Chapter 4
Aurora
“Turn the tap on for me.”
We’ve paused in a bathroom in the house. Cruse fills the darkened mirror beside me.
“What?”
“It makes sense for your fingerprints to be all over this place,” he says. He peels bloody leather gloves off of his fingers, dropping them into a small plastic bag and sealing it before shoving them into a pocket. “Turn the tap on for me.”
“Oh.”
My hands shake violently as I do it. The sound of the water hitting the sink feels as loud as a bomb going off. We need to get out of here.
Curse’s movements are efficient but unhurried as he dips his hands into the sink. Of course. He kills people every damn day. First for his uncle, now for his brother. This is probably as easy, maybe even as boring, to him as filing fucking paperwork.
But it’s not like that for me. The only people I’ve ever seen die were my own mamma and the man in the Montreal warehouse. And I wasn’t responsible for either of those.
I didn’t mean to push Marco. I didn’t mean for him to hit his head like that.
But he was touching me, and he suddenly looked and sounded so much like his uncle.
And the little girl I kept locked in a glass box inside my head started screaming so loudly that the clear cage had started to crack.
It was going to shatter any second. My body moved without me telling it to.
What I’d wanted to do in Taormina but was never able to finally happened here, twenty-two years later.
Different man, same famiglia. Same last name.
“I killed him.”
I think I might throw up.
“No,” Curse says immediately, without emotion. “I did.”
“But I pushed him! And…And he hit his head so hard on the mantel…”
It was a beautiful mantel, too, all luxurious carved marble. With very hard, sharp corners.
“Who’s the one washing the blood off their hands right now, Aurora?”
His question drags me back from the bedroom where we left Marco.
“You are,” I whisper.
He nods, as if satisfied with my answer.
“That’s right,” he says. Calmly. Slowly. Like he’s trying to get through to a hyperventilating child. “When I got here, he was still breathing. Maybe he would have been alright after a head injury like that. Or maybe not. But I’m the one who cut his throat.”
Cut his throat.
He makes it sound like nothing more than taking a phone call.
He’d done it like it was nothing more than a phone call, too. He’d crouched over Marco’s head, and with a quick slide of his hands – and a fountain of blood – it was done.
“Soap.”
Dutifully, I grasp the bottle and pump soap into his palms. It’s strangely soothing to have someone telling me what to do right now.
He’s washing his hands a little awkwardly, keeping his tattooed knuckles aimed downwards.
The only tattoo visible right now is what looks to be a tiny letter on the palm of his left hand.
But it’s distorted by the water and bubbles, and I can’t tell for sure.
He rinses his knife, too, still keeping his palms aimed up.
Once he’s done that, he pulls a fresh pair of leather gloves out and slides them on.
It's only then that I realize why he’s got new gloves back on, why he washed his hands palms-up.
He’s trying to keep his tattoos out of sight of any cameras.
“There’s no camera in the bedroom,” I say, my train of thought coming right out my mouth. “He told me when…when…”
I shudder.
Don’t be such a cold fucking fish, he’d said after my wedding dress had been discarded and his hands were sliding up my thighs. There are no cameras in here.
Those were the last words he ever said.
“Good,” Curse says. “Probably better if nobody saw you push him and then immediately make a phone call.”
He glances at my phone, which is on the counter beside us.
With a few quick movements, he’s retrieved the SIM card.
He puts the card down on the counter, using the tip of his knife to break it apart into tiny, jagged shards.
Once it’s completely destroyed, he sweeps the pieces into the same sealable plastic bag he put the bloody gloves into before returning the bag to his pocket.
“Put it in airplane mode now,” he tells me, handing me my phone, “then turn it off.”
I do so. Before I can look up again, something cold and hard grazes the side of my throat.
His knife.
I try to flinch away, but his head is on the other side, the material of his black medical mask grazing my ear as he quietly says, “It’s going to look a lot better on the cameras if I’m forcing you out of here.”
I try to hear what he says, try to listen past the thunder of my own heartbeat in my ears. The knife is so carefully balanced, nearly tender against my skin. I shiver helplessly.
“I’m kidnapping you,” he says. “Not helping you. Do you understand?”
I can’t tell if he means that’s what it needs to look like on the cameras…
Or if that’s what he’s actually doing.
