VIOLA
Idon’t know how to tell Dante that I killed Polina so I just send a picture of her tattoo using Quinn’s secure drive with a message to Quinn to deliver it to D.
When we get back to Sacred Heart, he’s waiting for me in a makeshift prison cell Quinn has seen fit to fashion out of the equipment storage room. It’s the only place in the school that has a huge cage door and a massive lock. Gym equipment is expensive apparently. Although, everything that was in the store room is now dotted around what was an empty gym hall. All that’s in there with him now is a mattress and bucket in the corner of the store area.
When I enter the gym, Dante looks at me with an unreadable expression on his face. The only way I know he’s annoyed is his arms are folded.
“V, can I talk to you in private?” his eyes flick to Jude leaning against the wall. I can only imagine Jude was the one who dragged Dante in there when he was unconscious. I give Jude a look.
“I’m not leaving you alone with him,” he says.
I roll my eyes. “He’s behind a locked cage door.”
“Fine, I’ll be out in the hall.”
The floating feeling that I got from killing the bitch from the agency is all but gone. But that’s fine. It never lasts long. I know that. After Polina told me lots of secrets, I feel the urge to sleep for a long time. But I need to speak to Dante. The things she told me are too confusing without his input.
Blood drips down Polina’s face from a cut on her forehead. She grins at me, unbothered by the pain of my knife cuts. She’s been taught to withstand more.
“Having fun, Viola dear?”
I blink at her, unmoved and uncharmed. “Who is Dante working for?”
She snorts a laugh. “Apart from me, and himself. No one. Why are you asking such idiotic questions?” She closes her eyes, body swaying. She’s dealing with the pain the way I was taught, taking it inside her, consuming it, and then drifting away so that it’s happening to someone.
I exhale, trying a different approach. “Does the agency belong to my father?”
Her eyes open. There’s a sneer on her lips. “No and yes,” she says, talking in riddles again.
I take my knife and slice another sliver of her flesh away. Polina doesn’t react, but she does look me in the eye, grinning. If she passes out, I won’t get to ask any more questions, so I need to take this slow.
“I’ll ask again. Does my father own the agency?” Dante once told me he did.
“You should be asking who it does belong to.”
“You could just tell me.”
“And you could go to hell.” She spits blood in my face and then laughs with red-stained teeth. She must have bitten her mouth trying to deal with the pain.
My shoulders are tense my neck is stiff from hunching over my prey, so I roll them back, cricking my neck as I take a walk around Polina tied to a chair that survived the fire, looking for the next piece to remove. Lorcan is watching me. I don’t how I feel about that so I ignore it, or try to. Every so often he’ll wince or frown when I’m working. It’s fucking off-putting.
“Who have you got working the Duke job?” I say.
She smiles—a twisted one as I dig the knife in. “No one you know.” She grimaces. “Your replacement.”
More blood. More pain. “Do you have a name?”
“All I can tell you is that she is very sad, a bit like you were when you joined us.” The agency thrives on recruiting young men and women into its ranks. New blood is the only way they can keep up with the demand for work, and keep the bigger share of the fee. If they have a new recruit on Lorcan, I’m less worried.
“Let’s go back to the adoptions,” I say, playing my knife along the skin at the back of her neck.
Polina hasn’t been completely closed-mouthed. She’s given me some tidbits about my father, depending on what she thinks will I already know. And she admitted the agency was selling the babies from Joseph’s prostitution ring, using them to blackmail their high-profile fathers and the couples they sold them to.
“Tell me, who maintains the list of all the sales?”
I didn’t know about the adoptions, but it makes sense Adrien would use whatever he could to gain leverage with certain groups of people.
When I get to the front of her chair, Polina’s eyes are fixed on Lorcan. “Why, are you looking to see if a certain boy toy is on it?”