Page 41 of Bad Bishop

A frustrated growl tore out of my mouth. I shook my head, tossing the phone onto my bed beside me. A tremor shot up my spine. A sign of the entrance door slamming shut. I froze.

It was only four in the afternoon. Tiernan should be at work, probably checking on his gambling joints and whorehouses.

Who the hell just walked in?

Maybe one of his guards decided to take a spin on the helpless girl.

I jerked open my nightstand drawer and pulled out a butcher knife. Tiernan had forgotten to hide it when I first moved in.Rookie mistake. He had cleared out the apartment of everything else lethal. I tucked the phone into the waistband of my sweatpants and advanced toward the hallway.

My heart dropped at the silhouette of a long-legged woman in knee-high Louboutin boots and a black faux fur coat. Huge Miu Miu sunglasses covered her face.

Lovely. Another one of my husband’s sex workers, I thought before she spun toward me, her marvelous bloodred hair flinging in slow motion across her shoulders.

Tierney.

“Oh, good. You’re still alive.” She tore the sunglasses from her face, tossing them onto the kitchen island along with her Chanel bag. She strutted to the fridge. “Tiernan asked me to check on you.”

He did? Why? He was perfectly happy to let me rot here alone for two weeks.

“Is that a butcher knife in your hand?” Her face popped from the fridge, which she closed with a kick of her stiletto, hugging fresh eggs and a jar of olives to her chest. “Can’t blame you, girl. I want to kill my brother at least five times a day.” She rolled her sparkling emerald eyes. “The only thing stopping me at this point is selfishness. What if I ever need a kidney donor, you know?”

I placed the knife on the counter, watching her in fascination. I’d never met a woman who was so unapologetically herself. Every Camorra woman I knew tried to fit into the mold the men in her life created for her.

“Jaysus, it’s boiling in here. He lets you put the thermostat on seventy-six?” She peeled off her coat, revealing a burgundy evening dress, almost the color of her hair. “He has it bad for you, girl. In the twenty-eight years we’ve spent together, he hasn’t once let me close a window to fight the chill.”

I did change the thermostat on my third day here. It was originally set to forty-two. Even two pairs of socks and a puffy sweater couldn’t ward off the cold. My guess was he hadn’t noticed. He was barely home, anyway.

Also…twenty-eight? That was his age? I was only eighteen. He already had an unfair advantage over me without adding life experience into the mix.

Placing my elbows against the kitchen island, I studied her, waiting for an explanation for why she was here. Tierney arranged the food items on the other side of the island, extracting tiny ciabatta buns from a paper bag I hadn’t noticed before.

“Tiernan said you’re losing a bunch of weight. He wants the deal with the Camorra to be fruitful, so he asked that I make sure you eat. Don’t worry. I won’t force you.” She flashed me a smart-ass smile. “You’llwantto eat my Tunisian fricassee. It’s decadent.”

I noticed she had a tattoo running from the side of her neck to her shoulder.

Oderint Dum Metuant.

It looked faded, blue, and uneven. The kind of tattoo you’d get from an amateur in prison.

Tiernan had the exact same one, I realized. They probably got it together.

“My God, look at you.” She reached across the island, snatching my jaw between her black almond nails, angling my head left and right. “You’re breathtaking. You look like a younger Doutzen Kroes.”

I had no idea what she just said. Maybe I misread her lips. The sleep deprivation was really taking its toll on me.

Tierney continued chatting away, not letting the fact that I didn’t respond to her stop her or even slow her down.

“My secret ingredient is this.” She drummed her fingernails over a small glass jar with a red paste inside it. “Pilpelchuma instead of harissa. It’s a chili garlic paste. I think your Italian palate will appreciate it.” She winked, then went on to drain a tuna can and dump a few eggs and potatoes into boiling water. “Tiernan and I spent a few months in North Africa hiding from…oh, let’s call themeager friends.” She chopped parsley and red onion thinly. “We were in hiding, fourteen, and school wasn’t on the menu, so I had a lot of spare time to learn how to cook, ride, drive, survive.” She hitched a shoulder up. “We’ve becomeverygood at surviving, by the way. In case you want to kill him.”

My brain screeched to a halt. Something didn’t add up. Before our nuptials, I oversaw Enzo and Luca discussing Tiernan. They said he lived in Ireland until he was fourteen, which was when his father moved him and his siblings to New York. No one mentioned anything about North Africa.

I knew next to nothing about my husband’s background. Shame Tierney couldn’t be trusted. I’d love to pick her brain.

“But enough about my glamorous life. What’s going on with you? How are you settling in?” Tierney licked the sharp knife in her hand, tongue lolling across the green-leafed edge. She slapped a generous amount of the red paste onto the now deep-fried bread. She then filled the bread with soft-boiled potatoes, tuna, sliced boiled egg, parsley, and prune-like black olives dripping oil. The sandwich overflowed.

She turned to face me, sighing at my stubborn silence. “You can trust me. I have no loyalty to T. Not since he let your cunt of a brother dictate my love life. Do you know Achilles makes me walk around with a chaperone to keep me from screwing people?”

I didn’t, but it sounded exactly like something Achilles would do. It did surprise me that he bothered in the first place. UnlikeLuca and Enzo, Achilles never took an interest in another human seriously enough to make an effort.