Page 198 of The Enslaved Duet

“You aren’t my real father,” I said, the words so cutting I thought for a moment they might really slice through his thick skin. “Did you know that?”

By the blank, unamused set of his features, I knew he hadn’t.

“Don’t play silly games,” he ordered, sitting back and righting himself.

“Amadeo Salvatore is my father,” I continued calmly. “You know him ascapoSalvatore, head of the Camorra in Napoli.”

Seamus snorted derisively, but a muscle flexed in his jaw, betraying his unease.

I forged on, sliding my dagger between his ribs and twist, twisting. “Mama met him in the fish market one day, and they started an affair. He wanted her to leave, and she loved him, but she was too good and too scared to do it.” I paused, watched Seamus as he held his breath, confused and angry, unwilling to believe. “Haven’t you ever wondered why Sebastian and I look nothing like you while Elena and Giselle could be your carbon copies?”

“Not all children look like their fathers, Cosima,” he said drily, but his voice lacked conviction, and his eyes moved over me with X-ray focus, as if he could read the truth in my very bones.

“No,” I agreed easily. “But if you think about it for a minute, you might remember that Salvatore had very unique eyes too. Golden eyes. You might remember that despite all your infractions, the Camorra was relatively lenient with you…why do you think that was? Maybe because Salvatore had a soft spot for Mama and caved too often in to her pleas to save your sorry arse? Maybe because you were a pseudo-father, however poor, to the two children he would never be able to parent himself?”

I leaned forward, my voice a hiss, my eyes slitted like a snake to deliver the last of my venomous attack. “I know I was your greatest accomplishment, Seamus. How does it feel to know that even that was never really yours?”

“Lies,” he barked meanly, but his eyes were wet with something softer than rage, and his mouth was pale with desperate tension. “That bastard lied to you, Cosima.”

“Yes, but not about this.” I leaned back, collected myself by smoothing down my dress and tossing my hair over my shoulder before I slid closer to the door and put my hand on the handle. “I’m not your daughter, Seamus, so you can stop ‘watching over’ me. I’m not your daughter, so you can stop the games. I’m not your daughter, and even if I was”—I smiled meanly, feeling my lips parted and pulled into a grotesque farce of good humour—“I would never want to see you again.”

Seamus stared at me, more ruined by my revelation than he ever had been by my sale into sexual slavery. His own ego was the root of his misery. I was beautiful and clever, and Seamus had taken pride in the creation of me.

I battled the urge to take out my horrible anger in violence on his flesh and instead lifted my chin and ordered imperiously, “Let me out here. And Seamus, if I see you again, I’ll give Alexander free rein to end you in any way he sees fit.”

After a brief hesitation, he knocked on the partition behind him with two knuckles. We stared at each other, watching the bond between us disintegrate into ash.

“I love you,” he told me, as if it mattered.

To him, I supposed, it did.

“Do you love me enough to stop trying to instigate this mob war? I have people I care about on the other side of this, and I don’t want to see them hurt. Would you save me from that pain?” I asked, not hard, just curious even though I already knew the answer.

He pressed his lips together, flatlining the conversation. “Love has nothing to do with something like that. It’s a business decision, Cosima.”

“You don’t know this, and it almost makes me sad for you,” I admitted softly as the car cruised to a stop, and I opened the door. “Butthis, this isn’t anything close to love.”

“And I assume you think what you have with the lord is?” he snapped back.

I knew that very moment Alexander was finding a way to get to me, hunting me down as a surely as any predator faced with the imminent loss of his prey. Seamus raised a good point, though. What made his wrongdoings so much worse than Xan’s?

I decided, as I looked at my father’s frustrated confusion, that the difference was choice. Alexander had been given very little rein to make his own decisions over the years, but when he could, he made the right ones even if they still seemed horrible given the dark circumstances. Seamus had liberty all his life, and he squandered it because he was selfish and weak.

Alexander had made the choice to take care of me no matter what.

Seamus had made the choice to use me for his own gains, proven even further today by his decision to steal me away from my friends in an attempt to start a mob war that would benefit him and his.

Pathetic.

But I didn’t explain any of that to the man in front of me, the man who had been my father for most of my life but who I was determined to leave behind as a stranger forevermore. I didn’t explain because he didn’t deserve it, but also because, tragically, he was incapable of understanding it.

Instead, I smiled sadly at him, and said pointedly, “There is a difference between saying something and doing it. You do one, and Alexander does the other. Love is so much more than words, Dad. I hope one day you understand that.”

Cosima

I stood alone at the mouth of an alleyway between two brick buildings somewhere I thought vaguely might have been Queens for only five minutes before he found me. The moment the sleek black car turned the corner onto the street, I knew it was him, and I braced.

Which was prudent, because the moment the car was close, the vehicle not even stopped yet at the curb, Xan was opening the door and swinging out gracefully, powerfully onto the walk. My breath caught in my throat as he stalked toward me and then expelled in a sob when he caught me up in his arms and crushed me to his hard frame, one hand sank deep in the hair at my nape and the other banded around my lower back to pin me exactly where he wanted me.