My jaw clicked with frustration. Dozens of bodies blocked my path up the ladder past the bulwark gates.
“Out of the way.” People scurried aside.
“Stand back. Let them through,” Erel added, his arms spread in an effort to push back the greedy gossipers hedging closer for a better view. He bent toward me. “Michel is fetching Margaux as we speak.”
“Have her meet us in the staterooms lobby.”
The girl in my arms was a lucky one. As a close friend of my mother’s, Margaux—the family doctor—received an invitation to an otherwise closed event.
“Are you sure you don’t want me to take her?” Erel asked again with concern.
“No.”
Through the passage Erel and my men created, I carried her up the passerelle through the pool deck.
“Did you see the state of her hair?” a woman whispered amidst the continuous commentary. “Dreadful. I’d rather die than be caught looking like that.”
“Poor choice of words, my dear.”
I resisted the urge to roll my eyes.
“Now, now,” Maman’s voice called firmly from behind me. Her heels clicked with purpose. Conversations quieted. “The canapés have been served. Your drinks refreshed. I personally vouch for the grapefruit salmon gravlax and the foie gras with the black cherry chutney. However, those will be served in the dining salon. Come along.”
The lobby doors sealed shut behind me, effectively cutting off the inane chatter. Politicians and plutocrats were the ficklest of creatures. Dangle a carrot, and they stayed perfectly distracted.
A hand landed on my shoulder, and I flinched. “A livelier soiree than expected, no?”
The contact seared into my skin, locking my muscles in place. My teeth gritted as I bore down the shockwaves of agony.Show no weakness, no hesitation, no pain. My father’s words repeated on a loop.
I glared at the fingers on my shoulder, then their owner, with a raised brow. Gaspard Barrot, playboy heir to one of the biggest names in the boating industry and a trust fund baby barely out of training pads, the weasel. It was only then that I picked up on the fruity tobacco smell. This little prick was vaping in private quarters. I inhaled three deep breaths, took note of the two framed images on either side of his face, then imagined his slow death once. It calmed me just enough not to gut him on my own boat.
I set the girl down on the white upholstered couch, a foolish color, now stained red.
“What’s wrong with her?”
I sucked in through my teeth. This motherfuckingblaireaujust couldn’t take a hint. Hands, arms, and suit coated in blood and seawater, I backhanded him for shock value, then shoulder-checked him against the wall and flicked open my knife. The blade gleamed as I twisted it beneath his chin.
“Ever touch me again,” I whispered against his ear, “and I’ll cut off your hands.”
Gaspard cleared his throat and rubbed at his baby-faced jaw. “My father will hear of this.”
“Your father won’t do shit, boy.” I only had five years on the twenty-year-old, but with my history, there might as well have been decades between us. I shoved myself off him. “Now get out.”
With a sneer, Gaspard tugged his suit down, fists balled. He wanted to talk back. God, I hoped he did because I was bursting with the need for release. To stab my knife through skin andsinew and then pummel his face into oblivion, anything to rid me of the jitters his touch caused.
He must have sensed the knife’s edge he stood on because his gaze dropped to the woman soaking my couch in blood.
“Nice tattoo,” he said with an odd flourish before scampering off.
My eyes glared at his retreating back until the double doors slid back in place. Now normally, I didn’t give a fig what ink someone sported—I had my own across my back and down my arms—but the way that arrogant little mama’s boy talked, something just wasn’t quite right.
The woman lay unconscious, mumbling gibberish under her breath, with the occasional low groan. Her inhales were heavy, slow, and wet. The beams from the recessed lights in the ceiling revealed every imperfection, every bruise, every injury mottling her skin.
A cut across her hairline still trickled blood, the area swollen and bulging. While the skin around both her eyes was red and blistered, a bloody gash split down the right one, rivulets of watered-down blood creeping down her face from it. Fresh blood seeped out of a wound to her side, darkening what remained of her dress. Further down, there was the tattoo—a constrictor’s knot cinched tight around a burning rose.
I stared at it. Shit, shit, shit. I knew where she came from, and I was pretty darn certain, now that I was getting a good look at her, that this was the very same woman who took my prize from me. Escaping my bullets, surviving the sea, just to land back at my feet. Fate had a twisted sense of humor. I was always meant to be her angel of death.
I crouched at her side, lips pinched, my knife open and poised. My conscience pricked at me to hold off. A quick death, it was the best I could give her. It was what she was owed afterenduring that stain on humanity, Bogdani. A real shame after that moment of connection we had.
