“Are you asking,” I said slowly, “if I’m going to kill you now? For what you just saw?”
She nodded jerkily, keeping her gaze firmly glued to my own, trying to project some kind of boldness. But there was no missing the rapid rise and fall of her ribs, the shuddering rhythm of her breath.
She was afraid.
Of me.
I glanced down at the corpse. Even in front of her, I couldn’t feel anything like guilt or shame or remorse. Those sorts of feelings were as lost to me as the sound of my mamma’s voice, and she’d been dead for ten long years.
Eighteen years old, and I’d killed more than a dozen men without batting an eye.
I’d killed more than dozen men and enjoyed it.
Sometimes being my uncle’s favourite assassin was the only thing that made me feel anything at all. The only thing that gave me purpose.
I’d had another purpose, once. Saving Aurora. Pulling her from the water. Taking care of her. Showing her all the sweet and secret places of my childhood.
I had to get her the fuck away from me.
“You can’t be here.” My voice was hard and cold. She flinched, as if she physically felt the words. As if they hurt.
I didn’t like seeing her flinch. I didn’t like seeing her in this dirty, empty building where men got strangled in the darkness. She should always be in warm, bright places. Sun-drenched balconies, gardens with flowers. Granita shops that smelled of sugar and lemon.
“Does that mean you’ll let me go?”
Let her go.
A part of me snapped its jaws inside and said, fuck no. Not because I was going to kill her, but because I wanted to keep her.
That part of me wanted to bring her back to Taormina, just to see if it could ever be the same.
Even though I knew it never would.
“I’m going to take you home.”
I had to. The instinct to protect her was just as strong now as it had been on that beach ten years ago, when I’d seen her white-blonde head slip beneath the waves. She shouldn’t have been out here on her own in the first fucking place. Sending her back out onto those darkened streets now would be like sending her out into the churning water.
Churning water with sharks in it.
I wasn’t the only monster in Montreal.
“To…To your place?” she asked.
“No.” I bent down, grasping the biker’s corpse beneath the pits. “I’m taking you back to wherever you’re staying.”
I dragged the body away to a far corner. There was a smaller room over there, just bigger than a closet. I stuffed him in and shut the door. I’d have to come back to deal with him later. I didn’t like leaving messes behind this way. But Aurora was the priority right now.
When I turned around once more, I almost expected her to be gone. Because she was always gone when I woke up. I half-wondered if she’d ever even been there to begin with. Maybe I’d hallucinated her, the way a man might hallucinate an oasis in the desert. Something exquisite and untouchable. Always on the horizon. Never really here.
But there she remained, in her pretty shoes and beautiful dress in this foul fucking place. Her big eyes still on me. With the lack of light, they were midnight-dark. But I perfectly recalled their actual colour. That brilliant, silver-flecked aqua. The precise shade of the sunlit sea that almost killed her once.
Her throat contracted on a hard swallow. She was glancing behind me now, staring at the door I’d just stuffed the body behind, as if she expected him to come springing back out of it, like some kind of gruesome Jack-in-the-box. Her hands were still clutching each other. And shaking.
“First time you ever saw a body?”
“No,” she said, surprising me. “My mamma…”
Of course.
