Chapter 45
ACHILLES
Five months earlier:
“I gotta ask.”
I grin as I glance up from my phone. “Ask what?”
Dinner is cleared from the dining area outside on Ya-ya’s roof. Mom and Iris are inside with her, Uncle Hades, Aunt Elsa and Bella, making coffee and organizing dessert. Dad and I are still out here enjoying the delightful summer weather.
“Is it hard?”
“Uhh…” I snicker. “Dad?”
He rolls his eyes. “Don’t be a child,” he chuckles. “I was trying to pay you a compliment, you little shit,” he grins. “I was going to say is it hard being such a fucking great kid.”
It’s my turn to roll my eyes. “How’s that scotch, dad?” I chuckle, nodding at the glass in his hand.
“Twenty-five years old, making it literally more mature than the kid making boner jokes,” he fires back.
“Dude, come on, you walked right into that!” I smile when he laughs back, then shrug. “In any case, no, it’s not hard to be this awesome.”
He laughs again. “Normally I'd say something to at least partially deflate that ego. But fuck it, what can I say?” He winks. “Your mom and I made two pretty goddamn perfect kids.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I groan, dropping my gaze back to my phone, where Kyla Halbertson has just sent me another picture of herself draped across her bed in her underwear.
Kyla doesn’t interest me at all, even though she probably should.
She’s my age, “hot” by pretty much any standards, and comes from the same world I do.
That’s weirdly important when it comes to dating.
I’ve tried to go out with girls who don’t come from mafia families seeped in wealth and danger before.
It…never works.
Yes, there’s a distinct possibly that it never works because I don’t work with most people. I have tastes I can’t and don’t share. There are parts of me that are always covered in this “perfect” fucking gold mask, one that I’ve never once been tempted to remove with anyone.
I mean, I don’t even take it off in front of my parents. Like fuck I’m letting it slip with a hookup, or even someone I’m dating.
Nope.
But Kyla does come from my world. Her father, Joey, runs a pretty well-connected crime syndicate based in Chicago. Her grandfather, George Halbertson, teaches economics at Knightsblood, which Kyla just graduated from this past spring.
Gramps being one of the more hard-ass professors at school isn’t the reason I’ve never touched Kyla, though, despite her near-constant attempts.
I’m just…not interested. And a huge part of that is that I can already see it playing out, just like every potential relationship.
We’ll get close, or at least pretend to.
The question of intimacy will come up, and she’ll ask what I’m “into”.
I’ll say I like it rough, which is barely scratching the surface, and she, like every girl before her, will assume that means I want to spank her a little and maybe use fuzzy pink handcuffs in the bedroom.
At that point, I have two options: pretend that I’m actually enjoying the fuzzy fucking Muppet handcuffs, or show her what’s really lurking behind the golden boy facade. But if I choose the second option, watching her run away screaming is probably the ideal outcome.
The less-than-ideal outcome would be what happened when I tried to show Cassidy, a high school girlfriend, what really got me hard.
In hindsight, “surprising” her with zip-ties, a switchblade, and a hockey mask was, arguably, not the best introduction to my kinks.
What can I say: I was young, dumb, and horny.
But the outcome of that particular foray into “being my true self” was Cassidy’s father calling the cops, and me having to lie to my own dad.
Thank fuck it happened in late October, so my story that I was “trying to be funny with my Halloween costume” wasn’t totally unbelievable.
But I learned a valuable lesson the day Cassidy ran away from me in sheer terror and broke off our ten-month relationship via text message saying “don’t ever come near me again”.
I learned that unless you’re literally perfect, don’t show people your “true self”. Don’t lay all those cards on the table.
Why should you, when you’ve got a perfectly good, shiny golden mask you can wear instead?
And that's exactly what I’ve done ever since.
Yes, my cousins and some of my closest friends have seen more of me than most. They’ve seen that the mask does have edges, with something unidentifiable lurking underneath it. But and that’s as close as I’ve ever gotten.
And that’s fine.
I am what people want me to be.
The perfect son and heir.
