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Especially not because of my cousin.
God, that sounded so bad.
But she wasn’t really my cousin.
What the fuck was it with me?
Did I get a kick out of the taboo or something?
First Victoria, now Katina.
Never mind Aunt Inessa.
I’d worry I was sick if my shrink hadn’t told me it was perfectly normal. The trouble was, it didn’t feel perfectly normal.
Not the way she made me smile.
Not the way she made me happy.
Not the way her obsession with pink always made me snort.
Not the way I wanted to hold her and to kiss her brow, to help her when she had one of her darker days.
I sometimes thought that was what made us so perfect for each other—we knew what real evil was. We could be each other’s soft place to land. We both had shrinks, we both had goals, and we both wanted to accomplish more than what our parents had achieved.
The only trouble?
She saw me as a friend.
A fucking friend.
I released a breath as she stepped out of the car, trying not to stare at her ass and how her skirt pulled taut around her hips.
“If she catches you looking, she’ll kill you.”
I smirked at Kat’s brother, Niall; the only one in the family who seemed to recognize my less-than-friendly feelings for Kat. “She won’t catch me.”
“You make it so obvious,” he retorted. “Girls are gross anyway. Kat’s grosser than them all. Pink sucks.”
“You’ll change your mind about girls when you’re my age,” I promised him. “You ready for this?”
“Have to be, don’t I?” he grumbled, tugging on his necktie as Kat leaned into the back of the limo again and helped her younger siblings out.
There was fourteen-year-old Benjamim who’d been saved from a child brothel in Rio de Janeiro, then there was six-year-old Enzo, who they’d managed to spare from death when a now-jailed tycoon had paid for his lungs and heart in a transplant that would’ve saved his kid while using Enzo like his body was an organ store.
Minnie, the only one in the car with Star and Conor, was a baby. Her mom had killed herself a few months after Minnie’s birth, unable to deal with what had happened to her as Sparrow chattel, unable to cope with bearing her rapist’s child.
Each of Star and Conor’s sons and daughters was born of or into tragedy, but here, they were normal.
Here, they were annoyed at having to wear suits and were grouching at being awoken at six to get ready for the ceremony.
Having promised to help Kat with her younger siblings—for obvious reasons—I dragged Enzo and Niall out onto the sidewalk and straightened up their ties and jackets as Benjamim did the same with his own suit.
“You just have to smile when a camera pops up in your face. Don’t say a word,” I ordered.
“And don’t touch anything,” Kat prompted. “Don’t fidget either. Just stand still and don’t get into trouble.”
Enzo giggled. “I’m a good boy.”
