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Slowly, I come back to myself. When he’s done, he kisses me, and I can taste myself on his tongue. He makes me suck his fingers clean, one after the other, and I feel his long, thick hardness pressed against me. I want to touch it, but I’m terrified of what he’ll do if I reach down and stroke my fingers along his thick length.
“Good girl,” he whispers, kisses my cheek, and tucks me in.
I’m asleep before I can get my shorts back on.
Chapter13
Brice
Grandma smiles at me over her cup of tea but there’s no real joy in her eyes. “How are you, darling?” Grandma asks. Her gray hair is cut in a tasteful bob and her ancient blue eyes look exhausted. She’s immaculately put together like always with tasteful, refined jewelry and a sense of style perfected over decades, but there’s something frayed about her, something off.
“I’m okay,” I say and sip the tea. “How are you holding up with Daddy in jail and Grandpa back to work?”
“Oh, you know me, soldiering on. I think your grandfather would’ve collapsed and died by now if I weren’t here making sure he’s eating and sleeping.”
“Sounds like Grandpa.”
“He’s too old for this but what other option is there? Turn the company over to one of the cousins? One of our other children? I don’t know, maybe we should.”
I’ve never seen Grandma like this before, much less heard her express any kind of uncertainty. She’s always been the family’s rock, the matriarch of the Rowe family, the only person in the whole world that knows exactly what’s going on at any given moment, and to see her looking like she’s lost in a forest makes the entire situation that much more intense and strained.
“I need to talk to him,” I say and sit with my back perfectly rigid.
“It’s not a good time, dear, I know Louisa told you that already. But really—”
“Grandma, it’s important. I need to talk to him and it has to be right now.”
She sighs and looks away. Louisa has nothing to do with this—Grandma makes and keeps his schedule, she just uses the staff as an excuse.
“Darling, really. Come back tomorrow when he’s not quite so busy. Maybe lunch—”
“The Panagos family’s been bothering me. I need to talk to Grandpa before something bad happens.”
Her eyes widen a touch and I feel sick to my stomach. That reaction means she knows who the Panagos are, which means Grandpa knows too, and maybe the whole fucking family knows, and I’m terrified of how deep this whole thing goes.
“All right, darling, okay. I’ll let him know you’re coming in.” She stands and walks stiffly out of the sitting room. These people haven’t told me anything about what’s going on, and yet I’m expected to marry Carmine as the family sacrificial victim. They want to send me up the mountain to have my heart cut out and my blood drained out for the gods of the deep darkness, and they don’t want me to worry my pretty little head about anything. It drives me crazy that even Grandma knows about the Panagos, and I had to learn the hard way.
I’m left alone to finish my tea until five minutes later, one of the staff gestures for me to follow him back to the office.
Grandpa’s pacing behind the desk. When I come in, he instantly walks over, his hands rubbing together. “Brice, are you okay? Are you hurt? Did they do anything?”
Anger hits me, sharp and intense. If he was worried about a Greek mafia hurting me, why didn’t he say something before right now? A warning might’ve been nice.
“I’m fine,” I say sharper than I thought I would and Grandpa stops before he can get closer. Like Grandma, he looks exhausted, thin, and haggard, like he’s holding on by a thread. “Carmine handled it.”
“Right. Carmine. I suppose if anyone could handle it, he could.” Grandpa walks back around the desk and slowly sits down in his chair with a sigh.
I don’t take a seat. I need to stay on my feet because fear’s jolting through my system and if I let myself relax, I might not say what I came here to say. There’s too much at stake, and I’ve been asked to do too much, and now it’s time for Grandpa and the rest of the family to make things right.
“Brice, really, I know you’re going through a lot right now, but I am extremely busy,” Grandpa says as he glances at his computer. “Would you mind skipping to the serious bits?”
I take a deep breath, put my hands on my hips, and do my best impression of the look Grandma would give me when I’d do something wrong as a kid.
“I want you to pay them,” I say.
The words hang in the air between us. Grandpa’s eyebrows raise in alarm and I keep my face as neutral as I can. I won’t give him an excuse to dismiss me—I won’t let him claim this is all someemotional display. But I’m so red-hot angry I could burn this whole room to the ground and I wouldn’t even mind watching the fancy books and all of Daddy’s keepsakes and pictures and mementos disappear into ash. I used to think the Rowe family was the most important thing in the world and its history should be celebrated and venerated, but now I’m starting to wonder if all those stories I was told about the great members of our family from past years weren’t all just lies.
Grandpa knew about the Panagos. So did Grandma. And neither of them bothered to tell me about the danger. What would they have done if the Panagos family decided to kill me back at my apartment instead of banging on the door? Would they have felt bad for one second, or would they have started shoving my cousin Summer at Carmine before my body even got cold? It’s all about the Rowe family and the Rowe name, ever since I was a little girl, and I never mattered much aside from being another cog in the big machine that is our monstrous family. Maybe Carmine’s right and we aren’t all that different from each other.
