Page 36 of Vicarious

“You didn’t knock. Did you?”

That snaps Leon out his stupor, and he immediately says, “Ew. My eyes,” before dashing out the room.

Lady sighs longsufferingly and mutters, “That’s what you get for not knocking on the door,” before closing the door to go after her brother.

I just manage to keep my laughter in until I’m sure the two can’t hear me.

Viper only groans and pushes me backward onto the bed, but doesn’t do anything except to lay on top of me while he looks down at me.

“Maybe we should wait to get settled in,” I state. “Besides, this trip was for you and twins. We get a lot more chances to fuck than you get to spend time with them.”

“It was for you too,” he corrects.

“Was it?”

“I planned this to spend time with my family away from everything that usually keeps me from them. Of course, it was for you too. It still is.”

He doesn’t directly say it, but what he’s saying is that he considers me his family. Not just the woman that’s going to help him topple a crime lord. Not just the woman that’s going to hand him an empire. Not just the woman who’s going to keep him in check and remind him of his goals when his flaws, imperfections, and lust for blood may potentially get in the way of his ambitions.

His family.

If only I didn’t have such a hard time believing that. If only it didn’t feel like I was just a stand-in, living the life Phae was supposed to have vicariously.

Rather than reply to that, I gently push him in the chest to signal him to get off me. He does. But when I stand, I can tell he has something else to say. Or rather, he thinks I have something to say, and he’s going to get it out of me.

Before he can, I offer my hand and say, “Come on. The twins missed you.”

He doesn’t immediately agree, and I desperately hope he takes this out. He finally sighs, shakes his head, and takes my hand to go find his children.

17

Viper

Just when I think I’ve got Dele figured out, and I think I’ve made some kind of progress with her, she closes up and distances herself from me. First it was the fact that I didn’t tell her I was switching sides until I was ordered to kill her. Then it was the fact that she wasn’t sure she could trust that I could get my homicidal impulses under control enough to not be more of a liability to the twin’s safety than an asset. And now there’s something else.

The obvious something else is the fact that Phae is alive and waiting for us to come back from this trip. But there was a reason I fought so hard to not have Phae come besides the fact that it was too risky to have her out in the public even in a place where Pray doesn’t have much, if any, reach. It was that when I planned this, I had Dele and the twins in mind.

It can’t be helped that I can’t openly spend time with them. It can’t be helped that most of our visits have to be clandestine or attached to a legitimate business reason where Dele and I can coincidently but not suspiciously end up in the same place.

But even though there’s a lot public pretense on what brought us to this place together, it’s purpose was always to allow Dele and the twins a way to spend time with me where they don’t have to feel like some dirty secret I don’t want the world to know about. It was always for them. Having Phae here would have put a wrench in that plan.

And yet, despite that, Dele pulls away from me still.

I’ve studied enough of her public persona as Addy Bianchi to know that she projects an air of audacious flirtation with just about everyone she interacts with. That it doesn’t matter who they are. No one is off limits and nowhere is socially unacceptable. I know that personally. She propositioned me right in the middle of lunch in front of Pray and a bunch of his business associates. Walked right back into the legal back and forth over her salon’s deal with Pray Drinks like she hadn’t disappeared for an entire thirty minutes to let me fuck her and everyone in the room didn’t know it.

She could use that persona as the excuse she needs to be openly flirtatious with me even with Cres sitting right there and no one would care or notice anything out the ordinary. But she’s not.

Whatever it is, it’s keeping her from enjoying herself. I can tell by the tension in her shoulders, the tightness in her smiles even toward the twins. It’s an odd reversal of our roles. She’s usually the one telling me to stop being so uptight and relax and here I am thinking the same thing about her.

“You’ve been tense lately,” I say while I stand next to her as she pretends to have any interests in looking through the outfits at the expensive boutique Cres dragged us all to when she found out about it.

She looks at me with a raised brow and little smirk. “Tense?”

If I didn’t know any better, I’d think she was okay right now.

“Like you’re preoccupied with something. Anything you need to tell me? Something wrong. Danger?” I mutter as I follow behind her.

“You know if that were the case, I would have told you.”

---