Lovely Venom (Quinlan Empire #3)

PROLOGUE

Raina Riatt – Upper West Side, Manhattan

One year earlier

I drop yet another pack of cigarettes into the trash. It was the fifth I’ve found hidden. Two cigs in this one. One was empty. Three weren’t even unwrapped.

Mom had everyone fooled into thinking that she’d quit smoking. Her lungs knew the truth. The house smells of lemon furniture polish and coffee grounds as usual.

Not a hint of smoke.

She scoured the place to a spotless shine every night before bed. I always thought she didn’t mind all the scrubbing and laundry since she’d cleaned houses and offices ever since we arrived in the States when I was a baby.

Mom was washing away her sins .

At the bottom of the plastic trash can, I stare at the five packs of Newport Red 100s. I hadn’t lived in this Upper West Side apartment with Mom since I left for Quantico, Virginia and did eighteen months of hard time. Not jail, but training to be a DEA agent felt like it.

No longer under my watchful eye, Mom’s smoking guardrails collapsed.

A year later, she was diagnosed with small-cell lung cancer.

I held her hand in that sterile white room when the doctor dropped the bomb.

The blood didn’t drain from her face until we were told she was terminal and only had nine months to live.

On the way home, she smoked in the car, saying it was her last. But it wasn’t.

God, I’d hate to be addicted to anything that can kill you.

Okay, I am addicted to my job. DEA agents in Manhattan tangle with ruthless criminals. Drug kingpins are psychos. And mafia lords who traffic narcotics have deadly enforcers and mercenaries.

I’m trained to deal with cold-blooded gangsters with the same level of force if we take on fire.

I’ve never killed anyone, but I ranked at the top of my class in firearm capabilities.

Knives are a secret passion that has turned into an obsession.

My hand-to-hand combat skills with a blade, honed by my sparring with instructors, are the best they’ve seen for my tender age of twenty-four.

A knock on the apartment door turns me around. After a glance in the hallway, I see it opening. Dropping the trash can, I reach for the small service revolver I always carry.

“Hi, it’s Dora.” Mom’s silver-haired neighbor opens the door. She’s sweet but a nosy pain in the ass.

Exhaling, I slide my gun back into the holster and pick up the trash can.

“In the kitchen!” I call out to her .

Dora sashays down the long hallway. “Thought you’d be hungry after a long day.”

I didn’t do a burial or cater a post-funeral get-together for my mother.

Only a few friends, Dora included, showed up to today’s one and only wake service.

It was all I could afford. Mom had been very closed off during my whole childhood.

She didn’t even pressure me to move back in when I got assigned to New York City’s elite High Intensity Drug Traffic Areas task force, known as HIDTA.

She preferred to be alone during her final months.

She wanted to keep smoking in secret. Mom was good at secrets. The biggest one being who my father is.

“I brought you a tray of ziti.” Dora waltzes past me and heads straight for the refrigerator, the smell of garlic and basil knocking me from my thoughts.

“Thank you.” I accept the pasta dish I won’t eat.

Taking a seat at Mom’s narrow kitchen table, Dora fans herself from the summer heat. “It’s warm. Your mom kept this place like an icebox.”

Because it helped hide the smell of smoke.

“I thought fresh air would do the place some good.” Even the sticky hot air that lingers for the entire summer in New York City.

Staring out at the two-bedroom Upper West Side apartment I grew up in, I take a seat as well.

The gravity of Mom’s death hits me out of nowhere.

Not that she’s gone, I was prepared for that.

But I need to empty this apartment, contact the landlord, and break the lease.

Or worse, pay the rent until it expires.

I don’t have money for two Manhattan apartments. I can barely afford my own.

“The service was lovely today, Raina.” Dora rests her hand over mine.

I stiffen from the contact, then give her one of my practiced mechanical smiles. “Thank you. She didn’t leave any instructions.”

Not because she couldn’t. She had nine months. She didn’t plan. Wouldn’t plan. Said she didn’t want to talk about it and didn’t want to spend her last months ‘casket and grave site shopping.’

She didn’t have to do anything else. She didn’t own any property. She only had a few hundred dollars in her checking account, thanks to the medical bills. She didn’t even own a car.

I’ve known people who made more arrangements to bury a pet.

