“Every day, every hour. You’re always there, like a fungus, or an incessant bug swarming around my head.”
A corner of his lips tipped up.
Setting the clipboard down, I leaned a hip against the table, rested the pen against my chin, and looked around the ballroom. “By the way, where is your blonde?”
I followed his stare to the woman in question, who was talking to another in the middle of the room. She wore a classy white cocktail dress and a tight chignon. Her posture was perfect and her current smile was tight. I bet she’d never let her hair down.
“She looks . . . fun.”
When I caught the corner of his disarming smile, something hot and hesitant flickered to life in my stomach. The feeling immediately brought a bad taste to my mouth.
I pushed off the table. “Okay, well, you have a decent night. I would say great, but I’m doing this new thing and trying not to say what I don’t mean.”
“Sure you don’t want to donate the shoes off your feet before you go?”
Glancing at my thigh-high boots, I clicked my heels together like Dorothy. Unfortunately, it didn’t take me home. “I would, but I think your girlfriend’s mamma would throw them away.”
I looked up to see his gaze trail from my boots to the few inches of naked thigh. It was clinical, assessing, and hardly lascivious. Still, the touch of his stare burned, like an ice cube melting on bare skin beneath a summer sun.
“She’s not my girlfriend,” he said, taking a large drink of what I was now sure was water.
“I would say poor girl, but . . .” My eyes sparkled with that new thing I’m trying as I began to walk past him.
His next words, dripping with something bitter and sweet, stopped me in my tracks.
“Trouble in paradise?”
My grip tightened around the pen I still held.
I swallowed and rubbed my bare ring finger with my thumb.
My marriage was a mockery, and I could never escape it—divorce didn’t exist in the Cosa Nostra—but I wouldn’t be chained by a diamond on my finger, by a symbol of love, when there was none. At least, none returned.
I turned to him, expecting to see triumph, but as I met his gaze, my heart stilled before tugging in an unnatural way.
There was something dark and genuine behind his eyes, and I didn’t realize until later that he was letting me see it. The steady drip, drip, drip of blood. The clanks of metal and fire that forged him.
He was up to his neck in blood.
I wondered if, even then, beneath his fake gentleman persona, his black suit and white shirt, he was covered in it.
“What have you sacrificed to stand here today?” The thought escaped me, pushed from my lips by an invisible force. “Your soul?” I stepped closer, inches away, until his presence brushed my bare skin. Running the tip of the pen across his palm by his side, I whispered, “Just how much blood is on these hands?”
He ran his tongue across his teeth, flicking his gaze to the side before bringing it back to me.
Bottomless. Blue. My heart beat heavy, because I knew if I stared too long I’d be trapped beneath ice.
“Someday,” I breathed, tilting my head, “it’s going to catch up with you.”
His gaze narrowed in distaste as it fell to the pen I’d bitten between my teeth. It took only a second to connect the dots. Germs, most likely.
I licked the end of the pen like a lollipop, tucked it into his front jacket pocket, and gave his chest a pat.
“Have a lousy night, Allister.”
Taking a step to leave, I realized how parched his stare had made me. I stepped backward, grabbed the glass from his hand, and downed the contents.
I choked.