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Drago’s body goes stone-still. His eyes hold mine as anger brews in their green depths. “I want to know what you have told Ajello so far.”
“I . . . I told him that you have some problems with the Romanians. He asked about some deal you’ve made, but I said I don’t know anything.”
He leans in, getting in my face. “What else?”
“That most of your people live here, in your house.”
“How dare you put my family at risk.” His voice is dangerously low as he says it, infused with so much disgust that I cringe. It’s so much worse than yelling. “Gather your stuff and get the hell out of my room.”
I watch Drago’s retreating form as he crosses the bedroom and slams the door shut behind him. My body jerks at the sound. After getting off the bed, I pull the duvet down to the floor and spread it in front of the closet. With numb limbs, I start throwing my clothes on top of it. One of the guys took my suitcases to the storeroom on the ground level, and there is no way I’m going there, no way I’m going to risk facing Drago again.
Once I’ve gathered a good part of my clothes on the duvet, I pull the corners together and drag my load toward the room at the end of the hallway. I repeat the ordeal twice more until I have everything moved out of my husband’s suite.
I can’t believe how absolutely unperturbed my wife is. She’s sitting next to me, chatting about some nonsense with Jelena with a wide smile on her face. Mirko throws in something, and she laughs. Not a care in the world. In fact, she seems to be enjoying her dinner.
I, on the other hand, spent the whole afternoon berating myself for snapping at her and ordering her out of our bedroom. It’s not like I didn’t already suspect she’s been providing info to her don. Confidential business matters are rarely discussed in the house, so she could have only learned and relayed inconsequential things, most of which, Ajello can easily obtain by other means. Seeing her snoop through my phone, however, made me lose my shit. It’s one thing if she passed some of the info she’s gathered along the way. It’s a completely different matter to purposely dig for more details. And the fact that she wasn’t even coerced into spying on me, made the bitter taste of betrayal ten times worse. What makes me even more pissed off is that she probably also saw the photos of her on my phone. Fuck!
Without saying a word, I rise from the table intending to head outside when my gaze falls on the fish tank in the corner. Three of the four orange fish are zooming inside the bowl, but the remaining one seems to be floating on the surface. I cross the distance and look inside the aquarium. The fish is dead, bobbing upside down.
Sienna already lost a pet once and she will probably be distressed when she sees it.It’s a fucking fish! They die all the time. She’s not a child to be seriously upset over a dead fish!Yes, but I can’t stomach the idea of having my wife unsettled over anything, even just a little. Even while I’m fucking furious at her.
Throwing a glance over my shoulder to confirm that Sienna is still occupied by the conversation with Jelena, I take out the slippery body and, keeping it hidden inside my fist, leave the dining room.
“Take a picture of this,” I say to Iliya, who’s on guard duty at the front door, and hand him the dead fish. “Send someone to find an identical one and put it into the fish tank.”
Iliya takes the fish by the tail and looks it over. “I’m not sure pet stores are still open.”
“I don’t fucking care. Make sure it’s done,” I spit out and make my way outside to clear my head.
The fifteen-minute walk I planned to take ends up being an hour-long drive across town to where my sister rented a studio apartment in a six-story walk-up. I give a slight chin lift to Tara’s security detail. The guys are keeping an eye on her place from a car parked on the other side of the street. I slip inside the building and climb the stairs to the top floor.
“If I knew it was you, I would have pretended not to be home,” Tara snaps when she opens the door. “What do you want?”
“I’ve decided you had enough time to cool off and came to check on you.” I walk in, taking a look around. It’s a nice, modern place, decorated in tones of white and dark brown.
Tara shuts the door and comes to stand before me with her hands on her hips. Her voice hasn’t changed much since she was a kid, retaining its high pitch. I always need to read her lips when we talk.
“I’m fine, as you can very well see. Now, feel free to go back home to your Italian wife.”
“This animosity you have toward Sienna is unfounded. She had nothing to do with Petar’s death.”
“Oh, you’re defending her now?”
“Stop acting like a brat.” I sigh. “Did you check the rocks?”
Tara’s eyes twinkle as they always do whenever we talk about work. Nothing has ever kept my sister’s focus for long. She transferred colleges a couple of times and couldn’t settle on a major, eventually dropping out altogether. Four years ago, after watching her waste her days, I decided she needed to do something with her life, and brought her in to handle the logistics for my business dealing in precious gems.
“Yes, everything is good except for the tanzanite. It should have been dark blue, but we only got pale ones. Absolutely unprofessional.” She shakes her head. “The emeralds we got for the Arabian Prince are fine, thank God.”
I nod, step around my sister, and approach the dresser against a nearby wall. On top of it is a picture set into a small silver frame. It’s a photo of Tara and Dina, holding hands on their first day of kindergarten. I take the frame and trace the tip of my finger over Dina’s smiling face.
Tara lays her hand on my arm. “Are you okay with me taking it? It’s the only photo we have.”
“Yeah,” I say.
It hurts too much to look at it, anyway. Every time I see this photo, I spiral into self-doubt and can’t stop reexamining that night, wondering what I did wrong. Would Dina be alive today if I tried to break the window in their room instead? Or if I had been faster?
I put the frame back on the dresser. “Come over to the mansion and meet my wife. Lunch or dinner. You can pick the day.”
