Page 108 of Wicked Intentions (Wicked Games 3)
Haltingly, as if he can’t help himself, he reaches out and touches my hair. I notice his hand is slightly trembling. Now there is a light in his eyes, but it’s got nothing to do with mercy.
“From what I’ve always wanted,” he whispers. “From what I’ve always really wanted from you.” His fingers tighten around a strand and pull.
My swallow is a loud gulp. The taste of vomit is sharp in my mouth, stinging the back of my throat. There’s a rancid stench in my nose I can’t get rid of. I jerk my head to free my hair, but he doesn’t let go, and so several strands are torn from the root. He stands there gazing at them in a weird kind of fascination while I curse and press a hand to my stinging scalp.
“Where is Reynard?” I say loudly, hanging on to my control by the slimmest of threads.
“Where I’ve always been, my darling,” says a familiar voice to my right. “Wherever you needed me.”
I whip my head around. There he stands in his typical blue suit, smiling his typical warm smile, healthy and whole, not a mark on him.
“Reynard!” I sob in relief and fly into his outstretched arms, slamming into him so hard, he staggers back a few steps.
Chuckling, he holds me tight against his chest, rocking me and reassuring me he’s all right, everything is all right, everything is going to be so much better from now on.
Only his words are wrong, all wrong, so wrong that my sweet relief quickly turns to bitter, choking ashes in my mouth.
Because the words he speaks are in Italian.
A language Reynard doesn’t know.
I pull away abruptly and stare at his face. His smiling, uninjured face.
The Sea Fox.
Reynard, who borrowed his name from the trickster fox from medieval fables.
Reynard…the fox.
“No,” I whisper in blossoming horror.
Reynard cradles my face in his hands. “What was the most valuable lesson I taught you, my darling?” he asks gently. “The one lesson you never could have eluded your enemies without?”
The answer burbles up from inside me on a wave of dizziness that almost makes me fall. “Disguise.”
Reynard nods slowly, holding my gaze, the meaning in his eyes unmistakable, and all that I am or ever thought I was is gone with an intake of breath.
I push him away, screaming, “NO!”
“I told you she’d overreact,” Capo says, moving around me to stand beside Reynard. Standing next to each other like that, looking at me with identical expressions of calm inevitability, the resemblance is clear.
If I hadn’t just regurgitated the contents of my stomach, I’d do it now.
“Impossible. Impossible.” I keep repeating it in a ragged whisper as I back away, my mind going a million miles per hour in a desperate quest to make sense of this insanity.
Reynard takes a step toward me. “Mariana—”
“You saved me from him!” I scream, pointing at Capo.
“Yes,” he replies calmly. “I did. Were it not for me, you’d have been chewed up and spit out years ago, like all the others. Like your sister would’ve b
een, had she not taken her own life.”
The tears are coming now. I can’t stop them, or the ugly way my voice breaks, betrayal and disbelief warping my words as they’re coursing like poison through my body. “This isn’t happening. This can’t be happening. You raised me like your own daughter!”
Reynard nods, and his eyes are kind. “I always wanted a daughter. My wife died giving birth to our only child.”
He lifts his hand and rests it on Capo’s shoulder.
