“He’s even worse now that his favourite god-daughter doesn’t live at home. Imagine when you’re even further away.”
“I’m hisonlygod-daughter.”
“Exactly.” My dad winks and I shake my head.
Grief is funny. It coexists too seamlessly with joy, and I find that part the hardest. Allowing myself to laugh as I want to cry is its own kind of torture. It makes me want to reach for a knife and strike at my thighs again and again. Like I used to.
Fuck, that box in my head is overflowing. It hasn’t been this bad for a while. I’m going to need the coldest of showers when I get home tonight.
“Let’s get inside,princesse. Your cousin hired a band, and if I have to hear him tell me one more time how much you’re going to like it, I’m going to punch him, or myself, unconscious.”
The tension in my body diffuses, the urge bleeding out as my thoughts get replaced with my cousin’s antics.
I can go on for one more day.
My dad enters the main room in front of me. I linger behind, taking one last deep breath of night air, bracing for the pain of leaving these people—people I love—behind.
A sensation of heaviness settles on my shoulder, as if someone’s behind me. I turn around, squinting to scan my surrounding for the source. There’s nothing to see in the darkness of the gardens. I shake my head and get back inside.
When I enter, my eyes involuntarily seek a massive man in the crowd, but I can’t find him. He probably left already.
I lose myself in the music and the laughter, leaving Diane in another box in my head along with Mariella’s condition, and the fear of losing my family in another. At some point, I’ll run out of boxes.
Inside, whispers of Toma of all people drift to me. Women look for him in the shadows, using his monicker instead of the four letters of his name, gossiping about never seeing him with anyone and taking bets on who willscorehim tonight. I want to sneer. I don’t, and smile tightly instead. He means nothing to me. And in two days, he’ll be in the rear mirror, like everyone else in this room.
“He killed a man with his bare hands,” one says.
“I bet he can do a lot of other things with these hands of his,” another comments. “Have you seen how big he is?”
I ignore the way my gut twists and get lost in the music the band makes, dancing with Aleksei, Irina, Dante, my dad. The people I love.
They hug me, dance with me, drink me under the table—that was expected—and make me feel like no matter what, I will always have a place to return to. I cling to that.
Yet, the whole night, the feeling that I’m being watched doesn’t abate. And I find it somewhat comforting.
FOUR
TOMA
The next day, I don’t even knock before entering Dante Ventura’s office.
“Who’s on Lucie’s security detail?” I ask, taking a seat in front of him.
“Hello to you, too, asshole. Did your mother raise you with no manners?”
“My father strangled her when I was six so. Didn’t raise me.”
His eyes widen comically. I don’t need his pity or any pathetic ‘sorry’ people tend to give me when I mention my mother’s death so I move on with a sly grin. “Plus, I saved your ass, that allows me perks.”
“Perks like knowing who my cousin’s bodyguards are? I don’t think so.”
My good humour drops and so does my smile. I lean forward on the chair, elbows on my thighs and pin him with a stare.
If it were anyone but Lucie, I’d admire his protective streak. But whatever he has planned for her, it won’t be enough. The Cosa Nostra doesn’t have a stronghold in Edinburgh—or Scotland at all, for that matter. Even though she’s going to uni under another name, it won’t be long before the sharks smell fresh blood.
His eyes darken, shoulders shifting like a predator would when threatened. I’m unwilling to make an enemy out of him. Lucie loves him too much for me to kill him. Besides, I quite like him when he’s not holding information from me. I should have gone to Irina; she’s the one truly in command.
I lean back, raising both hands up in a gesture of surrender, but I’m still serious when I insist. “She’ll need more than whatever you have planned. The Moscow Bratva is still a threat.”
