Page 35 of Betraying Family Vows

"Because something told me you weren't the enemy," he says.

"And what am I then?"

He doesn't answer right away.

Instead, he shifts, and for a moment, I think he's going to grab me.

But he just leans in. Close.

So fucking close I can feel his body heat again.

His hand lifts, grabbing my jaw. Not hard, just firm enough to keep my attention.

"I don't know what you are yet," he says. "But now I want to find out."

12

DIMITRI

The sky is black. Not city dark. Real dark. Rural dark. The kind of dark where you can't trust anything past your headlights.

We've been driving for hours.

My shoulders ache from the tension, from staying alert this long. The car needs gas. My body needs rest. I need a place to stage the next move. Running blind is how people die.

Once we settle, I'll call my brothers. I don't want to check in until I have more than half a story. I'm the one who enforces plans, not guesswork.

I've been watching my mirrors since we left the last safehouse. No sign of a tail. But in our world, that's how it works.

Someone's looking. Someone always is.

This little hellfire beside me hasn't spoken in a while.

She's barefoot, still wiping small traces of blood from her feet with tissues I gave her. Trying to pretend she's not broken. But she is.

I want to sympathize with her. I know what that feeling's like. In my case, my tasks helped push the family name forward, gain territory, or stop our enemies. With her, she's so mixed up I almost feel bad for her.

Almost.

I mean, she fucking drugged me. Tried to kill me. And whether she would've followed through or not is irrelevant, the men she worked with absolutely would've finished the job.

Either way, I'm still trying to decide what to do with her. I've got half the truth out of her, but not all of it. She knows more. The man who set her in motion, this John G. prick, he's connected to something bigger. I feel it in my bones. Same network Cosmo was working for. Same people behind my father's death. This "S" character.

So I'm not letting her go until I know everything she does.

But first, we need gas.

I'm running low, and I don't trust driving further on these empty roads. We're somewhere between Argos and the coast. No real towns out here. Just olive fields, empty dirt stretches, and one shitty all-night gas station I know from years ago.

It's a 24-hour stop for truckers mostly, and now, its sign flickers in the distance.

I slow down, turn off the road, and pull into the station, parking at a pump near the convenience store entrance. The place is mostly deserted except for two semi-trucks idling at the far end, their engines humming.

Athena shifts in her seat and looks around.

"What are we doing here?"

"Seeing if they have a room." I pause. "Getting gas."