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She's the reason I'm in this state.
I fight the urge to bend my head and taste her fluttering pulse.
"What's your name?" she asks, her voice shaking.
"Coda Passero."
"Coda," she repeats, licking her lips as she stares up at me. "I'm Karina Alessepo."
Fucking hell. She's his daughter. I knew he had a kid, but I've never seen her before. I made a point not to go looking. The less I knew about the kid, the better. It's a lot harder to kill a man when you know who they're leaving behind.
Those are the people who haunt you if you let them. Not the dead, but the living. They're the ones who plague your mind. The dead are easy to forget. A single bullet and they cease to exist. But the living? They're still out there, still walking around, still trying to pick up the pieces you shattered.
I never let myself think about them. As far as I'm concerned, they don't exist. Except one of them is in my arms right now, smiling up at me like I'm something special.
Fuck.
"Thank you for being brave enough to dance with me. No one else was." She rolls her eyes. "They're all afraid of my father."
"Cowards," I grunt, my mind racing. I need to shut this down now and walk away before I get any deeper with her. I don't need to know anything else about her. But my goddamn traitorous hands pull her closer instead. My fucking mouth betrays me. "If they're too afraid to ask, they don't deserve to dance with you, cara."
"That's what I said! It's not like dancing is illegal."
I watch her intently, not speaking—not trusting myself to speak. Her pretty gray eyes flit across my face, her bright, trusting smile doing things to me that it shouldn't.
Doesn't she know she's dancing with a goddamn monster? Doesn't she have any sense of self-preservation at all?
Cristo. She should. If she had any idea why I'm here tonight, she wouldn't be looking at me like she is right now—like I'm some fucking prize.
I'm not. I'm a murderer. A liar. Her worst goddamn nightmare.
She tilts her head to the side, studying me. "Is there something wrong?"
I shake my head, burying my face in the crook of her neck. The scent of her hair swirls around me, clouding my head. Sweet vanilla with subtle notes of lavender. For a moment, I forget who we are or where we are.
"You smell good," I mumble against her skin, feeling the vibrations of her laughter.
"Thank you," she says softly. "It's my shampoo."
I'm fairly certain it's her, but I don't say that.
"You smell good, too," she confesses, her voice warm and sweet as honey. "Not like the rest of them."
Blinking, I pull back to meet her gaze, an eyebrow arched in silent query.
She giggles, the sound going straight to my fucking heart. "Half of them smell like they bathed in cologne," she whispers conspiratorially, her nose wrinkling in distaste. "It's suffocating." Her fingers tighten around my bicep. "You're the only one here not giving me a headache. I like it."
The unexpected compliment catches me off guard. I came here intending to blend in tonight, but the fact that I don't is precisely why she's looking at me with such avid curiosity and…trust. The irony of the situation makes me want to laugh—a cruel, bitter sound that would shatter this deceitful calm surrounding us.
"Why aren't you trying to impress him?"
"Who?"
"My dad." She nods toward the front of the room where he's still holding court. "Every other cop here is."
"I'm not a fucking cop." The words erupt from my lips harsher than I intended.
She notices. One brow rises toward her hairline before she laughs the tension away. "Well, thank God for that," she breathes. "Being the only civilian in the room was lonely."
