Page 75 of The Viper's Wife

“It doesn’t matter,” she says and walks past me toward the bedroom.

I grab her arm and swing her back to me. Anger glints in her tired eyes.

“I didn’t know about any of this. I need you to fill me in, now.”

She gives me a searching look, the kind where I’m left wondering if she’s seeing the real me, or this version of myself she’s built me up to be. “Alright, then.”

As I finish breakfast, she sits down at the kitchen table and proceeds to tell me with the clinical detachment of a mortician how she found her house broken into and her dad missing. That, despite the storm of emotions she must’ve been going through, she had the wherewithal to search the house for evidence and collect a sample of blood to send to a paternity center for testing.

When she gets to the part where Giovanni threatened her at the train station, it’s only her matter-of-fact retelling that keeps me from flying off into a vicious rage.

How fuckingdarehe?

By the resentful look in her eye, she thinks I’m to blame for this, an injustice that mounts in my chest like a swelling pipe, fit to burst.

Until she gets to the part where her job found cocaine in her purse.

All the heat bleeds out of me like I’ve been plunged into an ice bath.

“Cocaine?” I ask. “You’re sure it was cocaine?”

She shrugs. “I don’t think it was sugar.”

My thoughts crash into each other as I finish the fettuccine carbonara and plate it for her.

She twirls pasta on her fork. “That’s what Lacey was calling to tell me, by the way. The paternity center got the results back. Guess who left blood at the scene of the crime?”

“Giovanni.”

Valeria laughs bitterly. “Ding, ding.” She stuffs a huge forkful of carbonara into her mouth and talks around it, “You should get a lottery ticket.”

I make my way to the bedroom in a daze.

I thought she was at the strip club to rebel. That all that talk about money was because of her shitty family making her pay for everything.

But she had just lost her job, her house, and her dad.

And her solution was to, what, make a little extra money as she tried to scare me away?

Does she really think she’d be better off without me, with the rest of her life in wreckage?

It stirs something in me—guilt, shame?

I stride to my closet and pull on clothes. In the kitchen, Valeria’s stroking one finger through the sauce left on her plate. She sucks her finger clean as she watches me with sleepy eyes.

Blood rushes south. I grind to a stop with my coat in hand. I’m glad she liked my food. I could make her more, if she wanted. I could cook whatever she wants.

“Heading out?” she asks coolly.

Focus. I kick-start my body into movement and shove my feet into boots. In a few steps, I drop to my knees in front of her.

Her expression hardly flickers as I take her hand in mine.

I don’t like this. I don’t want her resigned to her fate. I like her little scowls and frowns, her natural suspicion of me. Yesterday was rough, and I didn’t make it better for her, but I’m going to change that, and after she rests, I’m going to tease some life back into her. Valeria doesn’t give up. She’s stubborn, and she’s a fighter.

“I have to make some calls. I’ll be back soon. Don’t open the door to anyone else but me, and call me if anything strange happens.”

When I kiss her fingertip, the one she sucked, her eyelashes flicker.