29
Rafael
Ihanded Isa’s father the crystal tumbler filled with scotch, his grimace falling on the marks on my chest with my shirt hanging open. My name on Isa’s skin was smaller, much more localized despite the length of my name.
Hers took up the majority of my chest, the wounds angry and red as they healed. He tossed back the scotch quickly as I took a sip of my own and set it on the desk. Leaning my ass onto the surface, I watched as he stood from his seat.
“I don’t think I want to know anything about your relationship with my daughter,” he said, swallowing back the nausea I was sure he felt at seeing her name carved into my chest.
“Probably not,” I admitted with a smirk. I’d damn well kill anyone who went near my daughter eventually one day, so I liked to think I had an inkling of understanding about burying his head in the sand to deny the things he couldn’t stop. “I won’t tolerate people coming between us, but if you want to have a place in our life, I won’t stop you. So long as you accept her place in mine and what she means to me.”
He nodded, moving toward the door. “And you swear to me that you won’t hurt her?”
“I swear to you that I won’t hurt her in a way that the entire purpose is to cause her pain. There will be things in our relationship that she doesn’t agree with and choices I take away from her, but I do it with her best interest in mind and to enable her to better survive in my world.” I took another sip of my scotch as he left the office without another word, wondering how I’d ended up catering to Isa’s father. I much preferred when we were home onEl Infiernoand I didn’t feel obligated to explain myself to anyone.
The answers we needed couldn’t come soon enough.
I finished my drink, setting the glass on the desk one final time and sighing before I worked myself up to facing the negativity of her mother and sister. Something would need to be done to bring her mom to heel for Isa’s sake.
I just didn’t know what, given that Isa would castrate me if I dealt with her in the way I typically handled the people that annoyed me.
A soft feminine knock came on the door, making me snap my head to face it as Odina stepped into the space and leaned her weight into the door she closed behind her. Her eyes tracked up from my feet, trailing over my black slacks and to the defined muscles of my abs. Given our previous encounter had ended with my hand around her throat, my only hesitation in killing her being her parents in the other room, she was either incredibly stupid or unreasonably fearless.
Probably both.
Her gaze caught on her sister’s name etched into my skin, a scowl twisting her lips that were identical to my wife’s. “That’s a shame,” she muttered, raising her eyes to meet mine as she took a few steps closer. She stayed a few feet away, replacing her scowl with a cruel smirk that I recognized all too well from what I saw in the mirror before I hurt someone I hated.
“What do you want, Odina?” I asked, my face shutting down to complete and utter boredom. How someone could look nearly identical tomi reinaand still be nothing to me blew me away. Not even the trace of an emotion tugged at my chest, seeing the hatred on her face and knowing the place of pain that it came from.
“If you wanted to hurt her, you should have just cut her throat. Well, a little deeper anyway,” she said, stepping forward until she was only a foot away. She reached around me, pouring scotch into the tumbler I’d emptied and helping herself to the liquid. I’d already thought it odd that her parents allowed her to drink in their presence considering that the twins were only eighteen and illegal in the United States, but I supposed they’d long since given up on keeping Odina sober.
Alcohol was the least of her addictions, and from what I’d seen in my time watching Isa, Odina was far more tolerable to be around when she was plied with booze.
“I don’t have any interest in hurting my wife,” I growled, reaching for the bottom of my shirt and tugging the two halves together. I buttoned it slowly, not making any sudden movements out of a desire to keep Odina from pushing the limits with me once again.
I wouldn’t hesitate to strangle her again, but without Isa to stop me I couldn’t promise that Iwouldstop. There was no denying that Isa’s life would be far simpler without her sister in it. She would have been better off if Odina had died that day in the river, and I didn’t care what it said about me that I was willing to admit it.
“Hugo promised me you would hurt her,” she said, stepping closer and touching the second button on my shirt as I fastened it. I pushed her hand away, quirking a brow at her to try to tell her just how foolish it would be to touch what wasn’t hers. “I didn’t say anything that night or when Wayne mysteriously turned up dead. I kept your dirty little secret because I wanted her to suffer. Tell me, how is she fucking suffering?” she asked, glancing around the lavish office and glaring at the books as if they represented the worst crimes of humanity.
Because they’d been given to Isa.
“You can’t make her hurt just because you do,” I said, dismissing her and moving to step past her for the doors.
She caught my arm in her grip, her nails digging into the skin. “You knownothingabout me and my pain. She deserves to rot for what she took from me.”
“And what was that exactly? Your humanity?” I asked, tearing my arm out of her grip. “You are nothing but a spiteful cunt. You can’t handle that your sister has everything you could ever want, because you know you don’t matter to anyone.”
“Please. You think the husband with the nice house and the pretty clothes matters to me? I’ve seen the pitch blacknothingthat comes when youdie. I have felt the burning in my lungs while I watched my mother choose her. All that matters to me is making that go away and forgetting that every day I am one step away from going back into the black pit of death,” she said, her voice dropping to a gentle murmur.
I felt a moment of compassion, imagining what that black must have been like, but it didn’t explain the witch she’d become when she could have made the choice to live her life differently. The compassion wasn’t for the woman standing in front of me, but for the sister that had shouldered her hatred all her life and tried to make amends for something she hadn’t done intentionally in the first place. “What exactly does that have to do with Isa?”
“Seeing her hurt makes me feel better,” she said, her lips curving into a smile as she darted forward and touched her lips to my chest, directly above Isa’s name. I grabbed her head in my hands, shoving her off of me until she stumbled backward with a chuckle. “Oops,” she said, her voice mocking as she cast her eyes toward the doorway.
Where Isa stood, watching with her arms hanging limply at her side. Those hands curled into fists, her jaw clenching as she twisted her mouth into a grimace.
She couldn’t possibly think—
Her eyes dropped to my still partially unbuttoned shirt, glaring at the smeared lipstick Odina had left on my chest. I grabbed a tissue off the desk, using it to clean the red stain from my skin as I leveled Odina with a hard glare. “Thatwas very fucking stupid.”