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Chapter 9
“You treat allyour house guests like prostitutes, or just the ones you need something from?”
As my hand drops away from the doorknob, I turn around and see Jonas leaning against the wall at the opposite end of the hall.
His dark brown hair has grown since I last saw him in person, the ends curling around his ear lobes and brushing his bearded jaw. Bright, violet eyes stare back at mine, disapproval lining the extraordinary irises.
Wearing a black leather jacket with his bar’s logo—a fire-breathing Minotaur driving a chariot—and dark jeans ripped at the knee, he looks completely out of place against the backdrop of modern, unused decor littering my home.
When my mother and I visited Aplana, we stayed at the Asphodel Inn on the southern, more isolated border; the stretch of beach behind the hotel was rockier and lacked a proper marina, so tourists tended to avoid it altogether.
Each year, my mother pinched and saved every extra cent she earned from a daycare in Boston, walking from our crummy apartment in Hyde Park, foregoing dinner after ensuring I had enough to eat, and making our own clothes on an electric sewing machine she’d found in an alleyway when I was an infant.
In all honesty, I’d probably have preferred a meal that didn’t consist of beans just once growing up over a weekend vacation in the dead of winter—the only time she could ever seem to get off work—but it was important to Deidre Anderson that her only son experience some life outside of Boston.
Outside the poverty my sperm donor had thrust us into, that her eventual cancer would exacerbate.
The first time I returned to the island years after my mother’s death, Jonas Wolfe was something of a household name; one of Aplana’s few year-round residents, his parents moved from London when he was a child, and he grew up on the north end of the island where businesses flourished and everyone seemed to flock.
One summer, a talent scouted him out for their modeling agency, catapulting him to fame before he was even a teenager.
Given that Aplana is primarily known for its crab export and wild mint, Jonas’s discovery gave the island an advantage over those included in the Harbor’s National Recreation Area, and for a long time they did whatever they could to lure people to the very place where America’s Next Heartthrob lived.
Until his twenty-first birthday, when he was arrested and charged with attempting to assassinate the owner of the island, Tom Primrose. After a brief stint in jail, during which he confessed to having ties to some secret organization, Aplana mostly shunned him, with a restraining order being taken out that didn’t allow him even within spitting distance of the Primrose mansion.
I recognized a lot of myself in him when news broke out about his arrest, and so I hired a lawyer, got his sentence reduced, and was there to greet him as soon as he was released.
During his incarceration, I acquired ownership of the Flaming Chariot, his dive bar that clearly operated as a front for whatever gang or society he was loyal to, then offered a partnership in exchange for his services.
He’d only failed at the attempt because of a leak, it turned out.
Among the criminal underground on the East Coast, Jonas Wolfe was evidently known for quick, traceless hits, and I made sure to make myself indispensable to him. Even back then, I knew one day my time with the Riccis would come to an end, I just hadn’t realized how soon it would be.
As with Elena, Jonas plays a huge part in the success of my plans, though I wasn’t expecting him to show up at my home unannounced. His presence now notches unease against my spine, curling over each vertebrae like a boa constrictor, squeezing until my vision blanches.
Leaning against the bedroom door, I stuff my hands in my pockets, forcing a casual stance. “You looking to find out?”
He chuckles. “Seems like an odd way to treat your wife, is all. Are you trying to make her hate you?”
Yes.Her hatred would be so much easier to deal with than the liquid heat blazing in her gaze every time she fucking looks at me. It’d probably also help if I wasn’t so keen to shove her against a wall every chance I seem to get.
“She’ll be fine.”
“Windows still painted shut in there?” he asks.
I shrug, pushing off the door and starting down the left staircase to my office at the back right corner of the house. We pass Marcelline dusting the top of the refrigerator in the kitchen, and she averts her gaze immediately, probably still traumatized by the things I made her an accomplice to yesterday.
Jonas follows, hot on my heels, and still his presence unsettles me. “Did you come here to talk about the logistics of my house, or because you have something to give me?”
“Bloody greedy, aren’t we?” He shakes his head, moving past me to the bar behind my desk, pulling out two tumblers and ingredients for a cocktail.
I settle in behind my desk, pulling up the house’s security feed and finding the one set up in the master bedroom instantly. As I click into her camera, a wave of déjà vu washes over me, reminding me of the last time I saw her like this from behind the same screen.
How she’d been sporting a few new bruises, ones I knew her fiancé had caused, and how I lost my fucking mind and showed up to demand she tell me what happened.
How we fucked instead.
My dick jerks to life inside my slacks, and I rub a palm over my zipper, watching now as she perches on the edge of the king-size bed and runs a hand over the black upholstered headboard.