I never thought about what would come after I made that call.
Never thought about what it would mean to throw myself into Curse Titone’s power. Possibly forever.
“I understand.”
He puts the knife down for a second, grasping my waist and lifting me to sit on the counter. “Now-”
I drop my phone and snatch the knife, holding the blade up between us.
My hands shake like leaves rattled by a terrible wind. He and I both know I’d never actually be able to use this knife. But at least this way it looks like I’m resisting. I can play into his game.
I can rely on him to be the monster.
I hear his deep inhale. Something writhes at the back of his dark eyes.
“Good,” he murmurs. His hands slide down from my waist to my hips, gripping hard. “But you know I’m going to have to take that from you now.”
Before I can answer or react, he’s forced himself between my thighs, his hands closing quickly around my wrists.
He bends over me, backing my spine up against the mirror.
I’m still in nothing but the lingerie I was wearing beneath my wedding gown tonight, a sheer boustier with white silk panties.
My nipples graze his chest, then prickle and grow taut.
“If I weren’t worried about leaving too much DNA behind,” Curse says, “I’d make you cut me with that.” He tugs hard, drawing the blade towards his own face. I squirm, finally fighting him for real, terrified of the knife actually cutting into him.
“Stop!”
He doesn’t. Not until the blade hovers just in front of his own left eye. I cease moving, holding my breath. If Curse so much as blinks, I’m sure it’ll slice right through his eyelid.
He doesn’t seem to care at all, his gaze fathomless as he stares right through the knife and into me. I wonder if anything has the power to frighten him anymore.
After what feels like forever, I can finally breathe again, because he lowers both my hands to the counter beside my hips.
I release the knife at once, sending it clattering to the granite surface.
My chest heaves, my breasts dragging across his chest. My legs are spread wide to accommodate his bulk between them.
I notice sudden tension strain the muscles around his eyes the same moment I feel it.
He’s hard.
But a split second after I notice the thick, hot bar of his flesh press against mine, he’s grasping the knife once more and stepping away from me.
“Wash your feet.”
Dazedly, I look down at them, dangling from where I’m sitting on the counter. They’re dark with dried and cracking blood. One by one, I pull them up and put them into the sink. The water swirls around my polished toes, turning a murky and diluted red before disappearing down the drain.
“With soap,” Curse says. “Quickly.”
He’s a little agitated now, which he wasn’t before. He seemed perfectly at ease after slitting Marco’s throat. But now he appears impatient, glancing between me and the bathroom doorway. Like he’s itching to get out of here.
He won’t get any complaints from me. I don’t want to spend one more second in this fucking house.
The same house I would have lived in, been mistress of, if things had gone differently tonight. If Marco hadn’t reminded me so much of his uncle in Sicily.
If Curse hadn’t been here.
Hold on…
“How did you get here so fast?”
Curse is facing away from me right now, staring out the open bathroom door. He’s bigger than when I last saw him, thirty now instead of eighteen. His six-foot-something frame, the breadth of his leather-clad shoulders, take up most of the doorway.
He shouldn’t have been here. As far as I know, he spends almost all his time in Canada.
And unless I blacked out and lost hours of awareness after Marco was knocked unconscious, I don’t think I’m wrong about the fact that Curse was in the house, in the very room with me, less than five minutes after I called him. I was too stunned to question that.
Until now.
“Curse.” I turn off the tap, then say his name again, louder this time. There’s no way he doesn’t hear me. “Curse. What were you doing here?”
“I was in the neighbourhood,” he replies, finally turning back to me. He tears a towel from its hook with his free hand and tosses it onto my lap. I quickly scrub my toes, heels, and ankles. I’m glad he told me to wash up. I don’t want Marco’s blood on me anymore.
“In the neighbourhood,” I repeat incredulously, grabbing my phone and sliding down off the counter now that I’m dry. I make sure not to land on any of the bloody smears I’ve left on the tile.
His black gaze flicks down my body. There’s that same tightening around his eyes again. A moment later, he’s removed his jacket and tossed it over my shoulders. The scent of leather and him – my God, precisely the same as it was on that hoodie in Montreal – envelops me.
“You were in the neighbourhood for what?” I press.
“A wedding,” he replies.
He places the knife against the leather at my back.
And then, we disappear.