Original Sins by Faith Summers
26
Henry
We drive back home in silence.
Georgiou is looking like he was going to pop a nerve.
And me?
I don’t know what the fuck to say, much less explain how I feel.
I also wouldn’t know what I should start worrying about first.
Should it be the fact I’ve been screwing around with Donny’s daughter for the last three weeks?
Donny, the same guy who handed me a platter of wealth that got me back in my father’s good graces.
Or maybe I should worry about the fact that I bought his daughter in a virgin auction. I paid money for her pussy, and she signed her body away to Georgiou and me.
Fuck.
I assured my father I didn’t plan to disappoint him ever again, but look at it now, the same problem I had before might screw with me.
Me and my dick and the idea to buy a girl for the month was mine. Not Georgiou’s. He was the sensible one. The one who said we have too much shit on our plate to deal with, and we shouldn’t have a girl.
But I convinced him and enticed him to take her virginity.
I could worry over those two things destroying my ass, but most of all, what gets me is how I feel about Evie.
When we walk into the house, Georgiou still hasn’t said a fucking word to me.
I get to see how he feels, though, when he walks over to the ugly ass vase his mother gave him for Christmas and throws it into the wall.
It smashes to pieces, and he sends the vase’s equally ugly paperweight along with it straight into the wall.
The last time he behaved that way was when he let Priscilla go.
He’d just found out they lost their baby, and she wanted to call off their engagement.
“I’m going out,” he says, marching past me.
“Fuck you,” I shout, and he whirls back around to face me. “You’re not even going to talk about what happened?”
Of all the things that get on my nerves around him, this is the worst.
He just shuts down when there’s a problem, goes on some rampage, then hides in his fucking cave. He only comes back when he’s cooled off.
This time is different, though.
“What the fuck do you want me to say? What happened speaks for itself. People like me don’t make these kinds of mistakes. I should have checked her out from the get-go.”
“And I shouldn’t have encouraged you to go to the auction.”
“Man, fuck that. You make it sound like it’s the first time we’ve bought a girl. We’re always doing shit like that. She gave herself away at hello—Evangeline Montrose. We both noticed she stumbled over her surname and did nothing about it. That might be fine for you, not for me, though. I grew up knowing to pay attention to shit like that. People get killed for less than that, but I let it slide. Now look at the shit we’re in. You know what’s going to happen if Donny finds out what we did?”
“Of course I fucking know. If my father finds out, and Donny pulls his business he’s given us, that’s it for my father and me.”
“Mine will be the fucking same too because Donny is the biggest investor at Giordanos Inc. Most of the contracts we have are with him or contracts who work with him. If he goes, they all go, and I’m fucked. At least your family will be able to recoup, but it’s different for me. I don’t want to be responsible for bringing down my family's legacy, and not when I was just about to make my own.”
I hear him, and he’s right. Things are different for him, and what we did can’t be undone.
Evie might not say anything, but now that people know who she is, there’s no end of possibilities of how we could be found out.
And still, I’m thinking of her.
Why did she do it?
“Georgiou, what the hell did she need that money for?”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Henry.”
“But we fell for the same girl,” I say it blatant and plain.
He narrows his eyes at me. “I can’t talk about that right now either.”
“Why the fuck not? You don’t want to try and get to the bottom of why she did what she did?”
“No, I don’t. Do you want to know why? Because she knew who we were when she saw us at the auction. She knew this was a big fucking lie that could blow up in our faces.”
“Georgiou, we bid on her. She didn’t know that part. She wouldn’t have known that we were going to be there, much less bid on her. We picked her before she even stood on the block, and when we saw her, we decided she was going to be ours.”
The light comes back into his eyes, but it’s gone a second later.
“I got to get out of here.” He sighs. “I need to calm the fuck down before I do something I’ll regret.”
He walks out, and the next thing I hear is the front door slamming shut.
He takes the motorcycle, which probably means he’s either going to a bar or a club and will probably end up getting pussy to forget the shit.
I can’t do that this time.
I walk into the living room and sit down so I can think.
Evie is stinking rich and the heiress to fortunes untold. But that’s not her money; it’s her father’s.
She has to do what she’s told.
She and Peter didn’t exactly look like the happy couple. She looked like she wanted to run away from him.
What if that was it?
Escaping.
I remember her wrist and the bruise on it. Did he do that to her?
With what we know about Peter, I don’t even know why I’m asking myself that question.
We’re supposed to see her tomorrow, but we can’t.
It’s over.
It’s fucking over, and even if we wanted to, we couldn’t take the risk and continue this relationship that should never have started.
I just wish I could believe that.
