Page 4

Chapter two

No Snakes in Ireland

Gia

T here are no snakes in Ireland because they all came to America.

They washed up right here, in New York City. Green snakes that killed my father and pumped their venom into my mother’s heart, which poisoned me until I was as hard as petrified wood.

I would have been born Giovanna Morelli, had the green snakes of Ireland not slithered onto these shores.

I blinked my eyes open, as the unfamiliar scents tickled my nose. Far from the smell of winter berries and wool, I was surrounded by pine and other woodsy scented things. These were not from cheap grocery store candles. No, they were from expensive, cool diffusers that kept the scent subtle.

Far too rich for my taste. Sterile. Sophisticated. Lifeless.

The sheets were silk instead of flannel. Instead of the red brick of my apartment, there was drywall, painted a deep gray, or maybe even black. Expensive, moody dim lights accented the grim place.

My New York apartment bustled with the sound of foot traffic, bars, and the markets below. But this room was absolutely silent.

Cold. Controlled. Just like him.

And yet, I felt the warmth of relief spread over my chest. My foolish, stupid, traitorous chest.

You’re a traitor to Morelli!

No truer words were ever spoken.

I thought the Serpent Prince was a dream.

A dark angel who watched me from a black and gray armchair, hidden in the shadows.

An avenging angel of my sad, little girl fantasies.

The boy who I secretly hoped would look at me with warmth.

With the promise of happy endings as he led me from the darkness.

Before I could stop myself, I whispered, “Are you here to save me?”

And in a blink, the warmth was gone, as the weight of reality crashed down.

I was too old for things like hope. Or dreams. Or happy endings.

I was born in blood. I would die in blood. Just like my father and grandfather before me.

That was my curse.

He leaned forward, the lamplight casting shadows over his face. His lips peeled back into a menacing, predatory grin.

“Sorry to disappoint, Wife ,” he growled as his black eyes bored into me, as molten as his touch. “What—and I cannot emphasize this enough—the fuck did you think you were doing?”

His voice and his Irish accent sent vibrations under my skin, tingling at the small, romantic place that I needed to kill if I was to have my revenge.

“I-I-I…” I had no idea what I was supposed to say. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You passed out in the middle of ‘ I’ll Be Home for Christmas,’” he said with that sardonic bite to his Irish lilt. “Care to explain to me why my bride fainted in my arms, when I wasn’t doing anything particularly romantic?”

If he and romance met in a dark alley, he’d stab her and piss on her corpse.

“It was just a bad cold.” I pulled my legs up, my fingers searching for the edge of the blanket so I could get the fuck out of this prison of duvets.

“Is that right?” His expressionless face seemed to darken, even when he didn’t move a muscle.

“Yes.” My frantic searching turned into a panic. I was drowning in blankets.

I finally found the edge and pulled it off of me, exposing my naked legs.

What happened to my tights? My shoes? My dress?

My underwear? Fuck! Where were my…

I was in a huge t-shirt that drowned me down to mid-thigh. A gray Vasali University shirt.

“A cold?” Cillian tapped his finger on the arm rest, as he stared at me with his strange, obsidian eyes. The same ones as his father.

The last eyes my father, Giovanni Morelli, saw before his throat was slit by that iron blade. The iron, handleless blades of the Greens. That was their legacy, and their tradition.

The blades that served as their decoder rings, membership jackets, and secret passcodes. It also served as the marker for their most significant murders.

“Yes, a cold,” I said in frustration, as my feet touched the ground.

In a flash, he was on me, hand on my throat, his dark eyes a black fiery void of hatred.

“Do not lie to me, wife. ” His fury made me clench my thighs as his possessive hold on my throat tightened. My nipples pebbled and begged for his menacing touch. “I will take it as an insult. Now, lie down.”

His jaw was so tense, I saw the muscle pulsing at his molars.

His heated gaze was… intoxicating.

It shouldn’t be. I was staring into the eyes of a murderer, but the electricity between us sent a jolt through me that I couldn’t ignore. And I very much wanted to ignore it.

“Fuck you,” I choked out against his hand.

“I am not accustomed to repeating myself.” His voice was deceptively calm. “Lie down, or I will tie you down.”

I wanted to fight him. I wanted to defy him. But dizziness overtook me.

He let me go, and I gasped in the air I didn’t know I needed. Not when his hand had beckoned my heart to beat.

Of course, he’d own me. Uncle Eoghan must have laid an Irish curse on me when he tied us together.

Cillian handed me a glass of water from the nightstand and opened a yellow prescription bottle, dumping two pills into his rough palm.

“Tell me, my little Gia.” Even the way he said my name was full of arrogant contempt. “What kind of cold causes a knife wound in the abdomen?”

Shit. Of course, he had seen it. He had probably been the one to change my clothes.

Why didn’t I feel violated? Why did being unconscious and naked before him not send a shiver of disgust through me? I hadn’t consented. I would never want him to see me so vulnerable.

And yet, I wasn’t upset at that.

