Page 54 of The Viper's Wife

Was this some fucked up way of forcing me into his arms?

My heart sinks. Would I put this past him?

He hasn’t done anything to hurt me. Not explicitly.

But I know he’s a bad man, and that means he can’t be trusted. It should be simple, but it twists into something complicated, riddled with shades of grey when I acknowledge the rest of the truth. He treats me decently. He likes me. We fit together like matching puzzle pieces.

I might be falling for him.

My stupid heart wants to ignore every red flag he waves in my face, favoring fantasy in place of reality. This is how women get trapped in horrible, loveless marriages.

I can’t be one of those women.

I set aside thoughts of Nico and walk through Dad’s room. The tornado touched down here. The side tables have been kicked over, lamps broken. One of Mom’s dresses, ripped and thrown to the side—had Dad been keeping that on his bed?

I try to focus on painting myself an image of what happened, how they taught us at school. I take out my phone and snap pictures like I’m collecting evidence at the scene of the crime.

It doesn’t look like a struggle happened. There’s no blood—no clear path of destruction.

The longer I take pictures and delicately inspect the room, my mind becomes more certain—this is a warning.

But for who? Dad? Stefano?

Me?

Nico, even?

As I look over each shard of glass, each splintered piece of wood, something catches my eye.

On the edge of one of the shattered lamps is a thin streak of blood.

11

VALERIA

“I’m telling you,bro. My sister caught her baby daddy with an old tissue and BAM—child support for the next seventeen years.” Lacey’s roommate Toby nods sagely, tapping the laptop screen opened to GenoLabs, the testing facility offering fast, discreet, and nottechnicallylegally binding paternity testing. “They’re the best of the best.”

“Thanks, Toby,” Lacey says, tossing her stuffed raspberry into the air.

“Anytime, bro.” He fist-bumps her on his way out of her bedroom.

She stretches long to kick her door shut and motions to the plastic bags on her desk.

“Okay, so that one,” she says, pointing to half of the blood sample I gathered, “I’m going to pretend is the baby’s sample. And I’m going to ignore any and all weird looks for giving a tiny speck of blood as a baby’s DNA sample.”

“Right.” I squeeze one of her dozens of fruit-themed pillows to my belly.

“And these,” she says, pointing to Dad’s toothbrush andStefano’s toothbrush, “I’m going to pretend are the potential dad’s samples. And the last is yours, the ‘mom.’”

My sample is just a plastic bag that I spit into, but it should be enough for GenoLabs.

After I scraped off the blood from the shard of glass in Dad’s room, I spent hours searching the rest of the house for evidence—a strand of hair, a fingerprint,anything.

I found nothing.

Once my call to Annetta went to voicemail, I packed up my cash and clothes into duffel bags and suitcases and drove my piece-of-junk car to Lacey’s apartment.

I’ve always known Lacey would help me bury a body, but she proved it when I stumbled into her bedroom with all of my belongings, begging for her help with a bunch of random paternity tests, and her only response was to grab her laptop and call her roommate over for advice.