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He squeezed, and I felt my windpipe start to close. “Kate-Bait, I will break you. And I won’t put you back together.” “I’m already broken,” I murmured, but it sounded far away. “And I don’t expect a handout from anyone.”
“My blood is your blood. I bleed, you bleed.”
Douglass King presented himself with discipline, precision, and restraint.
“No matter.” He waved away my concern. “You know me. Look, I brought my sons and nephew to meet you. Roman, Sebastian, Caden—introduce yourselves.”
“I’m Bastian.” He pointed his other thumb over his shoulder. “No need to meet the others. You’ll only need me.”
“Cleopatra,” he murmured as his hand shot out. His fingers touched the etchings on the front. “What a powerful being.”
“She’s a reminder of what someone, even someone like me, can strive to be even when the odds are against them,” I said. “Or maybe a reminder of what you already are,”
“Yeah, you’ll live. Remember that the best of us go through the worst.”
Cleopatra wasn’t as pretty as she is on your necklace. It was her intelligence that allowed her to rule. She knew over a dozen languages and communicated effectively in all of them. When your dad is gone, remember that. PO Box 108 Chicago, IL
I wrote Rome every week, not sure if he was reading my letters and not really caring at all. The outlet was there, and I needed it.
“What are you selling, then?” He must have seen the shame in my gray eyes because his started to glisten. “Stop what you’re doing now, baby. You can’t come back from it if you keep on.” “We need the money, Daddy.” “I need my daughter to know she’s better than anyone. Remember what I’m telling you, Katalina. You don’t fit in because you were made to stand out.”
This will be my first and last letter. Jared and Jimmy are not good people. Don’t surround yourself with trash or you’ll start to smell just as it does. Rome PS Cleopatra dined with rulers, not servants. PPS Poe’s best is “The Raven.” He goes mad in missing his Lenore. I find we’re all missing something, and maybe that makes us all a little mad.
“I’m not beautiful, Dad. This is life-and-death. I choose life for you. Every. Single. Time.”
You’re beautiful. I choose death so you can live. I won’t tell you to stop working with them. I know you’re in too deep. Make me proud, Katalina. Show them you were meant to stand out or get out from under them.”
They placed me with a foster family, and I thought I’d care that the man who claims he wants to be my father visits me in the middle of the night. But I don’t feel a thing, Rome.
“My father was too proud to raise a girl who lied, Rome.” She said the words barely above a whisper and looked down as she tucked herself deeper into that sweater. Without another word, she pushed off the wall to go back to her room. Something twisted in my gut, snarled in anger, and unleashed in my soul.
Katalina spoke up before anyone else did. “He was with me,” she repeated. “But after we fought some and he held
his gun to my head, he left to see Sasha. He didn’t return the whole night.”
“This morning, I went there when you were working, Rome.” He groaned at his own story, as if he was disappointed in his actions. “I shouldn’t have been seeing her. You know how she was though? How she looked at you with those big doe eyes, huh?”
“Where did you shoot her?” I weighed the knife in my hand. It was nice and balanced. I’d had it sharpened just a week ago. It’d cut through his flesh precisely. “Her stomach.” “Right where she was growing my baby?”
“I want in, Mario.” He nodded. “It’s a blood oath. Family first, honey. You don’t get out. You bleed, we bleed. You die, we die.”
“Too late now. She’s known too much for too long.” Mario shrugged. “She’ll be like a daughter to me. I’ve always wanted one, and a ruthless one is even better.” A laugh burst from him, and he slapped his meaty, ringed hand across his knee. “The way she pulled that trigger, even I jumped.”
“You’re bait. Plain and simple.”
“Stop fighting me. Let out a breath on me, Katalina. I want to taste your air.”
“I never sell myself, and even if I did, you wouldn’t be able to afford me, jackass.”
Katalina had permanently marked herself with the words I’d said to her the first night we met: You’ll live because if you don’t, you’ll die.
“I can handle a man’s hands on me.” I gripped her hips in response, and she hissed when I squeezed and then lifted her up onto the table. “A man like that on a body like yours is a waste.”
