Anxiety had plagued my entire childhood, wondering when the men with black eyes would come calling and I’d have to hide my siblings from their vicious intent. Hours spent cramped in the hiding space beneath the kitchen sink. Holding Giselle as she cried once when huddled in our shared room while someone beat Seamus in the living room for taking money he’d never be able to repay.
“You didn’t have to work for the bastardo. I had nothing to do with that,” he argued even as I reached for him and shoved a hand hard into his sternum, pushing him into the wall. He hissed at the impact, then leaned forward into my face to snarl, “Everything I do, I do for my family.”
“You don’t know the meaning,” I snapped. “Spare me the fatherly bullshit. I can fight my own battles.”
“Clearly, you cannot,” he countered, a smile twitching his upper lip. It wasn’t an expression of joy but one of calculated satisfaction. “How would you like to know that it’s your dad keeping the Irish off your back, Elena?”
“Let them come for me, then, dear old Da,” I mocked, my red lips pulled back over my teeth. “I’d sooner trust Dante Salvatore to protect me than you.”
Hurt flared through his features before he carefully stowed the expression behind his mask. His hands went to my shoulders, fingers curling into the trench coat and the flesh beneath it with a painful bite.
“You want to die, huh?” he demanded coldly. “Because there are worse monsters than the Italian mob in New York City, and all of them have their eyes on Don Salvatore and his crew. And you. They’ll take you and crack you open like a fucking piggy bank to find whatever treasured intel they can get on the Camorra.”
“I don’t know anything. I just represent him in court,” I said, but it lacked conviction because it honestly hadn’t ever occurred to me I could be risking my life for a man I hardly knew just by doing my job.
Seamus knew my face well enough to read the fear at the pinched corners of my mouth. “You should be afraid, cara. You’re in my world now, and the people who inhabit it are fucking cannibals.”
I wrenched from his hold and took a massive step away from him. I’d heard enough. Seamus was every bad part of me, the pride, the explosive temper, the inability to forgive, and the tendencies toward superiority. He lived in me more than enough. I didn’t need his presence in my life for him to take a toll on me, and I was done giving him the benefit of the doubt.
He would never love me.
I might not have understood adoration all that well, but I knew whatever Seamus claimed to feel for us was the antithesis.
“Don’t contact me again,” I told him in a deep voice that emerged from somewhere dark and low in my gut. “You do, Seamus, and I swear to God, I’ll kill you if that’s the only way to get rid of you.”
He laughed. Actually laughed at my threat, tucking his hands in his pockets and rocking back on his heels as if we were just having a lovely father-daughter chat.
“Little fighter,” he said again, affection in his tone. “If I don’t protect you, however ungrateful you may be, you’ll die.”
“A part of me died the day you introduced Christopher into our lives.” The words were wrenched from the fabric of my soul, and I found suddenly that there was wet in my eyes and a harsh tickle in my sinuses. “When you let him seduce a little girl who didn’t know better and again when you knew he hurt me, but you didn’t step in.” A shadow passed over his face, but I was too far gone to feel anything but rage. “Another part died when you took Cosima from us, when you disappeared even though we were better off without you. You killed my ability to love, Seamus, and you almost killed my ability to even live. Most of what plagues me is because of you, and that is the only legacy you’ve ever given me. If you care at all about me, you’ll leave me with the scars you’ve already inflicted and never bother me again.”
I turned to stalk down the alley only to flip my hair over my shoulder and snarl one last threat, a warning that wasn’t mine to make, yet I felt fully assured of its validity. I knew I wouldn’t tell Dante I’d seen my father, that he’d told me the truth about Cosima and Alexander, but I knew even if I never did and I had to cash in my warning, Dante would do it without question.
“And if you think to fuck with me again, the Devil of New York City himself will come for you, and I won’t stop him when he does.”