I pulled up the shirt to look at my wound. Black, medical-grade stitches poked out of my skin. The swelling that I had tried to cover up with gauze and antiseptic had healed, a little.

He bounced the pills in his hand, a clear command for me to take them.

I delicately pinched them from his hold, trying to minimize how much contact we had before examining them.

The medical name for them was stamped along the sides, so if he was trying to kill me…

he’d certainly have gone through a lot of effort to fake a painkiller and anti-inflammatory.

“Did you stitch yourself up?”

His hands were in his trouser pockets. He’d removed his tie; the top two buttons of his tuxedo shirt were unfastened. His hair was a mess, like he’d been tugging at it in frustration.

“Yes,” I admitted. Because the alternative was to lie, and then they might blame Marco for the poorly dressed wound. Who knew what they’d do to him.

“Why didn’t you come to me? To my family? To the fucking hospital?” he asked. “You had an infection, and the damn thing was a disgusting oozing mess before Maeve fixed you up.”

“Maeve isn’t a doctor,” I remarked.

At least she wasn’t yet. A med student.

“And yet, she did a better job on you than you did on yourself!” He yelled, then seemed to regain his control, and softened his voice. “If you hadn’t fainted, and we hadn’t fixed the wound, you would have died. Do you understand that?”

If Maeve knew I’d been stabbed, then my mother would too. The Green grapevine of gossip would have done its full rounds. I had hidden my wound from Mamma for four days, not wanting to break her heart any more than it was. Four careful days were now wrecked by the green serpents of New York.

I was going to throw up.

“Oh,” I said, stunned.

“Yeah.” He stepped away from the side of the bed, leaning back on the black-paned factory windows of his renovated penthouse. For good measure, he lifted a single brow, and sarcastically mocked, “Oh.”

He pulled the blade from his belt and started cleaning his nails. His initials, CKG—Cillian Kent Green—were etched on the handle.

My father’s last moments were with a blade that looked just like it, with slightly different letters.

Blood. So much fucking blood. The Greens were obsessed with spilling it, bathing in it, painting with it…

My grandfather’s blood. My father’s blood. My blood.

“Who did it?” he asked so casually that he might as well have been inquiring about my dinner plans.

Blood. So much fucking blood, I could smell it. I could taste it.

The iron taste, like their iron blades.

“Who did… what?” I swallowed the bile creeping up my throat.

He rolled his eyes, flipped the iron in his hand, and slipped it back in its sheath.

Suddenly I could breathe again.

“Who stabbed you, Wife?” Did he make his Irish accent thicker?

Jesus, he was born in the United States. His father had an accent, but he was born in Derry, so that tracked. But him? His mother was born in Hawaii and had no accent whatsoever. So, I knew that this was a put on.

He looked at me like I was some kind of simpleton, as he probed, “Well?”

“It was a mugging,” I said.

“A mugging you say?” And the accent grew thicker still. Was that how he got chicks? “And yet you have your phone, wallet, your keys. Your bank accounts haven’t reported a cancellation of stolen cards. So–”

“Are you stalking me?”

“Stalking?” His chuckle was sardonic, and cruel. So why did it warm me? Why was his cruelty so pleasant to my ears? “Love, you seem to be under the impression that you’re not, in fact, a prisoner on a very long leash.”

There it was.

The secret none of us mentioned because it was impolite to discuss. They had access to my accounts. My mother’s accounts. The Morelli and Durante fortunes were under their guardianship to ensure that my mother and I didn’t mutiny against our circumstances.

To the victor go the spoils. And I was a spoil of the Irish-Italian Mafia war.

Engaged to their prince, as a condition of surrender.

“Who stabbed you?” Cillian asked again, and I knew that not answering would just incur his wrath.

“What will you do if I tell you?” I asked, quietly.

I knew that whoever did it was Italian. If they knew that, they’d take it as an excuse to disrupt what limping power we still had. The Greens would punish us all, indiscriminately, just as they did during the war that our fathers fought.

“No one touches a Green without consequences.” Cillian practically sung their family motto.

“I’m not a Green.” I couldn’t stop the words from slipping out.

It was habit. A phrase I had repeated and again to my own people. But now, it was a lie.

“Oh, but you are.” Cillian winked, an evil glint in his eye darkening to something… lustful. Or… sadistic. I wasn’t sure. “Tell me who did it.”

“No.”

“No?” There was a lift of that eyebrow again, delightfully surprised that I had defied him.

His mouth straightened in what was almost a frown, as he stalked towards me until his shadow darkened my vision.

“I’m not in the habit of making requests, sweetheart.”

“I’m not your sweetheart.”

“No, you’re right. You’re a wife.” He held out his hand and stroked the pad of his index finger from my forehead to my temple. Then, he gently tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

His finger continued down, until his touch landed on the pulse of my neck. I could do nothing but sit completely still under his intensity.

“Most girls are made of sugar and spice. But not you. You’re made of ice.”

“I wish that were true,” I whispered to myself, more than him. “Ice doesn’t bleed.”