“I don’t understand,” she said as I wrenched the door open. “Is this your phone number?”
I chucked the key into the foyer, the metal clinking across tile as it slid along the floor. Then, I clamped my hand down on her slender shoulder. Even through the fabric of the hoodie, I could feel the tender joinings of her bones. So fucking fragile.
I didn’t want to break her.
I pushed her through the door instead.
She shoved the notebook into the gap between the door and the frame, preventing me from closing it. She held it open to the page I’d just written on, brandishing it like a lawyer with evidence at a trial.
“Answer me,” she said, giving the notebook a meaningful shake. “Is this your phone number?”
“Yes.” My gaze swallowed hers. “And don’t you ever fucking use it, either.”
“Then why-”
“Consider it your own personal curse,” I gritted out. I gripped the door, ready to slam it. “Death is the only thing I’m good for, Aurora. So if you ever call this number, it won’t be because you need a friend. It won’t be because you need little Accursio Giordano to come and save you. It’ll be because you need somebody dead. You got that? Because that’s all I have to give you.”
Understanding so clear and raw it almost looked like grief dawned on her tear-streaked face. Even after watching me kill a man, she’d still held out some kind of foolish hope that the boy she’d searched for lived on in me.
I’d just murdered the last bit of that hope in her.
One final tear slipped down the soft line of her cheek. She didn’t say another word.
And in the end, I didn’t have to slam the door on her. She closed it and locked it herself.
I knew she’d never call me.
For twelve years, I kept the same number anyway.
And then, after Aurora and her groom had left the wedding hall in New York, and after I’d followed them back to his house, my phone rang.
I picked up but did not speak.
“Curse?”
I knew her voice at once.
And I knew that she’d been crying.
“I need you,” she whispered.
I was inside in two minutes flat.
Chapter 4
Aurora
“Turn the tap on for me.”
We’ve paused in a bathroom in the house. Cruse fills the darkened mirror beside me.
“What?”
“It makes sense for your fingerprints to be all over this place,” he says. He peels bloody leather gloves off of his fingers, dropping them into a small plastic bag and sealing it before shoving them into a pocket. “Turn the tap on for me.”
“Oh.”
My hands shake violently as I do it. The sound of the water hitting the sink feels as loud as a bomb going off. We need to get out of here.
