“Young age to get married.”
I glanced at my cuticles. “Yeah, I suppose.”
“You’re a native of New York, then.”
“I wish,” I muttered.
“Don’t like home?”
“What I don’t like is you trying to small talk to coax things out of me. I don’t have anything to say to you, so you might as well take me back to jail.”
His arm brushed mine from where it rested on the center console, and I shifted away from the touch, crossing my legs the other way. Was his car small, or was it just me? The heater ran on low, but my skin was burning up. I slipped my coat off and tossed it onto the back seat.
He side-eyed me. “Nervous?”
“Feds don’t make me nervous, Allister. They give me a rash.”
I ignored the touch of his stare as it swept from the loose curls in my hair, down the red lace over my stomach that revealed a diamond navel piercing, to my bare feet.
“If you dressed a little less like a hooker, the cop who pulled you over might not have searched you.”
I pulled the bubblegum off my finger with my teeth and gave him a smile. “If you looked a little less like an anal-retentive asshole, you might get laid every once in a while.”
The corner of his lips tipped up. “Glad to hear there’s some hope for me.”
I rolled my eyes and turned my head to look out the window.
“It must have been a special occasion tonight,” he drawled.
“No.”
“No? You usually have that much blow on you on just an average day?”
I lifted a shoulder. “I might.”
“How do you pay for it?”
“Money.”
I blew a bubble.
Popped it.
A muscle in his jaw tightened, and a small amount of satisfaction filled me.
“Is that why you married your husband?” His gaze met mine. “Money?”
Anger stretched in my chest, and I refused to even respond. But, after he voiced his next question, I couldn’t keep it in.
“Are you at least a faithful gold-digger?”
Gold-digger?
“Like I ever had a choice in the matter! Vaffanculo a chi t’è morto!”
The look he gave me seared, dark and hot.
I pressed my lips together.
Dammit.
He’d barely begun a conversation and he’d already gotten me to admit I didn’t exactly have a choice in marrying Antonio.
“Your mom never wash your mouth out with soap?”
I didn’t reply. I’d tell him my mamma was the best, and he’d easily deduce my papà would rather lock me in a room for three days than bother with having to listen to me.
“Stupid move, speeding with drugs on you.”
I scoffed. I wanted to ignore him but couldn’t stop myself from replying. To be ignored felt like a cut in one’s chest, and it made me sick to think I’d ever make someone else feel that way. Amusing, as I’d just told this man to go screw his dead ancestors. Italians were creative with their insults.
“It was three miles per hour over the speed limit.”
His finger tap, tap, tapped on the steering wheel. “Who taught you to drive? Doesn’t the Cosa Nostra like to keep their women dumb and docile?”
“Obviously not, because my husband taught me.”
I wouldn’t admit Antonio gave me freer rein than any other man in the Cosa Nostra gave their wife. Antonio gave me many things. And maybe that was why it was hard to despise him for what he took away.
“And how is he going to react when you’re released to go home?”
“How is your mamma gonna react when you get home past curfew?”
“Answer the question.”
I gritted my teeth and tried to ignore the anger brewing inside me by pulling down the sun visor and fixing my hair in the mirror. “Are you asking if my husband hits me? No, he does not.” Hits was plural, so, technically, it was the truth.
His gaze singed my cheek. “You’re a bad liar.”
“And you’re annoying me, Allister.” I slammed the sun visor closed.
The atmosphere grew heavy and claustrophobic, his presence, large body, and smooth movements closing in on me.
“Does he love you?”
He asked it indifferently, as if it shared the same merit as my favorite color. Nonetheless, the question hit me like a blow to the stomach. I stared straight ahead as the back of my throat burned something fierce. He’d found a weakness, and now he was going to poke at it until I bled. Hatred tasted acidic in my mouth.
I would take electrocution over this any day.
I suddenly loathed this man, for getting into my head with his stupid questions and for baring parts of me I didn’t let anyone else see.
I blew a bubble.
Popped it.
That was when he’d had enough.
He pulled the deflated bubble straight from my mouth and threw it out the window.
I stared at him, fighting not to lick the unsettling heat of his touch from my lips. “That’s littering.”
His gaze sparked of indifference.
Agent Allister didn’t care about the environment.
No surprise.
He placed his hand back on the wheel, and I suddenly wondered how severe his OCD tendencies were—if he would go home and scrub my spit off his fingers with bleach or not. However, I quickly grew bored of thinking about the fed and turned my head to glance out the window, at the orange glow of passing streetlights and the flurries falling like tiny shadows in the night.
“How many times?”
A vague question, but by his tone, I knew we’d come full-circle and he was talking about my husband hitting me.
“Every night,” I said with insinuation. “He makes me scream so loud I wake the neighbors.”
“Yeah? You like fucking a man so much older than you?”
Deep irritation flared inside of me. I reached for the radio, turned it on, and coolly responded, “I’m sure he has more stamina than you.”
He didn’t even deign to reply. I heard only a second of some AM politics talk show before he turned the radio off. What kind of monster chose that over music?
We didn’t sit in silence for long before he filled it. “Your stepson is older than you,” he commented. “Must be strange.”
“Not really.”
“I imagine you have more in common with him than his father.”
“You imagine wrong,” I responded, bored of this conversation and bored of this man. This was the worst punishment. I’d never touch coke again.
“You lived under the same roof as him for a year. You’re close to the same age. If you don’t have more in common mentally, then surely physically.”
I laughed. Nico and me? Not in a million years.
Unfortunately, at the time, I hadn’t known it would only take one.
“Do you take my file home with you at night, Officer?”
He didn’t respond.
An awareness tickled in the back of my mind as the streets grew more and more familiar. A cold sensation settled in my stomach, and as we turned onto my street, a heavy and distinct feeling consumed me. Anger. Deep and loathing. He’d let me believe he was the honorable fed when, really, he was nothing but another man in my husband’s pocket.
He pulled up to the curb in front of my home and put the car in park.