Bad Bishop by L.J. Shen - 3

The ground shook beneath my bare feet.

A flash of a shadowed figure zipped past me from the corner of my eye.

I snapped my gaze up from the sketchbook in my lap, on high alert. I was sitting on the stone fountain in the courtyard, pouring the shape of the Amalfi Coast from memory onto the page.

I wore my pink satin nightgown and my hair was in a loose, long braid. It was pitch black, save for the amber light spilling from the windows.

My vision had always been good. Compensation for what wasn’t, Mama told me.

I spotted a figure prowling from our entrance door toward a gunmetal Mercedes-Benz G 63 that blocked one of our three garages. An uncommonly tall male, pale as a vampire and equally as frightening, stalked outside. He wore a dark coat and moved like a serpent, gliding through the night with the unnerving slickness of someone who belonged to it.

Look away now, quick, before he sees you , Mama’s voice reproached in my head. You’re not to make eye contact with people, Lila!

But what was the harm?

It was too dark for him to notice me.

I’d always watched people secretly. It was the morsel of normalcy I was still allowed. My loneliness was so intimate, so familiar to me, it became a friend in itself. It was my only companion other than Mama and Imma.

I kept staring, hoping it was Tate Blackthorn. The man who gave me the most wonderful present I’d ever been gifted—a dance. A moment of feeling like a woman.

Not a child, not a disabled person, a woman .

It happened a year ago at my brother Luca’s engagement party, and I’d been playing it in my head every night since. My most monumental moment in my eighteen years on this planet was with a complete stranger who used me as a tool to make his wife jealous.

And the sad part was…I’d let him do it all over again. This was how badly I craved human connection.

My eyes drank in his silhouette—obstinate jaw, chiseled cheekbones, features as smooth and icy as winter frost.

Could he be Tate? Could he give me another dance? Could I be so foolish as to ask for one?

He weaved through the shadows dancing across the pebbled front yard. Stopped. Tipped his head up to the moon. The moon stared back, like they were sharing a secret.

The light from one of the windows caught his hair, tangling into the strands. It burned burgundy. Rusty, like medieval copper. Not the gleaming stygian of Tate Blackthorn.

My solar plexus tightened.

It wasn’t him.

This man looked like he was sprung from fire. His hair tousled like dancing flames. And still… He appeared unbearably cold. I had the feeling I’d get frostbite if I touched him.

The pencil slipped between my fingers.

Hit the cobbled ground with a clink I couldn’t hear.

The man stopped abruptly. Froze.

Shit, shit, shit.

He heard.

I wasn’t supposed to be outside. Alone in the dark.

My legs clayed into stone. I couldn’t run even if I wanted to.

His head twisted in my direction. Slowly. Leisurely. Almost tauntingly.

Our gazes clashed in the moon-frosted courtyard. Two animals—a predator and prey—standing on opposite sides of a riverbank.

His shadowed face twisted. He was contemplating something.

Assessing. Scheming.

A rakish half smile pulled at the corner of his lips.

A decision had been made. My belly coiled into knots.

He advanced toward me. I scooted back, my butt dragging along the fountain’s edge until I felt the water skimming the back of my thighs. It was ice cold. Running would be futile. He’d chase me, then catch me, then punish me.

I knew that, even though I didn’t know him .

As he got closer, I saw he was missing an eye. The entire left side of his face was scarlet red. His nose was broken. A human skull was pinned under his arm.

And yet…he was beautiful. Beneath the blood, drainage, and fluid coming from his eyeball, and bruises, and gore.

Beautiful like violent art.

His entire demeanor was abrasive, even without all the blood. Like his existence was an attack on mine. And yet, I couldn’t look away.

My heart felt like something foreign I accidentally swallowed. I wanted to vomit it out of my body. I’d never been so scared in my life.

His mouth moved, and my eyes clung to it.

“Well, well, well. What have we here?” He examined me through his one good eye, lethally amused. “If it isn’t the Ferrantes’ innocent little princess.”

Even though I read his lips and couldn’t hear him, his voice somehow still rolled against my skin, gripping the back of my neck, forcing me to look up and meet his gaze.

He raised his free arm, tracing his knuckles along my cheek. My eyes flared, and a scream stranded in my throat. His still-warm blood painted my cheek.

“What should I do with you? Fuck you, kidnap you, or simply kill you?” he mused aloud.

I had every reason to believe he’d do all three.

My brothers weren’t nice people, and his meeting with them obviously didn’t go as planned, judging by his face. This was retaliation. I was his payback.

His hand ascended my cheek, fingertips gliding across the shell of my ear. He paused. I thought he’d rip it clean off my head. Instead, he seized the ribbon keeping my fair hair in the braid, pulling it slowly, rubbing it between his fingers with rapt fascination. My hair tumbled down my back.

He licked the corner of his lips, his stare invasive, detonating all of my walls at once.

