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Alani looks up at me as I enter the room, and I don’t miss the twitch in her cheek as if she was going to smile or speak but forgot she was ignoring me.
I swear every fucking woman is trained the same. Either that or it’s ingrained in them at birth.
Maybe I should’ve left her at the fucking office with her sister. Let her be Nash’s problem rather than mine.
Instead of speaking, she stands from the couch and heads into the kitchen, checking in the cabinets for food. I could offer to order something. Hell, leaving the house long enough to go grab something to eat would probably be less icy than the temp inside the house from her being so distant.
I’d like to bend her over the couch and fuck her until she screams or shove her to her knees and choke her with my dick.
I watch her back, wondering if she’s going to find some way to poison me if she cooks. Hell, that would be working under the assumption that she’ll even offer me anything.
I pull out a chair from the small dining room table and just watch her. As cold as she’s been to me today, I’ve also avoided her. The last thing I want is a million questions, mostly because if she asked, I’d probably tell her. It’s just one more thing to add to the list of what makes her so dangerous.
I couldn’t talk to Maya about what I did with the Severino brothers.
Alani is different. She didn’t cringe or turn white as a ghost when she found me hurting him. Hell, she used the knife against that man herself.
“My parents died in a car accident when I was fifteen,” she says, her back still turned to me as she grabs a pack of pasta from the cabinet.
I got over the part of me that turned my nose up at ready-made pasta. I imagine my Italian mother and father would turn sickly green at the idea of eating it.
“Ayla was away at nursing school, but she dropped everything to come back home and take care of me. She was barely an adult herself and in the blink of an eye, she became a parent.” Alani bends, that perfect ass almost enough to distract me from listening to what she’s saying. “I did my best to be good. I followed the rules. I wasn’t allowed to ride with anyone but her. It really put a damper on my high school years. I mean, what was the point? Our dad was a safe driver, but that didn’t stop both of them from dying.”
Even years later, there’s still a hint of anger in her voice, but I know it can take years to work through the other stages of grief. I’m no fucking expert, nor do I have any room to criticize how she deals with her pain.
There’s still a twinge of my own pain at losing my mother, but it’s encased in so much guilt, I’ll probably never unpack those feelings. I’ve gotten pretty fucking good at shoving them down and ignoring them for the most part.
I swallow against the threat of the memory of Madelene being so angry when she saw me at Angel’s office. She blamed our mother’s death on me. If I hadn’t been to blame for so many other crimes against people I loved, it might have hurt a little more. What Madelene couldn’t see was that if my mother truly died of a broken heart, she did so because her only daughter wasn’t worth living for. I don’t think my sister could deal with that if she actually sat down and thought about it.
I don’t feel a thing about my father’s death. Even knowing how brutal it was, I couldn’t care less about the man. I might’ve left Madelene to the wolves, but as her father, he should’ve done something to at least attempt to get her away from those monsters. Somehow, my sister still managed to be a functioning fucking adult, and it was from no help of our father.
I can’t say the same for myself. I can’t imagine a day when I’ll ever be normal. Hell, I don’t even think I want that. I know I’ll die from the same violence I was born into, but at least with the decisions I’ve made, I’ll die from my own mistakes and not because some piece of shit got annoyed with me or with any little thing, and I’m the way they decide to deal with their irritation.
“Where’s the oregano?”
“Probably isn’t any. Wouldn’t know. This isn’t my house.”
For the first time since I entered the room, she turns around to look at me. Did she really think this was my house? Killing someone in your own home is like What Not to Do 101.
