Page 2

Chapter 2

Piers

I knew this reunion would be a shitshow, but I didn’t expect it to be lethal too.

I don’t look away from Fantasia’s face, even as a thousand emotions flash behind her eyes. I drink them all in- horror, confusion, anger, agony. She jerks her hand away from mine, but there’s nowhere for her to go on the crowded bus. We’re already standing, and her attempt to flee nearly knocks her over. I take her hand again, and before she can pull away I wrap it firmly around one of the hand grips overhead.

We’re so close I can smell the soft florals of her perfume, faded as it is after our long plane ride.

“What the fuck are you doing here?” Fantasia hisses, jarring me back to the present. “Did Achilles send you?”

Her jade eyes are hard and cold and gorgeous. Her knuckles under mine are white.

I’m a little irritated she thinks I’m here under her brother’s orders. He might’ve been the one keeping me hidden from her this past year, but that doesn’t mean I move at his beck and call. In fact, my old friend will almost definitely be pissed when he realizes I’ve left London. As the newly established head of the Warwick family, I have a thousand responsibilities at Wesley Hall, after all.

And Achilles has never approved of my feelings for his little sister.

That’s why I didn’t ask for permission to board her flight and follow her to the States. That’s why, if he has words for me later, I probably won’t ask for forgiveness either.

Like it or not, this was something I had to do.

“Is that any way to greet an old friend, Fantasia?” I ask sweetly, and she blanches.

“We are not friends,” she spits. “Not since-” She twists her face away, hiding whatever expression comes with the memory of her coup. Her voice is even more quiet and bitter when she asks again, “What are you doing here, Piers?”

“I’m here to help you settle in, of course,” I tell Fantasia lightly. “Good thing, huh?”

“Were those your men?” she demands. “Was this all just some ploy to get me alone?”

Since she tried to sic her brother on me, I suppose it would be only fair for me to return the favor. Lucky for her, I don’t play the games of politics and blood that she grew up learning.

“I don’t know who they were, but I was under the impression your guys pissed them off first,” I say, though I can’t be sure. It all happened so fast. One moment, two men were coming out of the crowd, making a beeline for Fantasia only steps ahead of me. The next, they were being rebuked by Fantasia’s bodyguards and a shot was fired.

The way my heart stopped when that sound exploded through the airport and I didn’t know who had fired a bullet and who had been hit- it’s still sending pangs through my chest even now.

And the fact that neither of us seemed to recognize them or know what they could’ve wanted has me worried.

“What do you want, Piers?” Fantasia asks, her teeth gritted so hard I can hear them grind together.

“I told you, didn’t I?” I return, looking her up and down. “Is that all you brought? We’ll be done unpacking in an hour.”

“There is no ‘we’ here,” she spits. “I’m an exile, remember? And you’re supposed to be in London. Who’s squatting in Wesley Hall while you’re gallivanting over the ocean?”

I couldn’t care less about the old Warwick manor house right now. The place is four hundred years old, and it looks and feels it. My predecessor, Marcus Warwick, made attempts to modernize it but never finished, so many of the appliances still run on gas, and the lights flicker ominously at night.

Not to mention that it’s absolutely packed to bursting with ghosts and bad memories.

“I have my men looking after the place,” I tell her vaguely, and see the flash of jealousy in her eyes. Mere weeks ago, the place was hers, but now she’s an exile and her childhood home is mine. I can’t say it feels fair to me, but I can also admit she didn’t use her time under Wesley Hall’s roof doing anything saintly.

In fact, if she’d managed it for much longer on her own, I think it would’ve cost her her life instead of mine.

I look her over again, more slowly this time. Fantasia has always been pale, kept inside more often than not, and when outside she was usually running around under the grey London sky. But now she’s practically translucent. I can see the fine blue veins under the skin around her eyes. The bones in her slender face are too prominent, the bags under her eyes too dark. She’s tall but painfully thin, wasted away by a diet of alcohol and insomnia.

God, she’s still so beautiful, but now it hurts to look at her. Like a renaissance painting of a woman who ended up killing herself by drinking arsenic.

Fantasia blinks and her gaze slides away from mine. I immediately miss it, and I almost take hold of her chin to reclaim it. But our bus is slowing now, and people are standing around us, preparing to depart at the station. I put an arm around Fantasia’s waist to keep her close. She leans away, and for a second I think she’ll jerk away again, but she seems to realize it’ll throw her right into the way of other people. Reluctantly, she stays at my side as we disembark.

But as soon as we’ve hit the sidewalk, she steps deliberately away from me and starts marching off down the street- going where, I have no idea, and I don’t think she does either. We’re not actually in Raleigh yet, but a smaller sub city that looks like it’s made out of parking lots and motels. Fantasia seems to realize that too, because her steps slow quickly enough. She looks all around her, taking in the wide streets, the strange buildings, the cars going the wrong direction.

