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On my way.
Something, or someone, has the entire Bratva network abandoning New York in droves. For the past month, they’ve been rising up from the underground and taking flight like insects before a storm, and I want to know why.
I turn to leave the bathroom and catch sight of all the script boxes and pill bottles lined up on her vanity. The sheer volume of them makes my stomach lurch, and for the first time in six years I taste real fear.
I wasn’t allowed to ask, but now I need to know.
How bad is it, Mi Cielo? Are your organs going to fail? Is it life-limiting? When it’s bad, does it hurt to breathe and cry?
Sam gave the curse a name earlier.
Lupus.
I glance back at her through the open doorway. She’s hardly moved. She’s blissfully unaware that in a matter of minutes I’ll be gone from her life forever.
But it’s my fault she’s sick.My fault that I can’t figure out why the curse still lingers.
My fault I have to leave.
The house is silent as I make my way downstairs, shrugging into my suit jacket, but leaving my bow tie undone and my hair a tousled mess. Meet me now, and you’ll know what I’m guilty of. Meet my eyes, and they’ll blind you with my contradiction.
The walls are rose gold. The sun is almost up. The valet will be long gone, but I always keep a spare car key in my pocket for a quick getaway. I’m just hoping the good senator didn’t notice an extra Ferrari parked amongst his Vanquishes and Lamborghinis when he stumbled up to bed last night.
I head for the door and I’m a meter out when a nine-inch hunting knife comes breezing past my face and buries itself deep in the woodwork in front of me.
Holy—
“At least you had the balls totryand walk out the front door like a man,” comes a mocking voice from behind me. “If I’d caught you climbing out her window, I would have killed you, then and there.”
Santiago.
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I swing around on a hard swallow as he emerges from the shadows, his expression far darker than the place he’s just come from.
“I didn’t realize there’d be a twenty-one-gun salute celebrating my departure,” I clip back, bracing myself for the end. The man just caught me walking out on his daughter, reeking of sex and guilt. There’s no coming back from this.
“Not twenty, just one,” he corrects, prowling toward me, stinking of bourbon and retribution. He’s a tall bastard with at least twenty-five years on me, but I’d never make the mistake of thinking my age was an advantage. “Besides, I’ve always preferred a blade over a gun. You can’t carve hate into a man’s flesh in as much detail with a bullet.”
He cruises to a stop in front of me to yank his knife out of the door. I stand like a statue as he mimics slitting my throat, the blade coming in a little too close for comfort—catching the skin covering my jugular with a vicious flick of his wrist—and drawing first blood. It’s just a trickle, a mere tributary, but we both know it’ll be oceans by the time the day is through.
Was she worth it?
Every touch, every second. No question.
“Silly girl,” he says, clicking his tongue in irritation. “I warned her to leave this at the party, not to take it upstairs and lay with it.”
I know better than to ask him what he means by that.
“Did you fuck her?”
I also know better than to answer loaded questions.
His black eyes narrow at my silence. We glare at each other as the seconds tick by ominously, and then he’s taking half my jaw off with his first hit. The second slams the back of my head into the wall so hard I’m seeing stars.
Damn, he hits hard.
I take it all without retaliation. If any other man took a swing at me, they’d be lying in a morgue already, but this is my medicine for screwing the boss’s daughter, for dishonoring him and his hospitality, and for that I deserve it all and more.
