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Elia runs a hand through his hair, gesturing for his goon to come over and collect the groaning mass of muscle. “Could be a subordinate, framing the boss.”
Mind rattling with a million different thoughts, I nod, distant as I begin to lose myself in them. I glance at Jace as the bodyguard drags him back to their vehicle. “You bringing him to Crimson?”
“Yeah. I’ll leave him in the basement, see if Kal wants a crack at him until you do whatever it is you’re salivating to do. Don’t leave him for too long, though; I don’t want a rotting body stinking up my club. Bad for business.”
Bad for business.I study Murphy’s monument as the two Italians leave me in the dark, making my way around to the back and hating that the blood from before seems to have been replaced with an ink more permanent. The cross screams at me, mocking the Ivers surname, and my hands itch to destroy the slab of stone entirely.
Erase the evidence of Murphy Ivers altogether, make the town forget there was ever someone there to despise. To fear.
Other than me.
That fear is what’s kept me going the last few years, kept me seeking out the others involved in the sins of my brother. What brought me to my knees, what I sold my soul to uncover.
It started before Murphy’s death and was exacerbated by it, the darkness within me finally having a way to manifest outward. A purpose I could funnel it into. And yet, here I sit, presumably no closer to slaying King’s Trace’s demons than I am to exorcising them from myself.
My pulse picks up as the wind moves through the air, the slightest hint of vanilla perfume assaulting my nostrils. It picks me up, and I scramble to my feet, my hand reaching for the locket still clasped around my neck as I peer out across the cemetery at Dominic Harrison’s headstone.
I expect my petite kitten, the only thing occupying my thoughts outside of the ghost of my brother and the sins of his past, but that’s not what waits for me. Instead, when I step out from Murphy’s site, I’m met with the short, sleek barrel of a gun, blinking into a masked silhouette of familiarity I can’t quite place.
“Kieran, Kieran, Kieran. I hate that it has to end this way.”
Chapter 20
Juliet
Leaving the counseling center, I sling my purse over my shoulder and head to Benito’s car, sliding in the back seat and buckling in without a word.
This has become our routine at this point; he’s always waiting for me when I leave Dr. Zhang’s—Hana’s office, idling at the curb, ready to take me wherever I want to go. Usually, we go to the bakery or the house, anywhere I can give my sister false accounts of the progress I’m making at therapy.
Not that I’m not putting a little effort into it, although instead of opening up about myself, I’ve been hounding Hana with questions about her personal life, latching on to any crumb of information she’s willing to drop me. She indulges most of the time, perhaps on the belief that it’ll initiate reciprocity, but I have no intention of bearing my soul to her.
Don’t want to see the judgment in her eyes when she learns the truth about where my shame comes from.
Sliding my phone from my pocket, I unlock the screen and clear the texts from Caroline saying she’s going in for her last check-up before baby Noah’s due, searching for a message from the one person I actually want to hear from. The one who’s been ghosting me for a full four days now.
I’d done as he asked the other night and stripped bare, unlocked my window, and lounged in my bed waiting for him. It had begun to feel like clockwork; as soon as the night shifted into day, when midnight rolled around these last few weeks, Kieran’s steady, unyielding presence in my life was something I’d come to count on.
A constant I found myself clinging to as the rest of my life tried to sort itself out in an ever-changing fashion.
Someone who made me feel visible.
Whole.
And yet, he never showed up that night, or the next, and he hasn’t returned any of my calls or texts. If I didn’t know better, I’d think something bad had happened to him, but in this town, nothing happens to the elite without the media sinking their claws into it and making it front page news.
Which is why, as Benito drives through downtown, my sister’s face is plastered on every storefront newsstand, counting down the days until Noah’s leaked due date.
Leaked, accidentally, by me—apparently, your body becomes accustomed to sleeping next to someone when you do it often enough, and not having Kieran around the last few days has taken a serious toll on my nocturnal habits. I’d let it slip in a sleep-deprived, politically-charged rant about the state of our dwindling oceans in the age of global warming, noting that I wanted Noah to one day know what the ocean looks like, and it’d been headline news that afternoon.
We pass the decrepit law offices and the ancient courthouse, the novelty boutiques and diners doubling as functional services like laundromats just to keep their doors open. A sea of poverty I pass through in an expensive haze, untouched by the calamity of crime in our town.
But not fully untouched—I may not share the financial hardships of my peers, but crime bleeds into every other facet of my life, a stronghold I can’t seem to break out of. Since my days of sex tapes and underage drinking are behind me, I would’ve thought I’d be an upstanding citizen by now.
Not leeching off the comfort of known killers. Living in their house, inviting them into my bed. Missing them when they’re not around.
I guess when you descend from a criminal upbringing, even unknowingly, you can never quite escape the thorns brought on by another’s actions. Their influence.
That thick, deep-rooted misery inside me exists as a constant reminder, a barrier that keeps me from opening up. Keeps my soul from blossoming into something solid.
