Chapter 18
KENNA
A shift in the air warned me when Laney came back into the room, routinely looking over her shoulder, but the wariness dissipated when she turned her attention back to the painting.
“I need to make this house more friendly, don’t you think? What if we put this beside my mirror? Or wait–no, oh,” She exclaimed. “Wouldn’t it hang nicely above the fireplace!” Her excitement was not all the way entirely genuine.
I looked up at her on a small stool as she fixed a couple nails into the wall. For once taller than me. The house was unusually quiet. I could see the guard conjugate as normal outside on the lawn from Laney’s window. It appeared as a picture of normality, but something was off.
“Hmm.” I responded, wiggling my eyebrows at her, joking. “So, you can stare at me while in bed? I like it.”
“More like you can stare at yourself.” She forced a chuckle and then got quiet. “Can you hold this up for me?”
I stood immediately and held the frame against the wall.
My eyes strayed from the task at hand. I knew Laney was wary of me. In the last couple of days, I felt strange—like an insurmountable canyon was being filled with water, and I was stuck at the bottom. The conversation with the guy in the forest had me on edge. His energy had been inconsistent, unpredictable, and that, with mounting tension on the estate, made me anxious.
“Is there something you’d like to say?” Laney broke the silence.
I stumbled for a response. “Just how beautiful you are.”
She blushed and looked away again, but there was something more she was withholding.
One of the guards from outside the window looked me dead in the eye then, and it made the blood drain from my face, feeling suddenly faint.
“I’m sorry,” I muttered to Laney, feeling as if static flooded my brain. “I need to sit.”
“Are you alright?” Her voice filled with concern.
I dismissed her. “Yeah, yeah, just let me—” I fell into a chair, but as I did a sharp pain ripped through my backside. I searched for the offending item underneath me, and laughed, nervously.
“Kenna,” She jumped from her stool. “Please, don’t open that.”
I shook the box lightly, eliciting a dampened rattle sound. It was a wonder I didn’t squash it when I sat down.
When my thoughts cleared, pleading eyes stared at me. “Please,” she said.
“What is it?”
“It was my mother’s.”
“You don’t talk about your mum that much?”
“Father barely talks about her.” I looked at her. A sad smile spread across her face.
“I haven’t opened it yet,” She explained. “I’m only meant to open it after I get married.”
I tilted my head, in confusion. She had already been married.
“I went into isolated counselling before my wedding night. Couldn’t open it.”
I nodded, put the box to my side, and leaned my head back into a sigh. My head was heavy, but my vision had cleared—finally.
“This stuff is full of memories, huh.” I tried to stifle the bitterness in my voice. A house was a house in my household, never a home. It was difficult to watch an operation of safety and security when your parents taught you how to handle a chokehold before a hug. Besides, I didn’t have enough stuff to call it a collection.
Wealth gave you the opportunity to explore possibilities. It was a luxury my family couldn’t afford, it’s why chains have become an accessory in my wardrobe. I couldn’t pay for jewellery.
Laney sighed. “Never got to leave, though. Not to go out, have fun, live my own life, you know?”
“Have you ever been to a party?”
“No, have you?”
A long time ago. It was a drunken haze of teenage petulance and hormonal disrespect that only led to mistakes and punishments. “You’re not missing anything. Believe me.”
“So, you have!” She grunted, “I just want to experience that.”
“You really don’t. It’s not what you think. Intoxicated people are so annoying.”
“Yeah, but you know that. I don’t, and I wan–”
“No.” The word cut through the room. I didn’t mean for it to come out so harsh. “No,” I said softer. “My memory is still foggy on what happened at the last party I went to. It was late, I was drunk, and something happened that night that dulled the colours of the world. I see it only through the lens of how a diver looks up at the water above them, transparent but rippling into obscurity. I woke up in a bed without the girl I went to sleep with, only this.” I pointed toward the scar on my collarbone. “You don’t want that.”
“You loved another girl.” It wasn’t a question, but the devastation on her face prompted me to answer it.
I shook my head. “It was nothing.” Getting up from my chair, I approached her and pushed a lock of her hair behind her ear. “One sided. Brief. Humiliating.” A dark cloud overtook my features.
That woman had used me. It was on a job, not unlike this current mission, to kill the head of the family business. But it was brutal. I was hired as a maid to the old matriarch, and when I would administer her medicine, she would reach her hand under my skirt and run her fingers through my folds. Each touch felt like poison had entered my veins, but I had to bear it to achieve the goal. She loved to play with her little fucktoy.
To cope, I fell into her housekeeper's bed to console me, and she eased my pain. The night I got drunk at the party, I was there happily dancing with the housekeeper, and someone whispered to her about the old lady's obsession with me. She didn't give me the chance to her that I didn't want them. She was disgusted and ran me from the house with the wound to my collarbone. I'd loved that woman for her comfort, or at least, I thought I did. Afterwards, I was told I was one in a long line of maids she'd used and thrown out. The worst part was that I thought she really cared.
Laney took me out of my thoughts when she looked down at her feet, suddenly shy. “Have you ever been in love?”
“No, never,” I said, quickly, and lifted her chin to be in line with mine with a finger. “Unless it could be with you.”
The words hung heavy in the air, clouding the room with an energy so unexplored and vulnerable neither one of us knew what to do with it. But goddamn, it was honest.
She cleared her throat after a prolonged minute. “We should get some wine.”
I inwardly groaned. My head was fuzzy from feeling lightheaded already, alcohol would be a lethal mix, but I needed something to take the edge off the tension that racked my body. Nodding my head, I walked out the door after her.
She led me to a hidden staircase in the dining room.
“You have a wine cellar?”
“Of course, you don’t form an alliance with the Italians without reaping a reward.”
I let out a laugh. Rows of white and red wines lined the walls, all from different parts of Italy, but mostly Sicily. Messina. Syracuse. Palermo. Scopello. They had it all. I stood in admiration of this wealth and opulence, yet inwardly, I fantasised about turning this place into my personal rage room.
“Pick one.”
My eyes scanned the shelves, back and forth, reading the names as if they meant something to me. Finally, I settled on one—a red Etna Rosso.
After I handed it to her, she took it to a minibar at the end of the shelving and uncorked the bottle before heading up the stairs again carrying two glasses.
I followed her out but took note of the secret passageway as we left. This might come in useful sometime.
A herd of men marched down the hallway at that moment caused the floor to vibrate under our feet.
I shot a hand out in front of Laney to stop her in her tracks, I used my outstretched arm to push myself in front of her to see round the corner of the door at the group of men approaching.
Dylan’s brother was among them and gave me a firm look. When I returned my gaze to Laney, I knew she saw.
“Let’s take the wine outside,” I suggested, and she agreed, moving toward the front of the house, where we sat perched on the front steps.
“What’s happening?” Laney seemed to wonder aloud.
“I don’t know.” But I did. I just thought I had more time.
Most of the commotion was taking place behind the estate house, but groups of men discussed in hushed tones in front of us, too. They were throwing meaningful and worried glances at us and the side of the house when Neenan walked up to them and gave them a stern look with words I couldn’t decipher.
Then, he came toward us. “Laney,” he said when he got near. “Can I talk with you?” She went to nod, but he interrupted to clarify, “Alone.”
“It’s okay,” I said as I waved them off. I had to fight the instinct to bite my cuticles.
I watched the men talk as I waited. When Laney returned, it didn’t take long for her many words to fracture my mind into scrambled thoughts.
“Tell me about your family.”