I see in painful clarity the moment it hits her that she really, truly, isn’t in England anymore. I watch her mourn in silence the loss of everything she’s ever known. And I see the wall come down over her heart when she remembers that I’m still here, standing mere feet away from her.

She glares over her shoulder at me. “Well? We’re alone now. Tell me what you’re really here for, Piers.”

I almost admire the fact that there’s no apology in her tone for what she did to me. I’ve known her thirteen years, since she was nine and I was seventeen, and yet for all I know she called for my death without any regret.

All I’m here for, all I want to know, is why .

But I’m not ready to ask that question just yet, not here on the side of a random road- traffic roaring past us and our duffle bags sitting at our feet. Instead I take her in once again, admiring the curling strands of dark hair escaping her bun, the set of her slender mouth, the way the light of the sun changes her eyes from pale green to gold.

“I’m here to talk to you,” I tell her honestly, taking a few steps closer.

Her dark brows rumple. “What could you possibly have to talk to me about?”

“We used to talk all the time, didn’t we?”

She flinches at that, which I’ll take as a win. Not because I want to hurt her, but because it’s confirmation that she feels something , anything for what was lost between us.

I take a few steps closer. “I’ve missed you, you know.”

“ Missed me?!” Fantasia repeats, incredulous. “Are you insane? I tried to have you killed!”

She doesn’t even deny it. Another thing I can admire her for.

I shrug. “I must have forgotten that part,” I joke.

Fantasia blinks, looking almost angry now. “This isn’t funny, Piers.”

“Who’s laughing?” I ask. She’s an arm’s length from me now. I could reach out and touch her face, and I would if I didn’t think it would make her disappear forever. “I’m just telling you the truth.”

Fantasia’s shoulders are trembling. “The truth that- I tried to have you killed, and you just don’t care?!” she demands.

“Oh I care,” I assure her. “It wasn’t exactly a walk in the park being under house arrest in Scotland for a year. At least I got a lot of reading in.”

Fantasia shakes her head, but before she can ridicule me again I tell her plainly, “I buried my mother in the backyard of that safe house.”

Her mouth falls open, her eyes darting up to my face and then away. Susan Warwick, the woman who adopted me, was one of the few Warwicks that survived Fantasia’s uprising. Her health had been declining irreparably for years, especially after her husband’s heart attack and sudden death. Living the last of her life in hiding wasn’t what she deserved.

That, I care about. That, I do resent Fantasia Warwick for. I can forgive most crimes committed against me, for better or worse. But causing distress to the woman who saw me, a teenage boy about to age out of the system, in an orphanage and chose to give me a family? For her, I want answers about what went wrong.

To her credit, Fantasia finally looks shaken more than angry. “What happened?” she asks quietly.

Interesting. If she regrets that, then perhaps she also regrets ordering me to die after all. I open my mouth, finally ready to ask-

A sleek black town car screeches to a stop beside me, and I grab Fantasia by the shoulder and pull her behind me on instinct. To my astonishment, Fantasia’s two bodyguards leap out of the car.

“Ma’am!!”

“Miss Fantasia!”

I’m not surprised they found us, only disappointed that they caught up so quickly. I can’t imagine Achilles sending his little sister overseas without placing some kind of tracker on her person or in her luggage.

The two men look me over warily, then both blanche in recognition. I’m the head of the Warwick family now, meaning I’m on the same level as their own boss, Achilles Ashwood. No doubt they’re just as shocked as Fantasia to find me here, but I’m not interested in explaining myself to them.

“Mr. Warwick? What are you-”

“You don’t have police trailing you, do you?” I ask, trying not to sound too irritated at their interruption. If law enforcement is on the way, it’ll really ruin this reunion.

The bigger of the two men recovers first and shakes his head. “Not yet. We managed to get lost in the crowd before security showed up. There’s no way cameras didn’t spot us, though.”

“Fantastic,” I sigh. Police attention isn’t the end of the world, of course. It’s a regular aspect of life in the mafia, after all, and bribes grease most wheels easily enough. This does mean that Achilles will be made aware of my presence here sooner rather than later, though.

“Let’s keep moving then,” I tell the group. “I’d rather not be caught by cops on the side of the road.”

Fantasia pushes away from me, her indignation back in full force. “There is no ‘ let’s ’,” she says. “You’re not coming with us!”

“If it weren’t for me, you’d have been trampled back in that airport,” I tell her. To her guards I add, “No offense. But if you’ve got men coming after you two seconds after you’ve landed in a new country, I want to know why.”

“It’s none of your business,” Fantasia insists. “ None of this is. Go back to London where you belong!”

I ignore her, tossing my duffle into the boot of the car, then hers after it. Her bodyguards watch in clear discomfort, but they can’t refuse me. Fantasia herself remains rooted on the sidewalk, as if she’ll refuse to get into the car if I’m riding in it.

Luckily, she’s getting better at recognizing futility when she sees it. I open the door to the backseat for her, and after holding my gaze for a rebellious moment, she climbs inside.