Page 90

My mouth opens slightly. My breath stalls in my chest till it burns, jolting me from my surprise. “Um, no.”

“Huh. Must be a me thing.” Gina shrugs and turns her head to look out at the horizon.

“Atom doesn’t snore,” I say as I look down at the ground. I’m flabbergasted to the point that it takes me far longer to ask the simplest of questions. “You’re married?”

She turns back to me and gives me a wink with a smile. “Was.”

“You’re scary, you know that?” I say before I think better of it, and my words seem to deflate her enough that the smile leaves her face and she turns away once more.

“Yeah.”

I move my foot, making mindless patterns in the loose-pebbled walkway. “I kind of like it.”

I see her head spin back to me from the corner of my eye and don’t fight my smile. “You do?”

I shrug. “Better than being fake and lying to me.” I look up at her and hold her eyes for a long moment.

“You know I’m not here to kill you, right?” Gina tilts her head to the side like a bird hearing a noise off in the distance.

“You’d already have done it if you were,” I say matter-of-factly like. No use in pretending between us.

“True. I also like you.”

I shake my head and huff softly. “You don’t even know me.” Hell, I don’t even know me. How can I when I keep learning things almost hourly at this point about my life that I didn’t know before coming here?

“Yes, I do.” I feel her staring at me, and I look back at her. “You might not remember, but we’ve met before. Other than in passing. We actually spoke to each other.”

“I’m assuming you mean other than when I screamed you out of the coffee shop in Kansas a few years ago?” When I thought the family was keeping tabs on me to make sure I didn’t come back. Not because my grandfather needed to know if I was still alive to take over his family business one day.

Gina nods as if thinking about a happy memory, which just makes me shake my head at her. “That was fun, but before that. It was after you came back from that second time.”

My second kidnapping. A time that’s as much a blur as the kidnapping itself. Days seemed to pass at once, and time wasn’t a factor. I was left alone for weeks at a time till Reina thought it’d been long enough and started her bullying again. But that time I didn’t want to just take it.

I was in California. Less than fifty miles from my home, and no one came for me. No one at all. That hurt the most.

I couldn’t stop thinking about the Leone family. About how they’d given me happiness, even for a brief time, when they rescued me after my first kidnapping. Something I wanted to have more of. Happiness. True happiness.

The time I spent back here, alone, I thought about how I could be happy. How I could make it work for me for once. When Reina started in on me again, I didn’t stand there like before. I went to Grandfather and brokered my deal. I was sixteen and said I would marry as early as the following year if it was needed. He pushed it out three years, but just barely. And then I left, single and all.

And then I figured out that while I might have hated my life here, it also brought me things I never knew I needed till I didn’t have them. I’d never bought groceries before I left home. Never rented an apartment. Never opened a bank account. I spent almost two years learning things everyone else figured out at eighteen or earlier. And then I found a place I thought I could call home in Kansas.

Gina takes a breath and looks out, but I don’t know what she sees as her face pinches up in thought. “I… I made a mistake, and I was taught a lesson. But the mistake wasn’t in me not killing the target. It was trusting the wrong person.”

She looks back down at me. “You saw me. After. I came here, to the gardens, licking my wounds. Hiding, really. Deciding what I was going to do. And then he walked by. A man who betrayed me in so many ways and not enough in others. He made me who I was but also destroyed other parts of what I could be. My knife was in my hand before I could think anything of it, but instead of stepping out of the shadows and slicing his throat, I didn’t. I was ready to end the man, but I let him walk by me, not even knowing I was there. But you saw me.”

Her eyes bore into me, and I see the pain clearly in them. The pain she must have felt in that moment. A moment I don’t recall at all.

“You were healing too, in your own way. You took one look at me, broken and bruised, and instead of looking down on me or calling me out and alerting everyone, you said that ‘hesitancy is a slow death.’ And that’s what I’ve lived by since. Because I realized you didn’t mean their death, but my own. So I act now. I don’t hesitate.”

“And the man?” I ask.

“In the same place I buried my husband.”

I shake my head slowly. “I don’t remember any of that.”

She shrugs as she breaks eye contact with me as if we didn’t just share a moment that some would say defined a villain’s backstory. “And that’s the best part. You made an impression so big that it changed me. That’s how I know you can rule this family. You see the bigger picture, not just one for yourself. And from it, others can thrive rather than being ground under the boot of another.”

Wow, talk about putting pressure on me. I don’t think what she claimed I said is anything to build an empire on, but I’m not about to argue with her. She just said she doesn’t hesitate anymore. If I make her mad, I doubt she would think twice about using her knife on me, loyalty to my words or not.