I stilled at the table, and somehow, I justknewwhat would follow.
“When I went to visit your brother the other day ... it looked disturbed.”
Fuck.“The caretakers do their maintenance every so often. Perhaps it was that.” I’d done my best to level the ground and make it look exactly as it had when I’d first arrived. But she’d been there every single day for the last seven years, so she knew it better than I did.
“No. It wasn’t that.”
I prayed she wouldn’t ask me. But how could she think I had anything to do with that? I was being beyond paranoid but straight-up irrational.
But then she looked at me—dead in the eye.
Fuck.
She looked at my face like she could read it, like there were inked words on my goddamn forehead.
For the love of fucking god, don’t ask me.
“Con.”
No, no, no.I wore the best poker face I could, but I knew my hand was shit.
“Was it you?” She put me on the spot and asked me, watching my face with eyes that felt like microscopes.
I swallowed, unsure how to respond, knowing she wouldn’t have asked me the question if she didn’t suspect something deeper. I was a shit liar because it was something I never did, and I definitely couldn’t lie to my mother. So the words sat on my tongue but never left my mouth. I held my silence like it was the last defense I had.
She took in a slow breath, her chest rising as her eyes smarted once again. “It wasn’t a car accident ... was it?”
I clenched my eyes closed when I heard her words—my heart shattering into shards like broken glass. I’d tried to protect her all these years, and the moment I put him to rest was the moment the facade was ruined.
She released a quiet yelp as her hand moved over her mouth. And then she cried quietly, cried over her wine with her hand still covering her mouth, the scars ripped wide open and the wounds bleeding fresh.
I sat there and listened to it, listened to my mother cry like she was at his funeral again.
“Edric got mixed up with Darius, the Skull King. Stupid shit happened and ...” I didn’t finish the sentence because it didn’t need to be finished. “I became emperor of Rome because it was my life’s purpose to get revenge for Edric. But it was complicated, and it never came to pass. Darius outsmarted me, and that was how I lost my position to his regime. He destroyed Rome and the rest of the country, but I killed him.”
She continued to keep her hand clamped against her mouth as she processed this, her eyes elsewhere, her cries quiet.
“I shot him in the head, Ma. He’s gone.”
She was still, her breath still labored. “You got his body back ... and laid him to rest.”
I hadn’t wanted her to know she’d visited an empty grave after all these years, but the truth had been unleashed. “Yes.”
Now both of her hands cupped her face, and she sobbed. “My boy ...”
I moved around the table to her side, pulled up a chair and circled my arms around her as I held her close.
She sobbed her heart out. Sobbed as if she’d just gotten the news that he’d been crushed by a semi. Sobbed as if the funeral had just ended but her grief continued.
“I’m so sorry, Ma.”
I almost told Rocco not to come, but since it was so last-minute, I didn’t call it off.
My mom had gone to her room because she wanted to be alone for a while, and I kept the food warm in the oven until Rocco arrived. I greeted him at the door with a smile that I didn’t feel in my chest. “Wow, your face looks a lot better. How much makeup are you wearing?”
Rocco grinned at the insult and gave me a hard nudge in the stomach when he welcomed himself inside. “Congratulations, asshole.”
I shut the door, and we walked into the kitchen, where the small dining table was.
