Page 19 of Thorns of Deceit

“If I remember correctly, he was eventually freed by Heracles.”

She shrugged. “In my version, there’d be no Heracles for the man who happens to be my biological father.”

“Bloodthirsty one, aren’t you?”

She blinked, then replied slowly, “Not particularly, but I do believe in karma.”

“Then let’s make a deal.” Her eyebrows rose in interest. “Anyone who wrongs you, I’ll deliver your karma.”

That had her eyes widening. “Really?”

“Cross my heart and all that.” Shit, did her generation still say stuff like that?

“And what if that someone is you?” she questioned, squinting at me.

“Then you tell me and I’ll make sure to correct my ways,” I retorted. “Like I said, Raven, our marriage is for life, and I want to make the best of this. For both our sakes.”

“You truly believe there are good marriages?”

Jesus, she had it worse than me. I wondered if Raven had ever even stood a chance at a healthy relationship or if she’d been doomed from the start.

“Yeah. Ours will be.”

She shot me a half-smile.

“You promise?” she asked shyly.

I cleared my throat. “Yeah, even if I have to make you a widow.”

Strangely, I meant it too.

TEN

RAVEN

Our marriage is for life.

Those words rang in my ears for the remainder of the day—while I played dress-up with all the new clothes, through my failed cooking experiment, our movie night where Aiden let me pick the snacks—but it was in my dreams that those words haunted me.

Lifelong marriage was what most women strived for, but I wasn’t one of them. It could be worse, I guess. Aiden could be a horrible person like my father.

Over the years, I’d uncovered little clues about him, in the rare moments when my mom slipped. It usually happened when she was drunk. My father was an incredibly handsome but cruel and ruthless “he who shall not be named” criminal. But he beat my mom when he didn’t get his way. She endured it all for the sake of love until he hit her while pregnant with me.

That’d been her final straw.

She left, ensuring he couldn’t find her. She was a better person than me, because I would have killed the bastard before leaving. She was unable to put down roots anywhere becauseshe always feared he’d find us. Hence the constant moving and keeping a P.O. box in case we had to flee in the night—which happened once when I was six and we had stayed in one place longer than two years. After that, she was almost paranoid, always looking over her shoulder.

It worried me while I was in boarding school, to the point that I developed an anxiety disorder, pulling on my hair. I was safe in school, but she was still out there, fending for herself. But Mom came through for me even then. We’d added an app to track each other’s locations in real time and she’d send me a text every morning and every night. It eased my fears to some extent, but as I got older, I learned it wasn’t the way others lived.

And as I thought about it all, a memory from years ago—when I was ten and in a city I couldn’t even remember—pushed forward.

The boxes towered all around me, making it feel small. They smelled funny, reminding me of all the other times we’d packed or unpacked.

We’d been packing all day, and the apartment was shrinking around us, threatening to allow cardboard to swallow us whole.

Mom sat on the floor, working on taping yet another box.

“Why do we always have to move?” I asked in a small voice, just as the tape screeched, sealing the box shut, along with our life here.