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“Oh?”
I glance at his outfit and laugh. “For starters, you’re not evendressedfor a party.”
Every man here tonight is wearing formal attire, but not him. In fact, I’ve never seen him wear anything other than black boots, jeans, and a shirt.
“Men like me don’t bow to social etiquette, Ella,” he says with a smirk. “We hang it on the wall and let others worship it.”
This reminds me of something my mother once said about him, about how he makes up his own rules in this world. It wasn’t a casual justification for his many transgressions, but rather a statement of fact. Some men lead, others follow, and then there’s him, the King of Sin, who presides over all of them.
I’ve known he was a bad man ever since I was a little girl, and it used to confuse the bejesus out of me. Bad men aren’t supposed to love wholly and unconditionally. They aren’t supposed to sacrifice. They aren’t supposed to hold their daughter’s hand and never tire when she’s going through round after round of chemotherapy to help suppress a bad lupus flare, and all the horrible side-effects that comes with it.
Yet here he is: my beautiful terrible contradiction of a father—which, incidentally, is another of my mother’s sayings about him—and the man I’m proud to share my blood with, even if his soul is the same color as his clothes.
“Maybe you should ask Uncle Rick for some book recommendations?” I suggest, as he debates his first move. “Mamásays the last one you tried to read wasWar and Peace, only you got so mad about the lack of graphic violence you threw it out of the window.”
The corners of his mouth lift, causing a single crack in his fierce façade. He only allows the people he loves to speak to him like this. The rest of the universe is kept at arm’s length, like dogs on leashes, but he’s the one baring the teeth.
“Believe it or not, I did ask him, but I won’t tell you what his response was.” He smirks again at the memory. “Not until you’re eighteen, anyway.”
Tilting my head, I check the time on his enormous Patek Philippe watch. “Then I have exactly four hours untiltrue enlightenment.”
“Nothing true about it.” I watch his eyes narrow at my dress. “Though I suspect you’re far moreenlightenedabout certain things than you’re letting on.”
I blush and drop my eyes.
“Word of advice?” He advances a black pawn because he always goes first.
“Please don’t let this be a sex thing.” Embarrassed, I rush my move and play the wrong white pawn, and he swipes it off the board.
“That’s not something you need concern yourself with just yet.” He unleashes his first knight as I remember what Thalia and I were laughing about earlier.No boys allowed. Period.“Call this a gentle parental warning, Ella.”
“Don’t joke,Papá,” I chide, freeing my first bishop and sliding it across three squares to the right. “You don’t know how to be gentle. You only know how to swing baseball bats studded with nails.”
“Hmmm, maybe you’re right.” He glides his black queen into the middle of the board in an audacious move, so typical of him in chessandin life. “Besides, I never joke about murder. It’s not good for my alibi.” Once finished, he steeples his hands, and considers me for a moment. “When you long for something,mija, don’t be too surprised if that constant ache turns into a bleeding bullet wound.”
I freeze, my hand suspended above the chess board. “I-I’m not sure I follow?”
His black eyes are drilling into my face now.“Men have reasons for what they do, and more often than not, it makes no fucking sense to anyone but themselves.”
He knows.
Oh my God, he knows.
And I thought I was being so careful in disguising my true motives for this party.
Deflated, my hand drops back into my lap. I should have realized he’d blow through my plan like a hurricane.
“Ask Edier Grayson what you’ve been dying to for years. Get your answers, and then leave your history outside in that marquee. He’s a damaged man, Ella. No peace will ever come from anything he has to say, yet I’m choosing to allow this because it’s your birthday. Afterward, he’ll go back to New York, and you’ll return to the island with your mother and Thalia. It’s better for your health there.”
But what if I don’t want to go back to a paradise in chains?
I think about the crumpled letter hidden underneath my pillow.
“You know I speak the truth. Turning eighteen is meant to be ‘enlightening’, after all.”
I watch him take my bishop in a move as casually brutal as his words.
Damaged? How?
