Dante frowns and sniffs the air, his brow furrowing. “What the…”
Oh God.
He sniffs again, glancing around the apartment.
“Bianca, why does it smell like…”
He freezes as he suddenly turns toward me. I gasp as he storms over to me, grabbing a handful of my still-damp hair and yanking it to his nose.
“Holy fucking shit,” he whispers in a haggard voice. He backs away from me, slowly shaking his head. “Bianca—”
“I… I can explain—”
“What the fuck did you do? What THE FUCK did you do?!” he roars.
I cringe, shaking as my brother whirls away. He grabs his phone out of his pocket and hits a number. Seconds later, I can hear him yelling to someone I assume is Carmine things like “security measures” “lockdown” and “prepare for the worst”.
I want to cry. I want to break down and scream. I want to tell him everything.
Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I see my phone silently light up on the kitchen counter. I shudder as I walk over and pick it up.
Admin
You have one new message.
It’s from the Venom site.
My hands shake as I unlock my phone and scroll to the page. Sure enough, my chat box is blinking with a new message from him.
RaisedByWolves
You shouldn’t have done that
Instantly, another message comes through: a picture. It takes a second to load, but when it does, my heart drops through the floor.
Someone torched Kratos Drakos’ car in the Bronx.
I only know the giant, stoic Drakos brother by reputation. Or at least, I thought so.
But as the image of the flaming wreckage of a Land Rover appears in my chat window, I realize I know Kratos much more than by reputation.
…Because the other day, he fingered me to oblivion on the dirty floor of an abandoned church, after chasing me down with a fucking knife, wearing a psycho mask.
That’s who my masked stranger is. That’s who I’ve been chatting with, who I begged to fuck me. Who I chose to act out disturbing, fucked-up fantasies with.
Not just some Club Venom rando.
I goaded a lethally dangerous mafia prince. I told him my darkest fantasies. He knows who I am.
…And tonight, I burned his car to the ground.
Holy shit…
My phone dings again.
RaisedByWolves
You crossed a line, babygirl.
RaisedByWolves
So now I’m going to eradicate yours.
Then the icon next to his name goes dark.
I think I’m going to be sick.
What the fuck have I done?
11
BIANCA
It’s the waiting that’s the worst.
Not the web of lies I have to create to explain to Dante why I torched a car in the middle of nowhere in the Bronx. I can’t, I simply won’t, tell him about the drug deal I was drawn into, even if it was completely inadvertent on my part.
Drugs are a hard line for my brother, mainly I think because of what happened to our older sister, Claudia. I was really young when it happened, but I can still remember the anguish of learning she’d been drugged and killed by those monsters when she was out one night.
