Page 100 of Dirty Game

“Yeah.”

The silence is absolute. Not even a car horn or the hum of the elevator thirty floors below. Just the thud of two hearts out of sync.

Rosalynn studies the scar again. “She did this?”

I shake my head. “My father did that one. Passage of rights. Fucked up on a job. Family tradition—he said if you make a mess, you wear it.” I wait to see if she’ll recoil. She doesn’t. She traces the jagged line down my chest, following it all the way to my stomach.

“Your father sounds like mine.”

“He was worse. Or maybe just better at it.” I grab her hand, not gentle, and press it flat to the base of my sternum. “Most people want to fix what’s broken. Some just want to see how much you can take before you split open.”

Her eyes search mine. “Did you love her?”

I don’t flinch. “I loved the war. She was the only person who could fight me and keep up.”

She lets that answer hang, considering. “But you let her live.”

“Not for her. For him. I wanted to know how he’d turn out. Wanted to see if my bloodline could do better than the last generation.”

Rosalynn nods, like this makes sense. In our world, it does.

Her fingers resume the circuit, slower now. She finds a round scar on my hip, traces the rim with her thumb. “This one?”

“Old job. Shot went clean through. Hurt worse getting stitched up by Korrin than taking the bullet.”

She laughs, real and sudden. “He doesn’t strike me as gentle.”

“He’s not. Never has been.” I watch her face while she works, the way her expression softens when she finds another scar, the way she makes them less ugly just by touching them.

“Yours?” I ask, meaning the scars on her wrists and the thin line through her eyebrow.

She answers without words, moving my hand to her left wrist. She pushes the watchband aside, exposing a patchwork of pale burns. “Marco. He liked me quiet.”

I curl my hand around her arm, thumb covering the worst of it. “You deserved better.”

She doesn’t argue. Instead, she fits herself tighter to my side, burying her face in my neck.

I wait for her to ask the next question. I can feel it buzzing in her skin.

She asks anyway: “Would you kill her now, if you had the chance?”

I don’t answer for a long time. I think about Sienna’s face, the exact dead look in her eyes when she stabbed me.

I think about Dante, four years old and already smarter than me.

I think about my father’s words:If you can’t kill it, own it.

“Probably,” I say.

Rosalynn doesn’t look disappointed. If anything, she looks satisfied.

She rolls on top of me, letting her hair fall over my chest. She stretches out, her body cold in spots where the sheets have slipped away. She lays her head on my heart and listens.

I keep my hand on her hair, steady.

We stay like that while the sun creeps up the skyline, burning the last shadows off the city.

I say, “You’re not afraid of me.”