Page 44 of Blood Code

I set the heads on the path and grabbed my auger. With an earth auger, I could dig a hole for a head in thirty minutes and fill it in within five.

“Can I do it?” Keira asked.

My eyebrows drew together. “Why?”

She shrugged. “I just feel like it.”

So I let her because why not.

She dug two holes exactly where I'd suggested, working quickly and efficiently, and once she finished, I gathered the heads and joined her.

“Do you want to say any words?” she asked, stepping back from the holes.

“No.” I tossed my father’s head into one and the Italian's into the other.

Keira bit her bottom lip and peered into the pit. “Very heartless of you.” Her tone was light and filled with humor.

“They don’t deserve sympathy.”

“Are you glad they’re dead?”

“Yes.”

And with that, I shoveled dirt over my father’s useless head. He belonged here, buried among all the other evil men.

Chapter Twelve

Xeniya Morozova

Age 35

Family dinner was worse than torture, and that was saying a lot. I’d been maimed, blinded, and murdered before… but somehow, dealing with an eight- to ten-year-old child topped all of it.

I still didn’t know how old the girl was, and although she was small and seemingly immature, she grasped topics that seemed beyond an eight-year-old’s capacity.

Either way, the spawn was terrifying.

We weren’t even a minute into our first appetizer when Svetlana asked Neeve, “I heard you were Severin’s previous fiancée. Is that true?”

“Yes,” Neeve replied slowly, raising her fork to her mouth.

Neeve sat to my left, Mikhail to my right, and Severin was directly across from me, with Svetlana beside him.

We were in the formal dining room, surrounded by elaborate carvings on the walls and furniture, the whole place looking like something out of an eighteenth-century royal palace.

“Was it a real engagement or a mafia stunt like my friend Ana told me about the other day?” Svetlana asked.

“Define real.” Neeve set down her fork and faced the girl head-on.

Svetlana set down her own utensils and fired off her next questions. “Did you want to marry him? Were you in love? Are you jealous of Keira? Do you still want to marry him?”

Neeve glanced at me, her eyes wide, her expression giving: what the fuck, Xeniya?

My shrug was my only answer: she’s not my child.

Silence fell over the table, and Svetlana looked between us, smiling like the cat who got the cream.

Then, with a mischievous glint in her eye, she said, “I think Neeve is far prettier than Keira.”