Top of his class.
Captain of the Privateers.
New president of Para Bellum.
A guy you would feel totally safe leaving your sister alone with, but also the guy who has girls sliding into his DMs pretty much every hour on the hour.
I present exactly as the golden boy the world wants to see. And that’s how it’s going to stay.
My phone dings. I glance down and see Kyla’s latest digital come-on: a picture of her squeezing her tits together in her bra and making a kissy-face at the camera while suggestively cupping her vagina through her panties.
I exhale in vanilla flavored boredom.
I am almost horny enough to contemplate taking Kyla up on her suggestion.
Almost. But not quite.
“I can see I’ve lost your attention.”
I glance up at my dad sheepishly. “Sorry, just…school thing.”
He snorts. “Yeah, sure.” He rolls his eyes as he stands and drains his glass. “Tell School Thing that I say hello.”
I chuckle.
“You know, kid,” he sighs. “I was once a bit of a heartbreaker, too.”
Which would surprise nobody who’s ever met my handsome, charming father.
“But you want to know something?”
“The second you saw Mom, you realized it was all a bunch of bullshit, and she was the love of your life, and you couldn’t imagine a reality without her in it?”
Dad grins at me. “So you do listen sometimes.”
“Kinda hard to miss that one,” I chuckle. “I’ve heard it about a million times.”
He winks at me as he walks over and drops a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll understand, one day. You'll see that one person, and boy….” He whistles and shakes his head. “Boom. Thunder. You’ll be done after that.”
Don’t hold your breath, Dad.
Because even though I look just like my father, I know I’m different from him. His charm is genuine.
Mine is a veneer that I’ve perfected after a lifetime of studying him.
“I’m going to go grab some of your mom’s pie,” he grins. “And then I might have some dessert.”
“Jesus,” I groan. “You can’t say shit like that to your own son!”
Dad cackles. “You coming in?”
“Yeah, after I bang my head against a wall hard enough to erase that mental image.”
He laughs again. “I’ll see you when you’re done, then.” He looks down into my eyes and smiles widely. “Love ya, kid.”
“Love you too, Dad.”
I take a deep, cleansing breath after he’s gone and glance at my phone again.
More “sexy” shots from Kyla.
Great.
Instead of responding, I set my phone face down on the table in front of me and lean back in my chair, fingers laced behind my head. My gaze swivels across Ya-ya's gorgeous rooftop gardens until it lands on the rooftop of a building on West 58th Street.
Fuck.
My family spent decades moving the right political and monetary pieces to make sure that when that building went up for sale, we could buy it.
Except a month ago we had the rug pulled out from under us when it finally did go up for sale and someone fucking else scooped it up.
Two someones, actually. One is Angelo Santoro, whose fuckstick son, Kyle, is a recent graduate of Knightsblood and the former president of Para Bellum.
The other is the notoriously psychotic mafia kingpin Nero De Luca, whose daughter, Yelena, is going to be a sophomore at Knightsblood this coming semester. I think she pledged The Order.
I’ve seen her on campus. She’s pretty, but I know almost nothing about her except for the fact that her psycho dad just bought that goddamn building.
I’m about to head inside and grab some dessert with the rest of the family when movement in the shadows on the roof across West 58th catches my eye.
For a second, my first thought is that the shadow creeping through the dark is a sniper, or some other threat. I mean, I was raised in the world of the mafia.
I spring from my chair and bolt across the roof, slipping into the darkness of Ya-ya’s rose bushes and slinking over to the side of our roof closest to the other building so I can get a better look.
I'm not armed. But if this is a threat, I’ll be calling for assistance, and in under sixty seconds, a dozen of the men my father has stationed all over this building will be up here lighting that shit up—
Wait.
I peer into the darkness across the street as a figure emerges from the shadows.
It’s not a sniper.
It’s an unarmed girl.
Her dark hair whips across her face in the wind, and the dark blue dress she’s wearing, which makes me think she’s just come from a business dinner of some kind, flutters madly around her knees.
