucking stubborn as Adrian. You know that?”

I don’t have to look at Eileen to know she’s outdone with me as I sit at my vanity in preparation for my day.

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