A knock sounds on my door.
I barely hear it.
King barges in. “Bro, been calling you for three days. Where’d you go?”
I shake my head.
I can’t stop shaking it.
“Maks?”
I swallow the heat in my throat.
It hurts.
It hurts like I’ve swallowed someone’s soul, and I’m holding it hostage in my throat.
“Maks?” He tries again.
I jerk away from him, not trusting myself, not trusting the pleasure, the pain, the sickness that makes me well.
“I met the devil last night,” I whisper instead. He doesn’t know that it was my own reflection.
“What did he tell you?” His voice trembles as if playing the same game when he isn’t even on the roster.
I rock back and forth and finally whisper, “He said welcome home.”
Chapter Two
“Someday, Utterson, after I am dead, you may perhaps come to learn the right and wrong of this. I cannot tell you.” —Robert Louise Stevenson
Izzy
I’ve been in love with Maksim ever since he walked up to me when we were ten and offered to build me an ant farm.
It was a defining moment in my young life.
I’d always loved insects, and yes, at one point I was guilty of doing the whole let’s grab a magnifying glass and see how long it takes to set the little guys on fire thing, only to be told by my judgmental killer dad that it was wrong and considered torture.
I vaguely remember that he’d been wiping blood from his hands at the time and was sporting a black eye and cracked tooth.
Mafia.
The double standard was unreal with the bosses, my dad included. Careful, Izzy, don’t kill the grasshopper. Oh look, Uncle Sergio has another tally mark tattoo on his body; what does that make this? His fiftieth kill?
This discussion happened over freaking Thanksgiving the following year when I asked my twin Ash to pass me the rolls.
The best and worst part was that it’s completely normal to have those types of conversations at the table. I’d like to think it’s what’s kept the five families strong throughout the years, the complete inability to censor any and every conversation, even in front of the kids.
They never shielded us from what they did, and they never justified why people had to die, just that it was in order for us to live; that was the agreement.
Most of my cousins and I wouldn’t trade our way of life for the world—until recently when it started going to hell.
First, with my cousin Serena and my friend, Junior, the heir to the Nicolasi throne. Yeah, that was bad, so bad.
They nearly died for their love and all because, you guessed it, double standards.
The dads all made a pact with the kids—mainly the heirs—a blood pact that none of the heirs would date, and that unfortunately extended to me as well. In this life you never knew and now that Vi was with Valerian, it falls to me and Ash, since we were twins. If anything happened to him, well, I’d like to think that pesky double standard wouldn’t exist, and I would take over as underboss or at least the leader of my Family even though Uncle Nixon was the boss.
The next to fall were Violet and Valerian—long, complicated story.
That story was cheerfully followed by Ash and Annie, another complicated story that nearly ended in bloodshed, not to be outdone by Kartini and Tank just a few months ago.
Mostly everyone had someone.
Except for me and King, the Capo’s heir, and last remaining guy, and the younger kids who were just now starting high school,
I refused to count Maksim for obvious reasons that gave me a headache when I started tallying them. It always made my chest ache, and I hated being so upset over something I had no control over.
I sighed and checked my phone again.
He was late.
He was never late until a few months ago when he started sleepwalking like a psychopath and saying things that made absolutely no sense—to the point that he wasn’t the same Maksim anymore.
I mean, I always knew that when his father asked him to step up, things would get a bit crazy. He’s a Sinacore-Petrov, after all, the perfect mixture of Italian loyalty and Russian aggression.
But this felt different—scary even.
And every time I asked him if he was okay, he’d laugh it off like he did everything and change the subject.
I was resorting to looking through his room and phone—it only happened once, but I suddenly felt like the crazy jealous girlfriend even though we weren’t dating.
No, he shut that down this last year.
He’d hurt me.
He’d made me cry.
He’d made me scream.
He’d made me feel like I wasn’t special anymore.
I expected someone that gorgeous wouldn’t just sleep with me and marry me at the age of eighteen. I just didn’t expect the manwhore to start fucking anything with two legs then come scrambling back with fake apologies and smiles as if what he did was suddenly okay now that he’d experienced the world outside of his very first relationship with yours truly.