Chapter 5 · Poison on the Rocks

"Bianca. Did you poison his drink yet?"

Silvio's voice crackled out of the intercom, warm as a Sunday dinner prayer.

I stopped breathing.

My back was still flat against the fogged mirror. Lucian's palm was clamped over mine, and blood slid between our fingers, hot and slippery. Water kept pounding behind us. Nobody had turned it off.

Lucian didn't look at the speaker. He looked at me.

"Say that again," he told the wall. Soft. Way too soft.

"Lucian!" Silvio's laugh was thin through the static. "Congratulations, nephew. Did my girl get the scotch up there? Twenty-five years old. A wedding gift."

The light on the panel blinked red, and then it went dark.

My mouth went dry. "I don't know what he's talking about."

"Funny." Lucian pulled my bleeding hand off the glass and flipped it over like he was reading a receipt. "Because your uncle sounds real sure you do."

"He's not my uncle." My voice came out cracked. "Not anymore. He's a snake who sells people."

"Then why does he talk like you're on his payroll?"

His other hand slid up my wet collarbone. He didn't squeeze yet. He just wrapped his fingers around my throat the way you test a rope before you hang something off it.

His thumb found my pulse. I knew exactly what it was telling him.

"Walk," he said.

He dragged me out of the bathroom by the wrist. I left red footprints on the white marble and my wedding dress dripped silk water behind me like a trail of bad decisions. Out in the living room, the storm hit the glass wall in sheets. Forty floors up, the whole Atlantic sounded like it wanted in.

On the bar cart sat a crystal decanter I had never seen. A silver ribbon was tied around its neck. Beside it sat two heavy tumblers, and in one of them were three clear cubes of ice.

One glass was already poured.

"That wasn't there when I got here," I said.

"No." Lucian's eyes flicked to the door, then back. "My man carried it up twenty minutes ago. Said a De Luca cousin dropped it at the lobby with a card."

He picked up the card. Flicked it at my chest. It stuck to my wet dress.

*To the happy couple. Drink to your future. Uncle S.*

My stomach turned over. I knew that handwriting. I had watched it sign my mother's funeral flowers.

"He's setting me up," I said.

"Convenient."

"It's true!"

"It's *convenient*." He crowded me backward until the bar cart bit into my spine. Cold glass clinked behind me. "Your family poisons. It's what you people do instead of fighting like men. Ask my brother how that worked out."

His hand closed.

Not hard, not at first. Just enough to turn my breath into a thin wire. I clawed at his wrist and felt tendons like steel cable under my nails.

"Look at me," he said.

I looked.

His eyes were gray as the sky outside, and there was nothing in them. No heat, no show. Just a man doing math with my life.

"Tell me you didn't touch that glass," he said.

"I... didn't."

"Tell me you don't know what's in it."

He squeezed. Black spots swam across the edges of the room. My heels scraped the floor. My lungs started to burn, and the stupid, desperate part of me wanted to kick his shin and the smarter part knew that would get me killed.

So I did the only thing I had left.

I stopped fighting his hand.

I went limp and held his stare with everything I had left, and I forced air through my throat in one sandpaper whisper.

"Then make me drink it."

His fingers twitched.

"If I'm lying," I rasped, "I'm dead in ten minutes. If I'm not, you just found out your cousin's a liar. Either way, you get an answer."

The room went very quiet. Just rain and my heartbeat in my ears.

Lucian's jaw worked once. His grip loosened by half an inch, and I dragged in air so hard it hurt.

"You'd do it," he said, almost to himself. "You'd drink."

"Mia's nineteen," I choked. "I'd drink bleach."

Something flickered across his face and was gone before I could name it. He reached past me, picked up the tumbler, and held it at eye level. Amber light bent through the crystal. The ice was cloudy in the middle. One cube had a thin white skin on it, like frost, only it wasn't.

He sniffed.

"Bitter almond," he said flatly.

My blood went cold. Not for me. For the fact that I'd actually have swallowed it.

"Oh, God."

"Not God." He turned the glass and watched the ice crack. "Silvio. Cyanide's too loud for him. That's something that stops a heart and looks like a bad night. Something a new bride could slip into her husband's drink, then cry about at the funeral."

He set the glass down, very gently, like it was a live grenade.

Then he hurled it.

It exploded against the wall, three feet from my head. Crystal rained across the carpet. Whiskey ran down the wallpaper in long brown streaks and the ice skittered across the floor and hissed on a patch of spilled water.

I flinched so hard my teeth clicked.

"You knew," I said. "You knew it was poison before I said a word."

"I suspected." His hand was back on my throat, and this time his thumb stroked the bruise he'd just made. Slow. Almost kind. That was worse. "Now I know who your uncle thinks you are."

"And who's that?"

"My wife." He said it like a curse. "Close enough to kill me."

Heat crawled up my neck that had nothing to do with fear. His body was all wet cotton and hard muscle against my soaked dress. I could feel his heartbeat, steady as a clock. Mine was going like a trapped bird.

"I didn't do it," I whispered.

"I know."

I blinked. "Then why are you still..."

"Because he put you in my bed, Bianca." His mouth was so close I could taste the salt on it. "Which means he thinks you'll be in it tonight. Alone with me. Soft. Stupid. Sleeping."

"I'm never soft."

"I noticed." The corner of his mouth moved. It wasn't a smile. "You bled on my mirror."

His other hand dropped to my waist and gripped the wet silk there. I felt my knees go loose and hated them for it.

"There's a camera in that bathroom," he said, low. "Silvio's people have ears in my walls. Which means that whole show of his is waiting for one thing. You and me in that bedroom, and one of us not walking out."

"So let him wait."

"No." He bent, and his shoulder hit my stomach, and the whole room flipped upside down.

I screamed. I kicked. My fists beat on the back of his soaked shirt and he didn't even break stride. Blood from my palm smeared a red handprint across the white cotton.

"Put me down! Lucian! You son of a..."

"Keep fighting." His arm locked across the back of my thighs. "Make it loud."

The master bedroom door was steel, three biometric locks glowing green down the frame. He didn't touch the pad. He just kicked the thing like he was done with the world, and it slammed back against the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth.

Cold air hit my face. A massive black bed. Rain whipping the glass. And behind us, somewhere in the walls, Silvio listening.

Lucian's voice rumbled through his ribs and straight into my bones.

"Contract time, Mrs. Corvo."