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It’s not the shock of his announcement, or the positively eye-rolling dramatics of him flying his ass in on a helicopter—though to be fair, there’s no way anyone would have let him in if he came knocking at the front door. It’s not even the cavalier way he looked at her and told her she washis, like some fucking collectible baseball card—though I felt a twist of something savagely vicious inside of me when he did.
No. What steals the air from my lungs is the look on Callie’s face as Massimo walks away. After life kicks her right in the fucking teeth,justafter I’ve told her it’s all going to be okay.
That’s what hurts the worst. Feeling that I lied to her. Thinking I literally built her up even higher just so she could fall even farther.
Predictably, after Massimo takes off the shit instantly hits the fan. In no time, we’re all back inside, in the sprawling old library of the Drakos estate. Hades is yelling. Kratos is yelling over him. And then Deimos is snarling over thebothof them.
Gavan is furiously barking orders in Russian into his phone in the corner. Neve, Eilish, and Dahlia try to console a stricken-looking Callie while Elsa gesticulates wildly with her hands as she talks legal mumbo-jumbo with Ares. Dimitra sits to one side with Elsa’s wide-eyed sixteen-year-old sister, Nora. In another corner, I watch Una’s hand quietly fingering something in her bag that I know damn well is a naked blade, a meditative, murderous look on her face.
“So get it the fuck out, man!”
I drag my eyes back to where Hades is raking his fingers through his longish hair, looking at Ares.
“I’m presuming it’s still here in dad’s old safe?”
Ares nods. “Yeah. One sec.”
He disappears for a minute and then returns with a locked metal binder. Ares sets it on the desk in the corner, unlocks it with a brass key, and opens the front cover, revealing a yellowed page with two signatures at the bottom.
I’ve never actually seen one of these things, but I know damn well what a mafia blood-marker is. This one looks ancient. Below the hand-written words, both signatures are in dark, rusty red.
Yeah… There’s nothing metaphorical about the term “blood-marker”.
Next to both signatures is a thumbprint, also inked in blood. Ares’s brow furrows deeply as he scans the page. Elsa moves next to him, frowning as she reads over his shoulder.
“Well?” Ares mutters, fury obvious in his tone. “What the fuck is that prick even talking about?”
Elsa just keeps scanning the page rapidly but carefully.
“Elsa—?”
“Take it easy,” Hades snaps, grabbing his brother’s collar as his eyes slip over to his fiancée. “She’s working.”
Ares nods. “Sorry,” he mutters, stepping back.
Elsa shrugs it off. “It’s fine. Just give me half a sec to piece this together. It’s not like mafia marriage contract law was something I specialized in at law school.”
My eyes slide back to Callie, sitting forlornly on the couch, staring at the wall in front of her. Part of me wants to go over—if for no other reason than to give her a reassuring pat on the shoulder and tell her that this, too, is going to be okay.
But I can’t do that.
For several reasons.
Callie and Eilish’s friend Dahlia, who looks thoroughly out of place given that she’s the only one here who’s not mafia connected, lowers her voice as she leans close to Eilish. “What exactly is a blood-marker?”
“An iron-clad agreement with monumental consequences if broken,” Kratos growls. “In our world, it’s literally an unbreakable contract.”
“How so?”
“If we broke this fucking thing,” Ares hisses, “we as a family would bedone. Finito. Full stop. Completely excommunicated from the entire mafia world. Our enemies would have carte blanche to come after us without repercussions. Any treaties we had with other families or organizations would instantly become null and void. Our allies would have to abandon us or face a similar fate.” His eyes narrow. “It means even my own wife’s family would have to turn its back on us, or also be destroyed.”
“Hang on.”
We all whirl at the sound of Elsa’s voice. She’s still hunched over the document, her fingertip tracing a sentence over and over.
“This clause, right here. I can’t imagine Massimo missed it, but I don’t know. Maybe he misread it, or didn’t think we’d catch the full shades of meaning in the wording?”
“What is the wording, exactly?” Ares asks.
