Page 104 of Like Grim Death: Part One
“Her name is Monday.” Elijah doesn’t drop my gaze.It’s a stupid name, but so is mine. Maybe her mom and mine had something in common.“Do you want her zodiac sign?” Elijah presses. “Her age? Height? Weight? Did you develop a crush on her—”
That’s not what I want to know, and he knows it. “I don’t give a fuck about any of that shit—”
“That’s the problem.” He cuts his hazel eyes to mine, and they narrow. He lowers his voice and scans the room, like he’s looking for a ghost hovering, listening. “You keep running your goddamn mouth. You defy RC’sorders,you keep fucking with people like Nikita, who youknowis Mikhail’s lackey now. Youstabhim inside your home, it’s no wonder Julie ends up fucking dead to send a message to you—”
“Nikita put his hands on my wife,” I interrupt coldly.
Elijah closes his mouth and clenches his jaw. Yeah. I don’t know what the fuck happened with Edith but I know he knows how it feels when someone plays with your fucking possessions. But when he speaks, it isn’t any softer. “If you keep forgoing your virtues, it’ll beSidin a room like that, with another man. They’d do that, before she was sprawled in a tub like Julie.”
My entire body feels like it’s on fire. My skin crawls, and my nostrils flare, and I want to reach across this fucking table and put my hands around his throat.
I don’t move.
I stay perfectly fucking still because the threat is ringing in my ears. But I still ask it. “Where the fuck is Finn?”
Elijah glances away, only for a moment before he shakes his head. “You listen, and he stays safe. If you don’t, you’ll stumble upon his body too.”
My lungs start to ache, imagining it, but Elijah keeps talking, breezing by it like the warning is nothing, his eyes back on mine.
“You know you only care if your secrets are safe. If Monday is going in the ground to swallow all of yours for eternity. You don’t give a fuck about her because to you, she’s a commodity. But once upon a time, Sid was exactly that. It’s no secret Lazar and Maddox dabbled in human trafficking—”
“And do you?” I once asked him the same question. I once asked him if the 6 was fucking around with a pedophile ring, or if what happened to Sid and Jeremiah came from my piece of shit father and his best friend alone. He didn’t answer me then, and I was too fucked up about Sid to give a damn.
The past few weeks, I went back into this building with the intention to change shit. I haven’t changed a fucking thing. And maybe because of Sid’s past, knowing what happened to her because of my dad’s work, it fucking eats at me.
“Doyoufuck around with pedophiles?” I repeat.What will I do if he does? What can I possibly fucking do?I think of the dissected article Sid found. All the ways I’ve convinced myself we don’tdo thatanymore. But I made a deal with Elijah for a reason.
Because I am a liar, inside my own head, about so many things.
Elijah clenches his jaw. “No. I don’t. My wife would murder you if you dared ask such a thing in front of her.”
I blink, surprised he’d offer me something like that, but he keeps going, like it’s nothing.
“But if you’ll recall your texts, if you’ll remember Mos Maiorum, you will know why RC exists. To overseeallof the crime syndicates and organizations under their rule. Which means it isn’t justus.We’re the original families of Alexandria. Of the 6. But there are others, and we rub shoulders with mafias all over, up and down the East Coast, theworld,including Bratva, the Greek Mob, Irish Mob, Albanian, I could go on and on. Is there trafficking? We both know the answer to that. It’s why I’ve agreed to our bargain.” He flicks his gaze past me, to the door. “Monday is Mikhail’s current mistress, which means he wastreatingyou. A gift, to his nephew.”
I lean closer, my fingernails digging into the stone table.“I’m not a fucking dog. I don’t need a goddamn treat.”
“The point being,” Elijah raises his voice. “It was an honor, in his eyes. Now, clearly, you have an aversion to gifts, but that’s neither here nor there. Your time is coming, Lucifer. But in order to rise, you’re going to have to do what you so stupidly refused to do last week.” He leans back in his chair. “You and Atlas both aren’t so good at following orders, and you saw what RC sent him as a reminder of who runs what, and what they sentyou.”
I swallow and my throat feels like sandpaper. “So Mikhail killed a nineteen-year-old boy, and then an innocent mother… what? In her sleep?” I recall what she was wearing. Pajamas. She’d been caught unaware.
But I remember what Elijah said too, when I questioned him last week. He said he wasn’t sure RC murdered Samson.
Elijah shrugs. “No. But he likely had someone do it.”
I say nothing to that, bristling as I think of my family.
“You have to bite your smart-ass tongue for as long as Mikhail is visiting. You have to follow his orders. And you have to take the boy you stabbed nearly to death home after our bonding exercises tonight and tomorrow, and train him.This is how you assume command.It’s not my decision. It’sMikhail’s.There’re people who think you don’t deserve what you have—”
“Interesting.I don’t think about those people at all—”
“—so you need toearnit, Lucifer.” Elijah’s eyes are lasers on mine.
There are few things I wantlessthan training a fucking kid. But one of those things is harm to my family. And for that, I’d do anything. Even fuck an escort.
“Who is he? Where the fuck did he come from?”
Elijah sighs, rubbing his temple with two fingers. “He’s an Astor.”
