Vicious Minds: Part 3 (Children of Vice 6)

Ring.

Ring.

Quickly, I moved to get my phone, not sure who’d turn the volume up so high. Then again, that was exactly what Ethan would do so he could see how out of it I might have been not to answer. Lifting the phone, I glanced down to see a blocked ID calling. Sighing, it could only be one of two people, and I disliked both of them right now.

“Why are you not with your husband?” my grandfather asked me. “Or at your daughter’s play this morning?”

“I was poisoned.”

“Poisoned?” He gasps.

“That is what I said.”

“Do you know by who?”

From the tone in his voice, I could feel him prying. “No, why? What is wrong?”

“We need to talk, in person.”

“Grandfather, I just woke up. I still feel…”

“Mala tempora currunt.” It was Latin, meaning bad times are upon us. A code which meant something had gone terribly wrong.

“Understood. I’ll meet you at the ball.”

He hung up without a word, and I glanced back at the vial in my hands. My grandmother was a botanist. In the beginning, before she had married my grandfather, she had only wanted to take care of gardens and experiments with plants to make better gardens. After her marriage, she began studying poison. She had taught me how to recognize the signs of poisoning right away, how to use them to heal myself, and how to kill others. It wasn’t as simple a buying some hemlock and dropping it in someone’s soup. She came up with the most complicated recipes and spent years trying to figure out how to make them more effective. All of that knowledge she poured into me and a few others under her care.

It was because of that, that I immediately knew something was wrong. It was because of her training that I had survived and felt well so quickly afterward. My grandmother was old now, slowly losing her mental capacities, and all she wanted in life was to see the destruction of the Callahan family for what they had done to her. It was her living and would be her dying wish on this earth, to give this family the pain they gave her.

That was why all of this was a mess.

But in the end, no matter how much I thought of it, there was no turning back now. I’d already chosen my path and chosen my side. All I could do was keep pushing forward, keep fighting until I had my happiness.

Lifting my phone

back up, I dialed once, and automatically, he picked up the phone.

“Where are you?”

“I am at the stupid ball with your husband. Good to hear you are still alive,” Dino replied.

I snickered. “How about Vinnie and Italo?”

“Vinnie is kissing ass and stuffing caviar and crème fraîche tartlets into his mouth with the other city elites, and I believe Italo is somewhere getting pimped out for your husband.”

“Pimped out?”

“I don’t know the details. Your husband keeps everything close to the vest. You’re going to have to call him.”

“I’ll ask him when I get there,” I said when I entered the bathroom.

“Get where? Here?”

“Yep, let him know, I’m coming.”

“He’s not going to like that.”

“That’s why my phone will be off and I’m letting you tell him, but give it like an hour before you do,” I replied and hung up, looking up at myself in the mirror. “Jesus Christ.” No, not even he looked this bad.