Page 75 of My Dark Ever After

I watched him like a fawn caught in a snare as he came closer and the woman kept talking.

“He was going to kill him,” she continued. “I thought for sure by the look in his eye that my lover would die and so, maybe, would I for disobeying our father. And then something strange happened.” She leaned forward, snatching my hand in a cold, fierce grip. “He knocked Said out, sat in the chair before the vanity, and started to drink my wine. Then, he told me that if he killed the person I loved for being the wrong kind of fit for the family, then he would have to kill the mother of his unborn child. Something he was not willing to do.”

Her gaze was so intense on mine that the ink of her irises seemed to spread to encapsulate my entire scope of vision.

Such a dark eye, thick lashed and large like mine.

Like my father’s.

My heart was beating so hard now that it ached in my chest. My fingers and toes tingled, and the hair on the back of my arms stood up, my entire body primed like the air before an electrical storm.

“You see,” she murmured, “he had fallen in love with the daughter of an Albanian gangster, and our father did not believe in mudding our blood with that of foreigners. It was why he did not like Said. It waswhy, if he had known about Mariano and Elizabeta, he would have killed them and the baby. So do you know what my brother did?”

I parted my lips when she paused long enough that it was clear she expected an answer, but my tongue was adhered to the roof of my dry mouth. There was an audible noise as I peeled it off my palate and swallowed so hard my throat clicked.

“He ran away with Elizabeta to America,” I croaked.

“He ran away with Elizabeta to America,” she echoed. “Very good. He left Said alive but had him smuggled out of the country, never to see me again. He sent me back to my father with the promise that I would never breathe a word of his existence again to anyone. As far as my family was concerned, he died taking out Said. And in twenty-eight years, I have never breathed a word of that story to anyone until now.”

She paused as Philippe took the seat beside her, his gun held against one thigh. My gaze flicked to it and then back to the woman who was undoubtedly my aunt.

“I think he would understand me telling his daughter, though, don’t you?” she asked, releasing my hand to sit back in her chair. The way she did it made her seem like a queen on her throne and not a woman on a swaying train in a blue polyester seat.

“Because you are my aunt,” I said and the words dropped like stones between us.

“Because I am your aunt,” she agreed. “In fact, you were named after me.”

I looked to Philippe, who sat placidly beside her as if he had done so dozens of times before.

“You asked Philippe to bring me to you,” I said, thinking through everything aloud. “Is the Mafia so antiquated you didn’t think a phone call would do?”

Her mouth ticked up, then fell flat. “I think a reunion warrants more than a phone call.”

“This doesn’t feel like a reunion,” I said honestly. “It feels more like a kidnapping.”

“Semantics,” she offered with a little shrug. “It is what you make of it.”

“And if I wanted to get off this train at the next stop without you?”

“Well.” She sighed as Philippe lifted the gun in his lap to train it on me. In the back of the mostly deserted train car, no one could see the threat. “Sometimes family fights.”

“I could scream,” I pointed out, because there were a few people at the other end of the car who would notice and help a young woman in distress.

Philippe glowered, but my aunt raised a hand and leaned forward again to grab my hand. I tried to snatch it away, but she was too fast, and her grip was shockingly strong for a middle-aged woman. Philippe followed some unspoken cue and reached into her black purse to hand her a needle very much like the kind I used to administer my medicine each day.

“No,” I said with a gasp as she held my hand flat to the table and Philippe approached with the syringe. “No!” I shouted.

The needle pierced my hand a moment later, a cool rush of liquid as it was emptied into my bloodstream. Almost immediately, I could feel the effects tingling through me, slowing my pulse, dragging my thoughts sideways off a linear path.

“Excuse my niece,” my aunt said as my body lost its structure and I sank back against the window in my seat. “She talks in her sleep.”

I wanted to argue that my eyes weren’t even closed, but I found they were. And then when I went to open my mouth, I found it was sewn shut, my tongue heavy as lead.

I have to scream,I thought just before I fell back into blackness, where thought no longer existed.

Chapter Seventeen

Guinevere