I heard the plea under her command, the hitch in her voice. Katalina was broken, shattered, left in jagged little pieces all over the floor. She wanted someone to make her feel something, to make life worth living, but I wasn’t that person. I wasn’t sure there was a person out there who could make her feel a thing. I was damn near positive they didn’t exist, because I knew they didn’t exist for me.
“That’s bullshit. You don’t walk out of my bar into the dark of the night.” “I do whatever I want.” I raised my voice. “Not after I sleep with you, you don’t.” He leaned into my face, and his eyes flicked to my lips. “Don’t make me hate you even more, Kate-Bait. Don’t make me regret it.”
“Even if you had been, it still could have happened because you’re close to us, to me. We didn’t consider the repercussions. You’re a threat to many, and now you’re extremely exposed.”
The thing about Rome and I was, we didn’t really have a place. Our true families had died, and we had died with them. Now, we wandered around without souls attached to us, trying to be a part of something.
Dante had done contract work since getting out of the military, and I knew he was flown places to do things in the middle of the night that only he and very few others knew how to do. I was lucky that he’d been an ally since the first day I’d met him.
“He shot his father when he tried to take my dad’s life, Katie. My uncle wanted the power and was willing to kill his own brother for it.”
“Rome doesn’t trust anyone because he almost missed it. We all did. He saved my dad’s life by taking his own father’s. It’s a mind-fuck. And the damn power of this city did it to all of us.”
“I’m starting to think I don’t treat any woman like you, because there is no woman like you. You don’t bitch about anything, you don’t care to prepare for me to be back. You’ve worn ratty socks since you’ve been here, and you still look good enough to fuck on this counter right here. And to add to it all, you make for damn good company.”
“They don’t tell me everything. So I don’t get to ask those types of questions.” “You better start. And you better be prepared for the answer.”
“Kate-Bait, I will break you. And I won’t put you back together.” “I’m already broken,” I murmured, but it sounded far away. “And I don’t expect a handout from anyone.”
“I should be able to say I’ve slept with someone else since you.” I pounded his shoulder. “I don’t want to wait for you to have me in the back of a bar. And yet, I’m fucking clean because all I think about is you. All I remember when another man touches me is you.”
“No man but me should ever be touching you. You’re driving me insane just living with him, Katalina. It’s driving me fucking insane.”
“You want to choose this? Choose the man who can kill you in a heartbeat? I’m the family’s monster, Katalina. I don’t have a heart to give you except a fucked up one.” “It’s the only one I want.”
Not one single thing carried any weight other than what she’d just revealed. For the first time, real jealousy throttled through me.
The idea heated my blood, tightened the muscles in me that I used to kill, and my hand itched to grab a weapon. He may have been family, but Katie was, or had just become, my untouchable.
“Your crazy is showing.” Bastian nodded toward my hand like he knew I was about to grab my gun.
“Then, as you build, you should know I take lives. No one ever takes mine, physically or metaphorically. I don’t answer to you. You’re only as strong as your right-hand man, and if I’m going to be that for you, well, you don’t fuck with what’s mine.” “Meaning Katie is yours?” I sucked on my teeth. “I’m not sure yet.” “Be sure, Rome. She sleeps under the same roof as me. She’s either untouchable or not.”
“She’s untouchable in one way or another.” “Now, that I can agree with. Just not sure if I’ll be able to follow through on the damn request you aren’t even making. Draw a line, Rome. And make it as clean as you slitting a throat. A request for an untouchable should always be that way.”
But Bastian was right. I hadn’t claimed her as an untouchable, and that was something that never changed within the family. We didn’t have many ties to the outside world. Our men were supposed to be loners. Family was family, and that was it. Except for the women we loved. Except for the kids we had. Untouchables.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I grumbled. The woman hugged, slept with, or made some connection with every man she encountered. Why any of them wanted to be around her more than a minute was beyond me.
Except I was the one contemplating her status within the mob. I was the one on the edge of claiming her as mine.
So I pushed every one of his red do-not-touch buttons.
One of his massive hands went to the back of his neck, and he pulled on it hard as he sighed up to the ceiling. Then he said, “Yep, I’m doing it,” to no one in particular and dragged me into the dressing room by my elbow.
