Page 113 of Thorns of Blood

“Yes. Don’t fail me.”

And with that, Cristiano handed me the key to the back entrance that my mother only ever shared with him. The favorite son. It would ensure a clean in and out.

I watched him disappear into the night, and soon the engine of his car revved in the distance.

It was early morning, dawn still an hour away. Three cups of coffee helped to wash out the bitterness of last night’s revelation. I would have paid this bitch a visit then, but I was too drunk and too angry to act rationally.

I sliced through the electric barbed wire encircling the property and unlatched the towering back gate, slipping inside. Moving stealthily across the pristine lawn—the very one I was expected to fund—I headed toward the servants’ entrance, each step measured and silent.

My body became rigid as I got closer, and the same question I’d been asking myself sounded in my ears. How could I have possibly missed this?

With quick work of the second key, I was inside. It was eerily quiet as I made my way through the home I grew up in, toward my mother’s bedroom in the north wing. She liked to sleep in late, counting on her beauty sleep to keep her looking young and beautiful. Too bad her insides were ugly and irreparable.

I headed up the stairs, the moonlight streaming in through the windows. It didn’t take long to reach her quarters, and soon I was at her door.

Something was off. It was too quiet. Too dark.

Mother usually kept nightlights lighting up hallways for?—

My thoughts shattered as a sudden bang echoed and the ground beneath me trembled. The door to her bedroom burst open—I dove to the floor just in time as gunfire erupted, bullets whizzing past and casings clattering around me like deadly hail.

I reached for my gun and took a shot, then two, eliminating a masked man with a rifle. But it only prompted another spray of bullets my way.

“Stay the fuck down if you want to live!”

My mother’s harsh words echoed in the air, causing me to pause.

Had I walked into a trap?

FORTY-TWO

LIANA

It felt like old times.

Both of us sitting on the bed, legs crisscrossed as I typed frantically on my laptop while Lou chewed on the tip of a pencil, studying her drawing critically. Surprise, surprise, it was a drawing of Kingston. Apparently she was obsessed with the man’s face even now.

After I left Amara with her parents, I checked into a hotel, and somehow it didn’t surprise me to find Lou knocking on my door a mere thirty minutes later. Kingston was in the room next door, their adoptive daughter Lara in the adjoining suite.

“Do you ever draw anything else?” I asked her, my eyes locked on the laptop screen as I corresponded back and forth with José, who was insisting I return to Venezuela where he could keep me safe.

“What do you mean?”

I typed my last response to José then shut the laptop before he could come back with anything else and raised my head to meet Lou’s eyes.

“I mean that even when we were kids, all you drew was Kingston’s face.” I wasn’t jealous that she got her happily-ever-after. I really wasn’t, but it did make the sting of my loss slightly bitter. “Do you ever draw anything else?”

She chuckled. “Well, I guess I could try and draw his dick.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I’d rather you didn’t.”

“I drew you.” Surprise flared through me. “When I thought you were dead and I believed I was actually you, I kept drawing your face.”

“Maybe you were drawing yours? After all, our faces are the same.” I tried to make a joke, but my voice still cracked.

“No, it was yours.” She watched me, almost as if debating whether to ask me something. I waited, letting her make up her mind until she finally did. “Why didn’t you come to me?”

I shrugged. “I was… broken. I needed time to get Amara better, for me to get better. Besides, I thought you were happy with Kingston for all those years, and I just wasn’t ready to see it.”