Page 139 of A Vicious Love

She hadn’t touched me in days.

But my head didn’t care about facts. My head kept replaying the back seat of the car. Her on my lap. Her black hair in my fingers. Her little gasps against my mouth. The way she had kissed me back before she remembered I was drunk and likely to ruin anything she handed me.

I had relived that night too many times.

Usually in the dark with my hand around my cock.

In my head, I fucked her right.

In my head, I knew exactly what to say.

I took my time with her. I stripped her slow. I made sure she knew she could stop me. I made sure she knew I wanted her with every awful piece of myself. I kissed her until she stopped apologizing. I put my mouth on her clit until she forgot the word sorry existed.

In my head, she trusted me.

In reality, I couldn’t say one fucking word right.

That was the problem, well one of theme, typically there were several.

By nine, the city had started paying for my mood.

A syndicate meeting in the lower casino turned ugly before it officially began.

Which resulted in bodies.

Reeves handled disposal logistics with the blank calm of a man who understood my family as weather. I told him to replace the carpet, bleach the lower lift, and have fresh coffee in the adjacent room because apparently the rest of the syndicate meeting still had to continue around corpses like we were running a family luncheon.

By lunch, Harrison had disappeared into a private office to threaten three more families. Marcel had gone silent, which meant someone else was probably discovering consequences. Reeves was dealing with bodies. Harlan’s underworld was scrambling around our moods like rats before floodwater.

Sadly for Harlan, the city had to deal with Crow men having emotional problems. I refused to call mine that.

I had a business problem. Sienna was simply attached to the issue. That was all.

At two, Veil pushed the first feature.

ST. CROSS HEIR TOURS HARLAN CLASSICAL GALLERIES WITH BELLEMERE BALLET STAR.

I stared at the headline in my office. Then opened it.

The video began outside the Harlan Museum of Classical Human Craft. Weston stood beside Sienna on the front steps like he had any right to be there. He wore navy today. Soft linen. No tie. Sunglasses tucked into the opening of his shirt. His whole body arranged to say effortless.

Sienna stood next to him in a white summer dress.

Black hair down. She looked like something the city did not deserve.

The Veil caption slid across the lower corner.

A quiet afternoon with Weston Crow and Sienna Bellemere as they explore Harlan’s forgotten human art wing. Sienna had loved that place before Weston learned the address.

The footage showed them in the gallery, standing before some painting of a girl near a window. Sienna was speaking with both hands, animated in a way I had not seen in months. Her eyes lit up when she explained something. Weston looked down at her, listening with that careful expression designed to make the whole world think he had a soul.

He didn’t give a fuck about old paintings.

He gave a fuck about being filmed giving a fuck. The optics of standing beside Sienna in a place she loved, letting Harlan see him listen where I had dismissed. He was building a narrative with every attentive nod.

Fucking bastard.

I knew what he was doing. Revenge. Weston and I had been due to settle things months ago.