Page 55 of Corrupted Deception

“You’re pretty damn smart, aren’t you?” I asked as I retrieved a can and opened it up, expecting some putrid stench to waft from the concoction inside. Apparently though, dog food smelled good, kind of like the mild, slightly sweet aroma of fillet mignon.

“Makes you wonder why we bother cooking,si?” I asked Ray.

Then I got a look at the gelatinous cubes and suspicious lumps in a mottled mush of grays, browns, and greens. No more wondering. That was most definitely not something I would ever be putting in my mouth.

"It's all yours,amico,” I said as I poured the contents of the can into a bowl and set it down on the floor.

Then I scrubbed my fingers through my hair and looked around at the empty main floor and the staircase that led to the sleeping woman above—the woman I could have been fucking at this very moment.

Christ, what the hell am I doing?

Chapter Sixteen

Charlotte Santoro

“Okay, so this is officially the most awkward morning-after ever,” I muttered to Ray as I stood at the top of the stairs in my own home, kind of wishing they’d swallow me up. Which was ridiculous. The ‘morning-after’ suggested there’d been sex the night before. There’d definitely been no sex, though. So, yeah, this sucked.

“I’ll catch up with Deo this afternoon,” Cielo said in a conversational tone somewhere downstairs.

I looked down at Ray, who was clearly sitting on the upper landing next to me, not down on the main floor with Cielo.

“If he’s not talking to you, then who on earth is he talking to?” I asked Ray.

Not that I minded. It actually made me feel a little better to think Cielo was downstairs talking to himself because the man had it way too together all the time. He needed a quirk that made him as crazy as the rest of us.

I started down the stairs in my bare feet, confident none of the steps would creak and give me away.

“I believe he’ll be overseeing a shipment at the docks,Signor,” an unfamiliar voice spoke from the same direction Cielo’s voice had come from.

I stopped mid-step.

Unless Cielo was talking to himself in multiple voices, he wasn’t alone down there.

Damn.And here I’d been thinking he was almost human. That, and the whole ‘why the hell were there other people in my home’ thing. That was ‘damn’-worthy too.

“I don’t suppose you want to go check it out and take a chunk out of whoever’s down there?” I whispered.

Ray looked up at me, then down the stairs, then back up again. I was pretty sure that was code for, ‘you go ahead and I’ll be right behind you—really’.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

I continued down the stairs with Ray following several steps behind me.

As I turned right at the bottom landing, I found Cielo standing at the breakfast bar with his arms crossed over his chest and—of course—not a single wrinkle in last night’s clothes. A few feet from him stood a man who was maybe in his mid-fifties, dressed in black pants and a cardigan.

Well, didn’t I feel underdressed in cotton shorts and a tank top?

The two men noticed me at the same time, and while Cielo’s gaze raked over me in a way that left my skin tingling, I wasn’t in the mood for tingles.

“How the hell did you disarm the system?” I asked, ignoring the newcomer for the moment.

Cielo nodded toward the panel by the front door where there was now some sort of white powder on the keypad.

“You dusted for prints?” Seriously?

He just nodded like there wasn’t anything abnormal about a guy dusting for fingerprints in a woman’s home. I supposed that explained the open canister of flour on the kitchen counter.

I shook my head, grappling for some sort of response tothat.

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