So, I planned. Someone had to. With no family plot and no savings, I had to pay for a wake service and cremation. Now, Mom is moving in with me when I get her ashes back.

Dora stares at me and blinks like she wants to tell me something. Like she knew Mom was smoking and needs to get the guilt off her chest for not stepping in. I want to wring her neck for not dropping a hint all those times I visited. Or trying to talk Mom into slowing the fuck down.

Instead of an apology, Dora reaches into the pocket of her cotton skirt and takes out an envelope. Thinking it’s cash, a contribution to the funeral costs, I go to wave her off, but the thinness signals that if it is money, it can’t be more than a couple of bucks.

“Your mother wanted me to give this to you.” She slides the envelope toward me.

Staring at it, I say, “What is it?”

“The truth.”

My body goes cold. “The truth about what?”

“About who you are.”

I press my hands on the cheap plastic tablecloth full of burn holes as I get to my feet. “Who I am ? What the hell does that mean?”

And why did Mom make this woman I barely know tell me?

I spoke to my mother a week ago. In the hospital.

On her deathbed. She could hardly talk, but she made sure to tell me where she hid her one piece of expensive jewelry, who to give her clothes to, and that she owed the kid on the fourth floor fifteen dollars.

“Dear, I don’t know.” Dora panics at my tone. “It’s sealed. Your mother didn’t tell me what the letter says. Just that I’m to give it to you after she passes.”

“Why do you think it’s the truth?” I still refuse to touch it.

“That’s all your mom said to me.” Dora pushes the letter toward me again and looks hungry for me to read it. “ Raina needs to know the truth .”

What does the truth matter at this point? Unless she didn’t tell me who my real father was because I’m the long-lost daughter of the Montenegro Royal Family, and Mom was a servant who stole me from my bed because she couldn’t have children.

Only that flies in the face of the story I got in the fourth grade when I had to make a family tree, and Mom came up with a cagey story about how my father was a young man she met while on vacation with friends right after high school.

At nine years old, I didn’t need the mechanics of how I was conceived.

Years later, I pieced more together. My grandfather, a very conservative and prominent tailor in town, knew who my father was and forced Mom to keep his name off the birth records.

When Mom and I applied for citizenship here in the US, she handed over my original birth certificate, which indeed has no father listed.

I had to present all kinds of paperwork from the INS to join the DEA. Then came the background checks. No one from the FBI paid a visit to tell me my father was rich and famous.

“Dora!” a man’s voice booms into the apartment. “ Your phone is ringing.”

Dora stands and smooths her skirt. “I should get going. If you need help, my son can come by and give you a hand.”

The same guy Mom had been anxious for me to meet. And date. Maybe marry. She and Dora were besties and would have loved to be related.

But I don’t have time for a relationship.

“Thanks,” I say, sending Dora on her way with a dash of hope.

I follow her down the hall and lock the apartment door this time.

Leaning against it, my head spins at the massive list forming in my head.

Mom’s passing was the easy part. The funeral home picked up the body from Madison Hill Hospital, prepared her viewing, ordered the death certificate, and arranged for her cremation.

The funeral director’s mother-in-law is a Social Security expert who started that whole process for me.

I stare at the envelope and shove it into my purse while I go hunting for more cigarettes.

A few days of digging later, I find out the lease has a few more months to go, but Dora’s son and his friend want the apartment. Yeah, that’s the guy I want to date, one who wants to live next door to Mommy.

But when he shows up to see the apartment with a buddy who is clearly his boyfriend , and says they’ll take it furnished, it’s a huge burden off my back.

I watch them leave, happy to be starting a new chapter together, and decide it’s time for me to end this one.

I should cry. People expected me to cry.

But I didn’t. I can’t. Not because I don’t feel sad.

I learned at a young age that grief is weakness, and the world is trying to eat you alive.

There’s also no point in crying without a shoulder.

Mom was the one who got to fall apart. I was the one who had to stay strong and clean it all up .

Alone.

Now there’s no one left to mop up after. No emergency to handle. Just an eerie quiet that holds both great and terrible memories. I need to walk away from here. This part of my life is over.

I press my hand to the doorframe. With one last breath, I taste Mom’s lavender detergent, lemon furniture polish, and the ghost of the last cigarette she smoked.

Then I walk out and don’t look back, because that’s what strong girls do.