Page 50 of Sinners Atone
Tonight, she told me everything but her fucking star sign unprompted and walked into the dark woods with me just because I told her to.
I could have been anyone.
Could have done anything to her.
Why did I even walk her into the woods in the first place, instead of stuffing her into my trunk and saving an hour of my time? It’s not like I didn’t have anything better to do.
I know why, of course, but no good ever comes from thinking about it.
“Just stop,” I hiss to nobody but my demons, scrubbing at my jaw. There’s something seriously wrong with me, aside from the obvious. I have far more important shit to be annoyed about than some ditzy chick with no survival instinct I met three yearsago. Like Dante’s attack or the stupid schoolyard plan Rafe has plucked out of his ass to counter it, and the fact Angelo has cosigned the idea.
Yet, here I am, thinking about her. Again. Asking myself questions I swore I wouldn’t dig up the answers to. Like why she doesn’t drink liquor, why she panicked at the idea of getting into a car.
Why she wears so much fucking pink.
Finally, the shower switches off, and relief comes in the form of rattling glass and the thump of footsteps, lighting a spark of excitement in my chest.
The bathroom door opens, a triangle of light spills out onto the floor, and within it, a familiar shadow.
I take a final drag on the cigarette, then stub it out on the armrest. “It sure takes you a long time to shave your pussy.”
The footsteps come to an abrupt halt. A whispered Italian curse fissures through the bedroom, and when I glance up, Dante emerges from a cloud of steam.
Cue the same old dance. He slams his palm on the light switch, flooding the room with a yellow glow. Then his eyes dart to all the usual places; the pillows on the bed, the nightstand drawer. Over to the safe in the corner, which has a passcode set to his birthday. Then his gaze falls to the coffee table, where all three of his guns lay in a neat row, chambers emptied.
He tightens the towel around his waist, eyes narrowing on me. “What do you want?”
Slipping the earbud into my breast pocket, I let out a tired sigh. He always fucking asks. It’s a stupid question at the best of times, but given the circumstances, it’s full-on moronic.
Though I’m enjoying the tension lining his shoulders too much to answer, so I pull out another rolling paper and take my time packing it with tobacco. His eyes burn into my lap, and I relish the petty satisfaction it gives me. Much to his disdain,I’ve been smoking in his bedroom at least once a week for three years. Stubbing out my cigarettes on his armchair too.
He stopped bothering to replace it a while ago, around the same time he finally accepted he wasn’t smart enough to keep me out.
My gaze tracks his bare feet as he pads over to his liquor cabinet. He pours a whiskey with a steady hand and moves to the window.
When he spots the bodies slumped on his front lawn, his jaw locks. “How many men?”
“Three.” I cast a careless look at my bloodied knuckles “Want some advice?”
“No.”
I give it to him anyway. “I know nobody wants to work for you but stop hiring your men off Craigslist. They couldn’t throw a party, let alone a punch.”
“I don’t—” He rolls his shoulders back and slowly turns to pin me with his signature sneer. I swear, he popped out of his mother with that fucking expression, and I couldn’t count on both hands how many times my fists wiped it off his face during our childhood. “Perhaps I should take a leaf from your book,” he says, back to his usual, quiet drawl, “and pick up a few feral dogs from the local pound. Quite the pack of strays you have,cugino.They killed twelve of my men tonight.”
With a bitter smirk, he raises his glass in a mock toast before sinking half of its contents with a hard gulp.
A white-hot heat rushes from the base of my spine to the top. It’s a protective instinct, wrapped around the innermost layer of my core. He’s right, all my men are strays. Rescued from all four corners of the world, nurtured back to health, put to work.
Angelo hates them, Rafe even more so. But they don’t understand—they weren’t bornto have the misfortune to understand—the thread that ties us together.
I strike a match and light the cigarette, mainly to give my hands something else to do other than reach for my gun. Taking a long, deep drag, I make a point of billowing the smoke in Dante’s direction.
The cunt got to me once, and I vowed I’d never let him again.
“You really fucked up this time. You know that?”
His glare burns through the dissipating smoke. “You want to talk about fuckups? Because holding a wedding so soon after your brother blew my father’s head off for that gold-digging whore is pretty up there.”
