Page 86 of Liberated By Sin
When your papa picks you up…
Fuck.
Derek couldn’t see me.
I threw open the bathroom door, intending to make a run for Santino while I cycled through excuses as to why we needed to leave, but I stopped dead in my tracks, nearly colliding with Helena.
“What was that about?” she asked, getting straight to the point.
“Excuse me?”
“It was something I said, wasn’t it?”
“And what would that be?”
“You tell me…preziosa.”
Helena was the kind of assassin I had aspired to be as a young girl in training. Confident, calculating, and cold as ice. Even eight years under Ares and countless bodies on my tally, eighteen-year-old me would have been both in awe and intimidated by this striking woman. But I’d been dragged through the darkest depths of hell. I was numb to fear.
Crossing my arms in defiance, we stared each other down. Besides Magda, I was a teenager the last time I’d killed a woman. It was the day before my eighteenth birthday. My mark was the thirty-four-year-old wife of a real estate mogul. At the time, life was what it was. I didn’t care about her past or why I’d been paid to bleed on her contract. Mybiggest gripe was how I’d broken a nail in the process. Some days, I wondered if what happened to me was somehow karma for the lives I’d so callously taken.
But if that were true, then what fresh hell awaited me now?
“There’s a few things I know,” she said, eyes roving over me again. “I know you’re not who you say you are.”
“Is that right?”
She scoffed. “You think I’d let just anyone in my home, around my husband and son—that little girl? Granted, she wasn’t supposed to be here, but her mom is a detective who got an early morning call about two bodies in some asshole’s condo downtown. Awful what happened in there.”
That seemed like an overshare, and Helena didn’t strike me as the type to speak out of impulse. No, she was much too disciplined for such a slipup. But she couldn’t possibly connect that crime scene with me.
“But I digress, Amara Carvalho. Your paper trail is just enough for the civilian population. But to me, you’re a ghost. You don’t exist. So that begs the question, who are you, really?”
Helena was intelligent and intuitive…but she was fishing. Her pieces were there, but I knew just as well as she did that connecting those dots was impossible when she was missing the most vital parts. Running on speculation and suspicion alone wouldn’t help her cause nor mine. I needed to throw her off and knew just how to do that.
Sighing, I looked away as tears gathered in my eyes. Calling them fake would be disingenuous because I had one hundred and one reasons to cry.
“That’s the point. Hiding, erasing my past. It’s the only way I survive.”
“You’re going to have to be a little less vague.”
The undercurrent of a threat lingered in her words.
She tried to kill me…twice.
I lost the ability to fear others, even if death was a possibility. But engaging in a fight with Helena was more than just my life. It wasSantino’s and the end of his friendship with Silas.
Reaching for the hem of my shirt, I shot a quick glance at Helena, whose eyes narrowed as she watched me turn my back and lift the fabric over my shoulders.
Countless seconds crawled by until an unexpected voice broke the silence.
“What happened to you?”
Helena and I whipped around simultaneously, shocked to find the boy standing in the hallway, eyes transfixed on me.
“Maksim, what are you doing here?”
“Show me,” he demanded, shuffling forward and ignoring his mother.