Page 71 of Souls and Sorrows

“Get her cleaned up.” He’s barely even looking at either of us, instead solely focused on the room the officers still haven’t come out of.

“I can give first aid to myself, you know,” I tell him, but he isn’t listening.

When he swings his gaze to Elena, I see a darkness in his stare that has only been there a couple of times before. The night he purchased me and Ermes didn’t want to release me and again when he thought I was trying to poison him at our wedding.

Something tells me it takes a lot to draw Cash Primrose’s darkness out, but when it’s there, the only way to taper it is to indulge.

It shouldn’t be attractive, but arousal spins a web through my abdomen anyway, catching every bite of tension and sharp breath as they emit from me.

“Don’t let her out of your sight.” Still, he speaks only to my sister and then strides back across the hall, slamming the door behind him as he closes himself in with the officers.

Elena’s dark brows arch, and she folds her mouth in as she snaps open the kit. “He seems like he’ll be a lot of fun at Christmas.”

The administrator comes over to ask me a few questions about the two officers—Butera and Jones, apparently—and I take over cleaning my finger when I realize Elena doesn’t know about the ring. She leans back against the wall when the other woman finally leaves with my statement, and I grit my teeth as I wipe off the blood, ignoring the pain from the spikes as they grate into raw, broken skin.

“I’m sorry,” Elena says after a couple of minutes, turning to look at me. “I shouldn’t… be so hard on you, just becauseI’mworried. It’s just that, since I became a mom myself, I have so many issues with how ours was growing up, and… I don’t know. I want to be better than that with my girls. I guess I’ve been using you as practice, and clearly, I have no clue what I’m doing.”

The flecks of brown in her irises and the severe tone of her hair, like burnt umber, remind me so much of Mamma that it takes me a second to look back.

But I give her a small smile anyway, reminding myself that our mother is barely more than a dried-out husk right now. “Well, I’m not an easy test subject.”

“You know your worth.” She shrugs. “I can’t fault you for making people work for your trust and affection.”

Sadness clutches at my heart like it’s a life raft, and I stare at the linoleum floor, wondering if it’s that easy to just forgive someone their flaws or if Elena’s soul is just wired differently than mine.

Maybe forgiveness is harder to come by when you know what it feels like to need it.

“So,” she says after a prolonged silence, swinging her legs on the bench, “Cash Primrose?”

A blush crawls up my neck, heating my face. “It’s complicated.”

She snorts. “It always is.” Sighing, she toys with the solitaire diamond on her left hand and the gold band beneath it. “Are we gonna talk about Papà?”

I lift a shoulder. “Only if you want to.”

Her relationship with him was as convoluted as mine, though maybe even more so, given that she was the one he wanted to one day run Ricci Inc. But when she turned him in and shattered the world we knew, he didn’t have much of a choice.

That was always my biggest fear with him—that our relationship existed only out of necessity. Like a default setting because he didn’t have anyone else to turn to. I want to believe he loved me, even in his own messed up way, but it never stopped feeling like an incomplete chore either.

And no matter what, the business would always have been more important anyway. It’s why I went to Anteros to salvage things with Vitus and Ermes and why I ended up on Cash’s radar instead.

Everything Papà did seemed to be a catalyst to everything wrong in our lives.

And I don’t feel bad that he’s gone.

* * *

Cash finally comesout of the interrogation room a half hour later, but he doesn’t look any less livid. His glasses hang from the neckline of his shirt while his face is rigid and appearing as if he aged about ten years.

I swallow, guilt bouncing around my chest like a flyaway balloon even though, technically, I didn’t do anything wrong.

Well, nothereanyway.

Elena leaves us outside the station, heading back to the ferry before it takes off without her. Cash stays several steps ahead of me, seeming to refuse to make eye contact with me as I scramble to keep up, gripping the lapels of his coat in my fists.

Ronnie’s waiting up the street, and he opens the back door of the limo, his face sullen. Without looking over his shoulder to make sure I’m coming, Cash climbs in and slides all the way over, making room for me.

I don’t follow after him.

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