Page 51 of Heartless Game

“Don’t worry, little snoop. I’ll give you what you want later but first I need to feed you. How’s spaghetti and meatballs?”

He was cooking for me?

“That’s fine,” I said.

As he made his way around the kitchen, pulling ingredients out of the huge fridge and pantry and setting them up near a chopping board and the stove, I watched him, flummoxed.

“I didn’t know mafia princes knew how to cook,” I finally said. “Don’t you have like, staff to do that for you?”

He looked at me. He smiled slightly, but his eyes were sad.

“My mom taught me how to cook, before she was killed,” he told me. “After she died, I cooked for me and my siblings. My dad is an old school chauvinist and has always given me shit about it, but it made me feel closer to her. I don’t know.” He shrugged, and then his voice turned bitter. “But I guess if you know so much about me already, you already know she was killed.”

I did. I knew Louisa Silver had died in a tragic accident, but the night she’d been killed was the same night my mother and I had made our escape. I’d been young, and terrified, and determined to help get me and my mother out from under my abusive stepfather’s thumb and had never bothered to learn exactly what happened.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “How did she die?”

“She was on her way to the opera,” Isaac said as he started mincing garlic. “My father wasn’t accompanying her, but she was meeting her sister. Her car had barely pulled away from the curb when gunshots rang out. They shot up her car with her inside, killing her on the spot. I’ve never seen so much blood in my life.”

He closed his eyes at the memory, and my heart squeezed in sympathy. I’d liked Louisa. She’d always been kind to me and my mother, even though we were only the help. But I couldn’t say as much to Isaac, or he’d realize who I actually was.

“My dad went running out of the house, pulling her out of the car. He was covered in her blood. He made a sound I’d never heard before and I’ve never heard since. He was always a maniacal asshole, but he loved her. That night, he told me you couldn’t love anyone when you were a part of our family. Loyalty, yes. Love, no. Because love meant death.” Isaac started chopping an onion furiously, making my eyes sting with tears. “And he was right.”

I didn’t know this side of Isaac, the part that thought he didn’t deserve and could never have true love in his life. It wasn’t something I wanted, either, but my reasoning was different: My mother had loved my stepfather, at first, and look how that turned out. I couldn’t trust a man long enough to believe he’d take care of me, instead of trying to destroy me. No, my love was reserved for my friends and my mother. That was it.

“I’m sorry, that sounds terrible,” I said.

“You know what I sometimes think is worse?” he mused, as he finished chopping the onion and pushed it with his knife into the big pot with the garlic, pouring in some olive oil and setting it on the stovetop to sauté. “There was a little girl who lived on the property. I never learned her name; I think she was the daughter of one of the maids or my father’s men or something. She refused to tell me. But even when I was young, I cared about her a lot. Actually thought I loved her, that we were meant to be together. I called her my bashert, my destiny.” He scoffed, and I had to look away so Isaac couldn’t see the pained shock on my face. “Anyway, she disappeared around the time my mother died, didn’t even come to the funeral. I was an idiot; her family was clearly involved in my mother’s death.”

I caught the denial in my throat. My mother and I had had nothing to do with Louisa’s death. I’d been devastated for Isaac, but my mother had thought that the chaos going on with the Silvers was a good opportunity for us to take care of my stepfather and disappear. And she’d been right.

But I hadn’t realized that Isaac had looked for me at the funeral.

Isaac had grabbed a can opener and was using it on a can of tomatoes, like he wished it bodily harm. “Anyway, that was the last time I gave my love to anyone. It’s better this way.”

I swallowed. What could I even say? All I wanted to do was to wrap my arms around my enemy and tell him that I was here, that I cared, that I hadn’t left him by choice. But Ihadleft him, and he thought I was involved in his mother’s death. If I told him who I was, what was to stop him from using the big chef’s knife on me?

“I’m so sorry you lost her,” I said, and I wasn’t sure if I was referring to his mother or to me. “That’s a horrible thing for anyone to go through, especially when you were so young. Do you know who did it?”

“The Golds,” he said shortly. “Which made it kind of awkward and inconvenient when Jack got involved with Aviva, but she’s only a distant cousin and isn’t involved at all in the family’s actual business. They’ve been our enemy forever.”

Avivawasa Gold. But the wealthy, dynastic family had never wanted anything to do with Aviva or her brother, Asher. The connection had concerned me, at first, but Aviva knew nothing. And I needed to keep it that way, to keep her and Asher safe.

Isaac stirred the sauce, and the smell of garlic and onions filled the kitchen, making me salivate. “In fact,” he added, “I bet that little girl was a plant or a spy of theirs. Just goes to show the kind of taste I have in women.”

Ouch.

“She was just a kid, wasn’t she?” I said, defending myself even though I needed to leave it alone. “Do you really think she’d plot against you that way? Or was she just an innocent bystander with no control of her own?”

Isaac turned away from the stove, his eyes landing on mine—and narrowing. “Why do you even care?”

Shit.

“As a journalist, part of my job is to both expose the bad guys and defend the innocent from slander. I guess I feel some sympathy for her, when it’s unlikely she’s the villain you think she is.”

Isaac nodded. “Go get a pot from the bottom left cabinet and fill it up with water. Usually I’d make pasta from scratch, but I’m starving, so we’re going to have to go with the boxed kind.”

I grabbed the change of subject with both hands. “Boxed pasta is my favorite pasta.”

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