Page 43 of The Wicked

I sighed, placing my palm on his thigh. “Hey.”

He paused.

“What is it? Talk to me,” I said quietly, trying to catch his gaze until he succumbed and looked at me.

“He could have killed you,” he said. “I can’t believe I trusted him with you—”

“I’m fine—”

“No, you’re not. You have bruises on your wrists. You tore open your wound. He lied. And I—” He stopped, letting out a shaky breath.

It was quiet for almost a minute until I broke it.

“You’re angry at yourself,” I pointed out. “That you believed him when he said he wouldn’t hurt me.” I wondered if I should add or keep the next part to myself. But he looked like he needed to talk to someone, and what was the point in hiding the fact that I knew they were related? “You’re angry that you believed him despite how it turned out the last time. How he abandoned you.”

Devil flinched, his eyes widening in shock as he watched me. “How did you—”

“I figured it out, and he confirmed it for me.”

He blinked at me. “He—he told you we were related?”

“More like I hinted it, and he didn’t deny, just… leaned into it.”

His shoulder relaxed a bit. “Now I know what you meant by leverage.” He eyed me. “You plan to hold me at gunpoint demanding all the money we stole from him?”

My smile was small. “If that’s what you want, we can go for it.”

He shook his head, looking away. “Like he would even care,” he muttered under his breath.

“Oh, trust me, he would. Everyone thinks Elio Marino is incapable of loving anyone just because they don’t know you exist, but I can assure you, if there’s anything that man loves more than power and being a fucking psychopath and killer, it’s you. You come first to him, above all else.”

“And you know that, how?”

“I saw it.”

“You saw wrong. When we spoke the other day, he washed his hands clean of me. He told me he would kill me. He said some fucked-up shit that keeps playing in my head nonstop, and I—I want to hate him. I want nothing more than to see him dead for everything he’s done, to me, to his family, to innocent people. I want to see him suffer, but at the same time, I don’t.” He swallowed. “And I don’t know if that makes me every bit as bad as he is.”

“No.” I scooted closer to him, my fingers diving into his hair as I massaged gently. “You’re not a bad person. We can’t choose our family, Devil. We can’t choose who we love, and we shouldn’t hate ourselves for it.”

“I don’t know what to do,” he confessed. “Despite everything he’s done… I still—I still want a relationship with him. Believe it or not, that man leading this whole thing used to be the greatest person I knew. He was… he wasgood.”

“That’s very hard to believe.”

He chuckled. “I know. When I look at him now, I just—I see a stranger; I see someone else. The person I know is long since dead, and this is just a very wicked ghost of him. The day we talked, I thought I saw a flicker of what he used to be, but I’m not sure after tonight.”

“But you still want to try?” I asked.

“Yes,” he confirmed. “Not for this version of him. For the one I remember as a kid. The one who would protect me and tell me how loved I was, the one who I shared dreams with. The one who hid me because his fucking dad wanted me dead. Elio, he’s—God, he’s been through so much. I don’t even know if he remembers now that he’s in charge of… everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“He was all over the place. Being groomed to become like Ricardo, caring for me, his mother, and his siblings. Sometimes he’d come to me, beaten and bruised; he never told me how he got them, but I knew they were from his father. He never liked to talk about it and the things he’d done.” Devil looked far away as he spoke. “I remember how sunken his eyes always were, dark and tired like—like he never slept.

“One day I asked him why he always looked like a zombie, and he said he was a zombie because zombies didn’t sleep. I remember laughing because I didn’t really understand. He would smile at me, but it never really did reach his eyes, almost like—it took everything in him to move that muscle.

“One night, he rushed in, gave me food, and apologized because he had to leave. He said his mother had been sick. It was the first time he’d been honest about literally anything that had to do with his family. He always talked about them, but only the good parts.

“The next day when he came by, I asked him if his mother had a cold or the flu, and he said he wished that were the case. He looked sad and defeated. I hugged him because he looked like he needed it. And then he cried. He cried so hard and heldme like I was the only thing keeping him together. Then he fell asleep for hours. I thought he was dead. He looked so… different, peaceful.