Oaths and Omissions (Monsters & Muses #3)(81)
If it were paparazzi, they’d have made themselves known.
Anyone else wouldn’t want to.
Rubbing her chin, Mileena tilts her head, watching me with a curious look in her eye.
“How well do you know my son?”
“Well enough.” Then, deciding to just double down on the lie entirely, I add, “Since he’s my fiancé and all.”
Hand freezing on her jaw, she goes very still. “Fiancée? My… Jonas is engaged?”
Emotion saturates her words, dripping like hot wax and burning my skin. Maybe I should feel bad for telling her that, but my parents think we’re engaged, so why not add Jonas’s to the mix?
Besides, it sounds like she deserves to know how badly she fucked up. I’m not sure how Jonas would feel about me taking her punishment upon myself, but considering he got aroused by the idea of me killing her, something tells me he probably wouldn’t mind.
I am sure that he wouldn’t appreciate me leaving her there on her own, but I have a lunch date with Elena and, frankly, I don’t want to stay with this stranger.
Swiping my keys from the fireplace, I note that she cleaned up the mess from last night and appears to have slept on the sofa, if the folded blanket and throw pillow are any indication.
Pausing at the door, I turn and give her a last lingering look. “How long have you been back?”
Mileena sighs, placing her granola bar on the counter. “I just got in last night. Usually, I stop in once a month to… check on things,” she says, her voice growing soft at the word things. “But work’s kept me tied up for a while.”
“What do you do for work?”
“What do you do for work? Mooch off my son?”
I snort. “Primroses don’t mooch.”
They lie, cheat, and steal. But mooching is beneath us.
With that, I spin on my heel and leave her there with her jaw hanging open. I’m not sure if the entire Wolfe family has beef with mine, but her immediate shock is enough of a reason to believe the rivalry runs deep.
Much deeper than any of the rest of us knows.
A little while later, I’m eating shrimp scampi portside at an experimental yacht restaurant, waiting for Cash to get off the phone with one of his firm partners. Elena sips a martini, eyeing me from across the table as I scarf down my plate.
I’m past the point of being comfortably full when I push back from the table, and I wipe my face with my napkin. “What?”
Elena shrugs, wrapping a strand of dark hair around her pinkie. “Nothing. You just seem hungrier than usual.”
Since we met up that day in Boston a few weeks ago, we’ve had a dozen lunch dates; despite my initial apprehension regarding making friends, as that skill wasn’t one I grew up utilizing much, Elena and I sort of hit it off immediately.
She’s warm and inviting, but there’s also this alluring darkness to her. An edge I’ve not seen in many people, especially any my age, that I find somehow comforting. Like I can embrace the broken, ugly parts of me in her presence, and all she’ll do is show me hers in return.
Don’t get me wrong, the woman seems to have her own host of secrets. I suppose you can’t be involved with the Mafia and live transparently.
Not to mention, her husband is completely terrifying. The one time I met the man who Aplanians call Dr. Death, he just stared at me and then disappeared down the hall with their kids.
But his friendship with Jonas definitely makes sense.
I take a drink of my water as Cash comes back to the table, intruding on our lunch because he insists on checking up on me nowadays.
“Not hungrier,” I tell Elena, setting my glass down. “Just nervous.”
“Is his mom that intimidating?”
“No, she’s just… I don’t know. Imagine spending your life thinking about someone close to you a certain way, getting used to that idea of them and eventually coming to terms with it, only to one day have that notion totally wiped. Almost a clean slate, except you can still see the dirt they left behind in the first place.”
Cash stabs a piece of his Caesar salad. “She fucked him up that bad?”
“Apparently.”
“Parents will do that,” Elena says into her glass, and I remember her comment about her mother’s disappearance, and wonder if that’s what destroyed their relationship.
Or if it was something else entirely.
“Imagine if we sat down and wrote out every single transgression our parents bestowed onto us.” Cash looks at me, scoffing. “We’d be writing until we die.”
“What are you talking about?” I ask. “What did they do to you?”
He makes a face. “You don’t think you have some sort of monopoly on the Primrose family trauma, do you, swan?”
Heat scorches my face, and I sit back in my seat, brushing some hair off my shoulder. The summer sun beats down on us, reflecting off the rippling water around us, and I write off the sweat beading in my palm as the summer air.
I don’t think that, but my brothers were never held to the same standards as me. They didn’t need to be, because for the most part, anything they did could be easily explained away. Whereas for me, a girl, my actions in public were always being judged more harshly, and a single slipup could have detrimental ramifications.
The worst thing either of the twins ever did in our parents’ eyes was when Cash got a DUI riding his bike around campus, and Palmer opened up to the island about his sexuality.