I forced myself to meet his stare. My whole body trembled with fear, but I didn’t scream, didn’t try to run away, didn’t do anything stupid.

I lived with psychopaths. I knew the surest way to become prey was to act like it.

“You’re the simple one.” He assessed me through his hooded, cold eye.

I didn’t answer, but his words stung.

That’s what people said behind my back.

To my face, too.

That I was simple. Dumb. Disposable. A punishment the Ferrantes were saddled with for their grave sins. Hell, even my father called me his pretty little burden.

Vello Ferrante had made it clear he had no use for a daughter beyond marrying her off to someone whose alliance he sought. And so my entire life had been carefully constructed to ensure he thought me unable to be married.

The only way to escape marriage to a mobster was to be unable to be married. More specifically—to pretend I had a developmental disability.

My mother came up with the scheme when I was a child, and I went along with it, trusting she knew best. While a pretty, ditzy woman was a mobster’s wet dream—a person with actual struggles, in need of assistance and care, wasn’t something men in this line of work considered.

It had nothing to do with morals and everything to do with them being the scum of the earth.

He let go of my hair, seizing the front of my neck punishingly. His gaze lingered on my face.

Slowly, he lowered my head into the gushing fountain. He was going to drown me. The realization kicked my heart into high gear. I fought the urge to wrap my fingers around his arm, to try to untangle it from my throat. There was no point.

Instead, I closed my eyes as my hair sank into the water first. Ice-cold liquid engulfed my skull.

I love you, Mama.

I love you, Luca, Enzo, and Achilles.

I love you, Imma.

I even love you, Papa, despite everything.

I’ll watch over you from heaven.

Suddenly, I was jerked back up. My eyes flew open.

I’d think he had a change of heart, but I knew he possessed no such organ. He pulled a pocketknife from his peacoat, flipping it open and pressing it to the corner of my eye. Yup. Just as I feared. He just figured he could make more mess chopping me.

I held my spine straight and my chin high, forcing myself not to swallow hard.

If I must die, I’d die like a Ferrante.

We weren’t good people, but we were warriors.

And warriors didn’t cower.

I stared at him with fierce defiance. The darkness around us held its breath.

The knife kissed my skin, poking, tightening, reminding me what was at stake. It was dull. I knew he’d choose a dull knife. Sadists often did.

The knife began traveling along the edge of my left eye. I choked on a pool of saliva in my throat. Still, I pressed my lips shut.

He tilted my chin with the edge of his knife, forcing me to stare more closely at his grotesque face. “Beauty is such a fragile thing, Raffaella. I can tarnish your face with one stroke of a knife.”

The stranger raised his knife-wielding hand, gathering momentum, and swung it toward my face. I squeezed my eyes shut and stopped breathing, my muscles tightening as I waited for the punishing explosion of pain.

A pain that didn’t come.

Shakily, I pried my eyelids open, pulse hammering. My body was slick with sweat.

A gleam of mirth flickered along his lifeless eye.

The man tucked his knife back into his coat, businesslike. He was playing with my life, screwing with my head, and swallowing every ounce of my fear, all while looking dry as a bone.

I stared at him, slack-jawed, waiting for his next move.

He grabbed something from his pocket, uncurling my fingers between us, putting it there and making me close my fist over it. It was small and slippery. Round. A shell-less snail?

I uncoiled my fingers, staring down. My heart sledgehammered its way past my rib cage.

An eye.

A human one.

His eye.

I wanted to drop it but I knew better than to defy him.

He leaned forward, until our noses almost touched. He smelled of blood, gunpowder, and dark, haunted woods. It was an oddly pleasant, sinister scent, and it seeped into my system, touching a corner inside me I didn’t even know existed.

“Tell your brothers that next time they fuck with me, enter my territory, or otherwise disturb my business, I’m going to hunt you down, fuck every hole in your body, slash that pretty throat, then dump you at their doorstep to bleed out. Understand?”

I was going to do no such thing.

For one thing, my brothers weren’t supposed to know I understood their language, let alone spoke. For another, I wasn’t his errand bitch.

I stared at him defiantly, saying nothing. I had a feeling he knew I understood him.

“Good.” He straightened, releasing my throat from his hold. “Now run, Gealach . Because when I catch? I kill.”

I sprang to my feet and sprinted back inside barefoot, leaving my canvas and pencils outside, as fast as I could before he changed his mind. Panicked breaths tore at my lungs.

Halfway through the journey to my front door, I realize he ripped the spaghetti straps of my nightgown. My breasts were exposed. Every inch of my upper body was smeared with his blood.

I felt the ghost of his hands slithering up and down my flesh. Warm and callused and alive.

Weeks after, I’d ask myself if he was a figment of my imagination.

A nightmare. An omen.

But no, he had to be real.

I knew.

Because I kept his eye.