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The simplicity of her answer confirmed I'd been right to behave as I had—she was grateful and wouldn't take this situation for granted.
She'd put pressure on me, had showed all her cards, but I still had the upper hand. That was exactly how I liked it.
"You were more than lucky," I rumbled. "Vasov shouldn't let you anywhere near Forest Park. Notwith trigger-happy Italians roaming their territory. You weren’t wrong when you said I could have been sent there to kill you. Just because that wasn’t my intention doesn’t mean it isn’t some other faction’s.”
Like she read my mind, she simply stated, “I’m a child of the Brotherhood. You think I don’t know when I’m being tailed?” She shrugged, moved something in her purse, then tipped it toward me to reveal a revolver. "I wasn't sure by who, but I came prepared."
“Apparently you’ve got better eyes than your guards," I told her, but I knew I'd have to watch her after we were wed. She might have come prepared but that satchel had been nowhere near her in the stables.
Guns were deadly, but they weren't when they were hanging on some coat rack ten feet away.
Sadness lit her eyes. “Can you blame me? After what went down in my own home?” She bit her lip. “I found her. She was…” Her eyes closed. “A broken doll. Covered in their—”
I reached up to squeeze her shoulder, unable to hear her next words.
It was too like what Ma had gone through for me to deal with, too similar except she’d survived, thank Christ.
I’d suspected for a long time, long before Camille had crossed my radar, that Vasov had made a deal with the Italians.
I hadn’t loved Mariska, but the dishonor in what Vasov had done, not only in pulling a shady deal with theFamiglia,but for letting his own house, with his own daughters under that roof, purposely come under attack, was something that would haunt me.
In the wake of Ma’s kidnapping, my father, while he was definitely a bastard, had started a war with the Aryans the city still remembered.
After Mariska’s death, Vasov hadn’t started shit with the Italians. And that was the most damning fact of all.
He was, and forever would be, bastard scum. Mariska had been right to leave her girls’ safety with me.
“Next!”
The woman barked at me, her displeasure clear even as her gaze softened and she shot Camille a piteous smile.
I rolled my eyes at the display, because the clerks had been rude to every fucker in here, but I mentioned STDs out loud and all of a sudden I was the pariah?
“I need a marriage license.”
Without moving, without even shifting her scowl from me, she slapped a piece of paper on the counter. “You need to fill this out.” She raised a hand and pointed toward the door where the line had begun to strain out of the office’s confines. “Then you have to get back in line again.”
“We will. Thank you.”
Politeness costs nothing,those were the words my maternal grandmother had tried to instill in me, but that wasn’t exactly an easy lesson to learn when you had Aidan O’Donnelly for a father.
It pained me to let a petty tyrant boss me around, but I knew how this shit worked. Knew how people worked. She was too self-righteous to bribe, and would take too much satisfaction in telling me where to go. But, what she could do, was bury the application.
As far as I knew, once we left here, we had twenty-four hours until we could take the plunge, but petty bureaucrats made my insane father look self-sacrificing.
Camille surprised me by snatching the form before I could and then stalking over to the doors. I followed her and found her in the queue once more, the application resting on the side of her bag as she began to fill out her section.
Of course, she wanted this marriage even more than I did.
Her reasons were obvious, mine were vague. Even to myself.
But as I stared at the arch of her throat, the gentle fall of a few locks of hair from her messy bun, from the golden sheen to her skin that made her look like she was dusted in the precious metal, all I could see was what she’d look like under me.
Few women triggered my imagination.
The only time I got to be creative was when I was torturing people or figuring out a way to hide a body. I’d long since stopped dreaming, having goals. In my line of work, the main aim was to be able to get home at the end of the day. And I was okay with that. I was luckier than most, richer than most, and that came at a cost.
But when a woman inspired more than a yawn out of me, or irritation, it was worth pursuing.
Just like her mother had been at the time...
