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Pursing his lips, he studies me quietly as I pull back, sending my congratulations and a promise to kill the happy couple as soon as my warden lets me visit. “Can I go now?”
“Made men are a different breed of people, you know.”
Furrowing my brow, I squint at him. “What?”
His fingers tap on the countertop, the massive signet rings glittering beneath the kitchen lights. Fingers that have inflicted pain and also warmth, a contradiction I find it hard to keep up with. “We love different. Quicker. Fiercer.Violently.Because we know how easily everything can be taken away. We protect, even if it means death. Even if it meansmurder.”
“What’s your point?” My tongue feels thick as I swallow, nerves bouncing around in my stomach like butterflies caught in a cage.
“Mypointis, even if you don’t think Kieran Ivers is dedicated to you after what he did, after the target it put on him to do it, you’re not familiar with the brand. Men like us don’t avenge just anyone.”
It dawns on me then that Orlando’s putting Kieran in the same category as his own men—made men.Something Kieran was long before he ever even met me, maybe long before King’s Trace even knew about it.
Unease settles in the pit of my stomach, a concrete block I can’t chisel away at. Not even with the meditative techniques Hana is attempting to teach me. It builds and builds, a slow-burning wildfire on a path of destruction, incinerating everything in its wake until all that’s left is a shell of debris.
Orlando finally lets me leave, having said his two cents I suppose—interesting that he didn’t saymore, considering the longstanding rivalry between the Ivers and the Montaltos. It wasn’t quite a blessing, not quite a curse, and so I find myself drifting through a sort of limbo, confused about everything.
The sort of limbo I’ve spent my entire life existing in, unsure of everyone’s feelings toward me. Unsure of how I feel aboutmyself. Wracked with guilt and shame, brought on primarily by the actions of others. Actions I had no hand in.
Like my father, a man who couldn’t commit to loving me.
And yet, I’ve spent nearly every day since his death wonderingwhy, wishing he’d given me even a kernel of affection. Wishing the yearning in my heart was valid.
Then with my mother, a woman who always valued reputation and money over her daughters—a woman who disappeared during the most tumultuous time in my life, and returned out of nowhere after radio silence for two years.
A woman who, against all rationale, I still wish would change. Would want to be my mother. Be proud of me for pursuing life even when I didn’t want to.
Panic blurs the corners of my vision, clogging my veins and seizing my muscles as I think about being stuck in this same place with Kieran, a man whose sins far outweigh what most can even imagine, if the skeletons in his closet are any indication.
Like a fool, I’ve fallen for the glitz of a handsome face and nixed the need for sincere promises. For concrete evidence of real affection.
Luca comes and picks me up a little while later, and I spend the rest of the afternoon doting on my nephew while my sister sleeps and Elia slips out to make a few phone calls. Caroline apologizes as she drifts off, saying there wasn’t time to wake me, but I wave her off, no longer caring the second I’ve got Noah in my arms.
There’s an air about newborns. Something redemptive in their existence. I finger the paper bracelet on his tiny wrist as he blinks up at me, stirring from a fitful slumber.
My phone buzzes at my side, but I ignore it; Kieran’s been texting all afternoon, but I’m not in the mood to chat. Not in the mood for disappointment.
As I stare into the incredible clear eyes of this new slate, a pang shatters my insides, a brokenness sloshing around like a cyclone. I hug Noah a little tighter, sending a quick message to the universe. A promise not to let the world destroy him.
He clucks and wiggles, those soft baby noises I didn’t realize I’d been missing since Poppy started forming words. They warm my heart, a balm to the emptiness wreaking havoc in my heart, and it’s that warmth, that innocence, I focus on later when I make my way back to the cemetery for the first time since my run-in with my mother.
Pulling the bottle of Wild Turkey from my messenger bag, I set it up beside my father’s headstone. Tempted, but unwilling to give in. The longer I stare at it, the more I connect it to his drunken rages when I was a kid, the nights he’d disappear into Caroline’s room and leave her a sobbing mess.
The nights I’d spend pressed up against her bedroom door, turning the knob against its lock, begging her to let me in. All the nights I went unheard, thinking she just didn’t want to see me—when really, she was protecting me.
Like she’s always done.
And as I try to reconcile that, try to understand why she kept me in the dark and didn’t let me shoulder any of her pain, I realize I’m doing the same thing now. Getting bogged down by invisible sadness and resentment, not letting her help. Not letting anyone in.
Seeing ghosts where they don’t deserve to exist.
Dawn falls over the graveyard, and I wrap my arms around my knees, barring myself against the chill as wind sweeps through the trees, guiding the spirits home. I can almost taste them, feel the death as it creeps along my skin, goose bumps preening like ripened fruit.
Although, it’s not the dead I’m afraid of.
The voice at my back terrifies me the most.
“Juliet.” He sounds out of breath, as if he walked all the way here from his cabin in the woods. Or maybe from the mansion on the hill, where he lives a falsely normal life, hidden away from his sins behind those walls.
