Jocelyn had always followed the same philosophy. “Did you win in Vegas?” She’d been annoyed to miss the jaunt.
“A little.”
“Truly, Tavish, why am I wasting so much of my skill on you if you’ll just piss it away?” She put down the whiskey. “Bring out the cards. I’ll show you how to beat the house until you fucking own the house.”
A tightness to his lips, the first indication of anger she’d ever seen in him.
Quite frankly, it thrilled her the same way the poker tables thrilled her. The unpredictable danger of it, the awareness of dancing on the razor’s edge. “Oh, Mr.Tavish Advani doesn’t like to be told what to do.” She smiled with all her teeth. “Well, tough luck—I’m the boss bitch in this relationship. Now, come sit at my feet like the little puppy dog you are.”
That was the first night she ended up with his hands around her throat.
The high was better than poker or cocaine.
Chapter 53
I woke myself out of a nightmare, my throat so raw that I knew I’d been screaming. It would’ve been Joss’s name. It always was.
The clock blinked 3:07.
I saw the concrete coming at me, felt it fracture me to pieces. Just like that fire fractured your in-laws. Funny how that happens around you, isn’t it?
My entire body revolting at the poisonous echo of her voice in my head, I ran to the bathroom and threw up what little I had in my stomach.
Afterward, I sat in bed, just staring at the door as I waited for the night to end. The nights when Joss came for revenge…they were the worst ones. And she didn’t let go once she had her hooks in me—just like in life.
To escape, I’d had to tear those hooks from my flesh.
I didn’t even know when my tired body kicked me back into the dark…but it wasn’t Joss waiting for me on the other side.
I stood in the grove where Ani had died, even though I’d never set foot in it.
A little girl stood looking up at me, blood dripping down her face and a doll clutched to her chest, her eyes huge pools of black. “Bhaiya, you killed me,” she said in a small, high voice…and that was whenI realized I was Bobby. Young, with scraped knees and scratched-up arms from all our play.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my pulse a lump of muscle in my mouth. “I’m so sorry.”
Her face smudged, morphed, and suddenly, I was sitting across a table from Jocelyn, the cards scattered in front of us. “I wasn’t that bad, was I, Tavish?” she was asking. “Not bad enough to murder.”
“I didn’t hurt you.” Sweat broke out all over my skin.
A very feline look. “You know that’s a lie, love—you’ve always been so good at those. Audrey’s true son, a man who acts through life itself.” She picked up a tumbler of whiskey. “I’ve begun to think that you believe your own lies—that’s why you’re so good at it. You convince yourself of a whole other version of events.”
I plunged to the ground, the hard concrete rushing up at me so fast that I knew I’d die, my face shattered to pieces and my bones shrapnel. “JOSS!”
I stared at the door to the motel.
It took my brain several long seconds to figure out that I was still sitting upright in bed, not falling from the balcony of Jocelyn’s luxurious suite. Where Susanne had been about sophisticated glamour, Jocelyn had been a proud maximalist.
Velvet, tassels, everything gilded, her home should have looked tacky but it had instead looked like the den of some old-world vampire who’d collected only the best things through time. I’d been part of that collection, a “pretty boy” she’d met at a high-stakes poker table in Las Vegas.
“Don’t tell me I’m too old for you,” she’d purred in my ear in the elevator up to her penthouse suite. “I saw the way you looked at me from the other side of the table.”
I’d lost the game to her, and that night, I’d lost a piece of myinnocence. Because Joss hadn’t been Susanne, who had made me. Joss had been the opposite, her intent to break me in ways that I didn’t understand until it was almost too late.
Her death had freed me.
Swinging my legs off the bed, I took long, deep breaths and reminded myself of that. Jocelyn wasn’t around anymore to tempt me with “just a little taste” of things bad and dark and destructive. I’d never understood why she did it, why she went all out to destroy those around her.
Joss smiled at me from across the room…and I realized I was still dreaming. Walking over to me dressed in the long black gown in which I’d last seen her, her hair slicked back in a perfect updo, she leaned down in a wave of musky perfume to tap me on the jaw.
