Page 34 of Scandalous Kingpin
“That’s it?”
“What?”
“Your reaction. You’re not going to…” I searched for the right word and came up short. “You’re not going to view me as damaged goods? Less than, because of how I treated her? Awoman?”
She took a step forward, Cobra close at her heel. “A woman who should have protected you but failed. As did this Father Gabriel. None of that makes you ‘damaged goods,’ Christian.”
A corner of my lips lifted.
“I wish you were right.” She didn’t know this darkness inside me, something so dangerous and volatile that only eased when I tortured those who’d wronged me. “I’ll never be right up here.” I tapped my fingers against my temple while acute pain sliced through my chest.
“You’re not responsible for your mother’s choices. You’re the victim, she’s the perpetrator.” I breathed harshly, my chest rising and falling. “And an eternity of torture isn’t enough to pay for her sins, but while you’re keeping her alive, you’re also suffering.”
She took my hand in her softer one, and a strange warmth expanded in my chest as she took a step toward me.
“There isnothingwrong with you,” she repeated. “Sometimes healing takes time. But, Christian, you have to cut the cord.”
It had been a decade, and still, I had yet to move on. Could she be right?
Chapter Sixteen
IVY
My heart beat loud and fast as I held his hand, the first “normal” gesture to occur between us since we crossed paths. Our first touch in a darkened nightclub was a moment of mindless lust. The subsequent times, he barely looked at me. Until Athair’s funeral on a cold winter’s day when he came to offer his condolences. Until my birthday party when he came to give birthday wishes and stir trouble.
I suspected what he told me wasn’t the entire story, and that thought alone made me ache for him. I’d been tempted to run into his arms, bury my wet face in his shirt, but I didn’t think he’d appreciate it.
The woman I was before starting Yale and meeting my best friends was sheltered and would be at a loss for what to do. But after the shenanigans we’d gotten ourselves out of—burning down a house, robbing Juliette’s father, breaking the house during Wynter’s poker game, even robbing an armored truck that belonged to this man—I was no longer sheltered, hardly innocent. And I certainly understood the “eye for an eye” rule in the underworld.
I curled my fingers into fists, my knuckles whitening. On one hand, Christian kidnapped me, but on the other, he’d been honest to the point of being blunt. It made it easy to trust him, and truthfully, his story affected me.
My spine steeled and my mind made up, I asked in a trembling voice, “Can you kill her?” He shot me a surprised look. “If it’s too hard for you, I… I can organize it. I’ll get my brothers to help me if I have to.” I closed my eyes for a second before prying them open, trying to stay strong. “For you. She doesn’t deserve to have this effect on you.”
Christian’s jaw clenched. “I need to make her suffer for as long as she made us suffer.”
I swallowed. “And how long is that?”
“Twelve years.” His jaw clenched, molars grinding. “I was sixteen and Dante eighteen when we burned down the house.”
There were so many layers to this man, I wasn’t quite sure what I’d find at the core of him. “Even at the cost of your own happiness?”
His face remained immobile. “Torturing her, and others like her, brings me joy.”
I just stared at him as his words sunk in and some pieces of the puzzle fell together. It was his coping mechanism. We all handled trauma differently; who was I to judge? After all, my encounter with Sofia as a little girl hardly compared, yet I’d made myself forget.
This man in front of me re-lived it every time he tortured this woman.
I swallowed, his words not lost on me. “How many others have you tortured?”
“I’ve lost count. But none of them mattered.”
My skin prickled with emotions I didn’t know what to do with. “Who counts the most?”
He let out a mocking noise. “The fucker who hides behind the church and his red robes.”
“Father Gabriel.”
That set Christian off. His features contorted, and it looked as if he was now transforming into a monster. Or rather, an avenging angel.