A delicate hand comes up, furtively pushing her windswept hair out of her face, and I frown when I realize what I thought was too much makeup is actually her mascara running down her face.
She’s crying.
My guard lowers, but I stay in the shadows, watching her.
She takes an unsteady breath, obviously still sobbing as she wraps her arms around her body and crumples.
There's a tug inside me.
She moves closer to the edge of the roof, still hugging herself as she looks over it, down to the street below.
Suddenly, she climbs up onto the ledge.
What the fuck.
She stands tall—well, as tall as she’s able. She looks pretty short. But she stands proudly, and for one brief moment when her shoulders are back and her face is raised to the sky, I have a much better view of her.
Fuck me sideways.
What the fuck is Yelena De Luca doing up here?
Another shudder wrenches her body. A sob I see but can’t hear makes her shoulders collapse as she drops her hands and looks down at the street again.
She kicks off her shoes.
Oh, fuck.
She’s going to jump.
I lurch from the shadows of the rose bushes. Just before I’m forced to figure out what the fuck you yell at someone who’s about to leap off a forty-story building, Yelena screams.
It’s not a scream of pain or fear. It’s primal, and violent, and angry.
It’s fury and rage, coming from a subhuman part of her that rattles me to my core.
It’s a battle cry that rips the fucking world apart as her hands ball to fists, her head throws back, and her voice roars over the din of the city.
“FUCK! YOU!!” she bellows. I can hear her so clearly that she might as well be standing five feet away, not across a busy Manhattan street.
Her body is tense, her hair whipping in the wind. But she doesn’t look broken anymore, and the mascara doesn’t look like black tears now.
It looks like fucking warpaint.
“FUCK YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!!!” She roars out another blood-curdling, bone-chilling scream. “I’M A MOTHERFUCKING WOLF AND YOU WILL NEVER FUCKING brEAK ME!! EVER!”
I don’t really know why it hits me so hard. Maybe it’s that I’ve never seen someone act so primally before. Maybe it’s the juxtaposition of this small, beautiful girl roaring like the fucking devil.
Maybe it's the dramatics of the wind, and the night, and the neon of the city underneath us paired with that soul-flaying scream of defiance and rage and fury.
Then I realize why this moment’s hit me so viscerally.
This is what it looks like when a mask comes off.
This is what not pretending anymore sounds like.
This is what it feels like when you’re standing at the edge of the world and defiantly roaring “fuck you” into the abyss.
Fuck you to perfection, and expectations.
And I realize I’ve never seen anyone so naked and without armor before.
I’m not just looking at Yelena De Luca being really fucking angry.
I’m looking at her baring her fucking soul.
And it’s literally the most beautiful, captivating thing I’ve ever seen in my life.
Yelena tilts her head back and looks up at the night sky again. Her arms drop, her eyes closing like she’s reached nirvana.
And then she steps back onto solid ground. Her hands run through her hair and she takes another slow, steadying breath.
I watch, spellbound, as she slips her mask back into place.
She breathes in and out deeply, then turns and disappears, like this was all a vision I dreamed up.
But it wasn’t.
And now I’m fixated.
I’ve never felt like this, ever.
When I get back to the table I sit quietly, trying to process what I just witnessed.
I pick up my phone and immediately text Kyla “Not interested. Delete this number” before I block hers.
Then I start to dig.
It starts as these things have started so often before.
An interest.
A fascination.
But then I keep digging. I push deeper, peeling back more layers. And when I peer into the darker shadows of this girl, I gradually realize that this is no ordinary fascination.
This is a reflection of myself that I’ve never seen in another person.
And once I’ve seen that, I know there’s no going back.
No distance I won’t go.
No shadow I won’t look into.
No barrier I won’t breach, no line I won’t cross, no method I won’t use, until I know more about Yelena De Luca than she knows about herself.
Every secret. Every dream. Every fantasy, memory, and thought.
You’re so much like me.
You’re like nothing I’ve ever come across before.
And there’s no getting away now, Yelena.
Be seeing you soon…
…Little prey.