Page 4 of Dagger in the Sea

“What does it look like?” I flung back at him.

“What? You quit your job?”

“Seriously? My mother found out what I did for you, and she fired me.”

He knocked his head back and laughed. A laugh that sheared through me. My pulse jammed in my neck. Was he laughingatme? I’d told him my greatest tragedy and for him it was the greatest joke ever?

My jaw stiffened. “That’s funny? She kicked me out on my ass for helping you.”

“So fucking easy,” he spit out. “Just like I thought she would.”

“What? What are you talking about?” I breathed, my chest suddenly numb.

“You think I needed you?” he said. “All that was for her benefit. All these years that bitch kept you away from me. You’re my son, too, so I hit her where it hurts. She got the message this time.” His lips smacked together, a smirk streaking his face.

My own father had used me as a pawn to make a statement to my mother. Couldn’t help himself, had to express his vengeance upon her somehow even all these years later. A vendetta.

I froze, my heart slowing to a thud in my chest. “You used me to get back at her?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you—”

His eyes gleamed. The enthusiasm for his plan was still stamped on his face. “What?”

I’d thought he needed me. I’d thought he’d wanted a relationship with me, with his son. He didn’t give a rat’s ass about me. This was about sticking it to my mother with a sharp blade.

No enemy should ever go unpunished, he would later tell me after I’d completed my first assassination for him.

“Look, kid, it had to be done. End of story.”

“How nice for you, but it’s not the end of the story for me. I lost my job, I betrayed my mother out of some sense of loyalty to a father I don’t even know, out of—fuck knows!”

“Calm down, dammit. I get it, I do.” He clapped a heavy hand around my bicep.

“No, no, you don’t.” I pulled myself out of his grip, but he dragged me back in, his face suddenly stern. He was annoyed with me. I was being disobedient, childish.

That wordfatherhad lost its luster for me right then and there.Fatherhad been a cherished desire, nowfatherwas shattered into shards of broken glass I’d slid into, scraped and cut myself, made myself bleed.

And I wasn’t quite sure how to clean up the mess.

“You think she didn’t use you all these years to show off to me that you’re not like me?” he said on a growl. “That you never would be? Every little academic achievement, every athletic championship. Every educational and professional score.” His voice was laced with the acid of mockery. “Yeah, guess the bitch got that wrong, huh? I hope she’s loving this feeling right now. I got her. I finally got that Irish cunt good.”

He shoved me back, and I stumbled. My stomach lurched, sour bile shot up my throat. I’d played right into his hands. He’d used me. I’d been duped by him, just like my mother.

My father had been her shameless dirty adventure on the wild side, and although she’d deeply regretted her stupidity and carelessness, as had her parents, she didn’t get rid of me or give me away for adoption. She stashed me at her parents’ country house in Saugatuck, Michigan with a nanny while she finished college and then sent me to the finest boarding schools out East. Three, actually. I got kicked out of one for my anger issues, and another for instigating a fight which sent a kid to the hospital. Through the years, through my mother’s marriage, I remained, I grew up. I was the reminder of her feverish mistake of stepping out of the family coach and into a dirty puddle on the sidewalk in the big, bad, dark world. And Mauro Guardino knew it and enjoyed taunting her for it.

“Come on—” Mauro held a hand out to me, and I blinked. “You shouldn’t be working like this. Let me do something for you.” His voice returned to that thick, velvety tone. I took his hand and got up from the floor. “She tossed her own son out to the wolves. Look at you now.” His hands gestured with that flair of Italian despair at my jeans and white shirt, the red waiter’s smock I wore. A wink. Mollification. “You call me tomorrow and come in, and I’ll have something for you. Least I can do.”

The least. Yeah, the least.

“I’ll do right by you,” he said.

I snickered. “Yeah, okay.”

He slapped a heavy hand around my neck yanking me close to him once more, I flinched. The cigar smoke, the women’s perfume mixed with his too spicy aftershave filled my nostrils. “Tomorrow at noon. You come over, you little shit.”

“Okay.”

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