Page 121 of In My Heart
“Oh, will I?” I laughed, bitter and breathless.
He didn’t respond, but again he seemed surprised he hadn’t broken me yet. He obviously didn’t realise how hard it was to break something that was already destroyed.
“Bring them both.” He nodded to the door as he issued the order, then he strode through it casually, straightening his navy suit as he went.
I was roughly manhandled between two of the men out to the drive, then I watched as they shoved Dante into the back of one vehicle a little more carefully this time, at least carefully enough to keep him alive anyway; not careful enough to make it mercy.
I looked at Dante through the window. He wasn’t conscious, but his chest was moving. He was still there, still breathing. That fact was the only thing stopping me from falling apart there and then. I didn’t want to give up, and I wouldn’t, but it was starting to feel like a losing battle.
“Move,” A rough voice grunted and a bruising grip on my arm shoved me into the back of a second SUV. I fought the grip and the shove, but they didn’t let me go until I was in the car. Someone sat gracefully beside me and I knew it was Daniel without looking. Arsehole.
I sat up, smoothing yet more wild, escaped hair back from my face. And when I looked up, across from me sat Adamian.
I knew him before I processed him. It pained me to even think it, but there were similarities between us. The shape of my nose was just like his, as was the shape of my face.
Even if I hadn’t have recognised those things though, I’d have known it was him. The oxygen tank. The thinness. The way illness had hollowed him out but not softened anything inside him. His face was hard and cruel. I saw so much of Marcello in the way he held himself, even so close to death.
He looked at me like I was something finally delivered. An annoyance that he’d been forced to deal with repeatedly.
“My daughter,” he said softly.
“If you’re holding out for me to call you ‘daddy,’ you’ll be waiting a long time. I’m not your anything.”
A faint smile crossed his skeletal face, but it was neither soft, nor kind. It was calculating. He was taking a measure of me, I realised.
“You are.”
“You donated sperm. Nothing more. I want nothing to do with you.”
Daniel sat beside me without speaking yet. Just observing.
Adamian studied me for a long moment.
“You look like her,” he announced, and my stomach clenched.
“Don’t talk about my mother.”
Something like amusement passed through his expression. I was surprised to see an actual emotion.
“She was a problem.”
My hands curled into fists. He wasn’t wrong, but he didn’t have the right to comment on her. He didn’t know her. He didn’t spend years trying to hold her together and take care of her. He tossed her aside after he used her and me right along with her.
“She was a person.”
“She was unstable. A drug addict and a whore,” he corrected. “And she spoke too freely.”
“You killed her.” It wasn’t a question. I already knew the answer.
He paused. It wasn’t confirmation, but it wasn’t denial either. Just acknowledgment.
“She would have compromised everything eventually,” he said simply. “People like her always do. Money and drugs were her only priorities.”
“So you brutally murdered her, then left her dismembered body for me to find?” I accused, overwhelmed by his casualness. He truly was a monster.
“I prevented a leak. The method was not my choice.”
Something in me went very still. This man shared blood with me and yet he didn’t give a single fuck.
