Page 174 of A Vicious Love

She nodded. “The turn sequence starts controlled, almost too perfect, then gets harder. The pause on pointe before the fall is the important part.”

“Why?”

She glanced at me, as if checking whether I truly wanted the answer.

“The audience has to feel the break before the music does,” she said. “Madame Aveline says if I hold it long enough, it should look like I’m choosing not to collapse until I can’t choose anymore.”

The words went through me sharp. Sienna looked away quickly, maybe hearing what she had said only after she said it. Choosing not to collapse until she couldn’t choose anymore.

People began to flow back into the halls. Deeply fucking unwanted. I was a saint and did not threaten anyone’s bloodlines. Instead, I asked Sienna to show me where she practiced.

Looking at daddy learning restraint.

CHAPTER TWENTY

JAMISON

The most humiliating night of my life started with basil. Unfortunately, it kept fucking happening. That was the part no one warned you about. Humiliation, if attached to family, did not arrive once.

It developed a schedule, with calendar alerts.

At 11:47 p.m. Harrison and I stood outside Marcel’s kitchen garden dressed in black, armed with gloves, a trowel set, three replacement herb trays. And the kind of silence men usually reserved for disposing bodies. Except there were no bodies.

There was however, a lot of dead fucking herbs.

Harrison crouched beside the planter and stared at it.

“Fuck me,” he muttered. “She got to the parsley.”

I rubbed a hand over my face, and looked down at the plant.

This was my life now.

I ran Harlan’s syndicate. Men crossed streets when they saw me. And yet here I was, in Marcel’s side garden near midnight, replacing Emmie’s herbs because no one had the heart to tell her she could not keep a plant alive.

Not one.

I looked down at the tray. Basil. Parsley. Rosemary. Thyme. Two pots of something leafy I had been told was coriander, though it looked exactly like every other fragile green bastard Emmie had managed to kill with love.

The woman could survive Marcel’s moods, and a marriage that required nerves of steel.

But herbs defeated her.

Repeatedly.

Harrison dug his gloved hand into the soil and pulled out the dead basil by the roots.

“Christ,” he muttered. “This one’s crispy.”

“You were supposed to replace it last week.”

“I did replace it last week.”

“Then why is it dead?”

“Because Emmie owns it.”

We both looked toward the kitchen windows.