Savage Queen (The Dark Elite 3)

Her face softens a little. There’s something strange about it, something false, like she’s an actor playing a role. It’s convincing, but I can see behind the curtain now. “I don’t know if your father ever told you, but our marriage was an arranged one. I didn’t want anything to do with it from day one. Did you know that?”

I didn’t know it, but despite my racing heart, I don’t say anything.

Arranged?

And unwanted?

It’s hard to believe, considering how much… peace there was in our home. How normal things were, despite the mafia aspect of our lives. My father doted on my mother, and I suppose there were times that I picked up on the fact that she didn’t love him as much as he did her, but that was always the end of things for me—as much.

She was always well-dressed and polished, always conscious of her appearance, so I just assumed she was less open with her feelings.

Not that she didn’t have them.

As if answering the question I haven’t spoken, my mother shakes her head.

“No. I didn’t love him. Ever. My father promised me that I would learn to love him after a while, that those sorts of things always worked out. But I never did. Sometimes I imagined that I hated him.” Her expression grows thoughtful, and my stomach turns at the casual way she talks about despising my dead father. “I wanted to be in control. Not just an obedient mafia wife, always turning a blind eye to her husband’s absences, his control over the money, the marriage, the house.”

“Dad wasn’t like that,” I blurt, anger rising up in me. “He would’ve given you anything you wanted. He would’ve let you have a hand in his work if you wanted to. He loved you!”

She gives me a condescending look, like I couldn’t possibly understand. “I wasn’t interested in his love. And I wasn’t interested in having a hand in his work. I wanted my own empire. So I decided to change my fate. To ‘die’ and rise again—on my own terms, this time.”

I swallow. “The car accident… whose body was it?”

Camilla smiles, like she’s enjoying watching me try to piece together the truth. “It wasn’t an accident, you know that by now. And the body? No one important. Just a necessary sacrifice if I wanted to make my ‘death’ believable. I planned and planned. You don’t know how long I waited, Grace.” She shakes her head ruefully. “You don’t know how much I

suffered for years and years, being tied down to your father like that, wanting to live my own life. To control my own destiny.”

She speaks as if she’s asking for sympathy, but I don’t feel anything but hatred welling up in my chest. I thought I couldn’t hate her any more than I already did, but I was wrong.

Dead fucking wrong.

I have plenty of room left to despise her.

“I was delayed longer than I wanted,” she says absently, as if remembering something hardly important to the story. “I never let your father touch me. I hated it when he touched me, it made my skin crawl. But one night when I was drunk and miserable, I let him. A month later, I realized I had a problem. I fixed it.”

My head spins as I begin to realize how she works. Camilla sees a problem… and fixes it. Cruelly and murderously, she fixes it.

“It was too young to tell the gender,” she explains. “Don’t worry yourself with thinking you had a sibling you never got to meet.”

“You… fucking bitch,” I say, my voice rising. It’s all I can manage, and I grope for words as they fail me. I know it’s probably not smart to call her a bitch when dozens of her men are itching to pull a gun on me, but I can’t help it. “You’re a monster. You kill without thought—”

“I kill when and what is necessary.” She cuts me off, her voice sharp. “Isn’t that what your father and all of his mafia brothers did? What Damian Novak did? I’ve played the same game they do, Grace, and I’ve played it better than them.”

The way she talks about the awful shit she’s done—as if she’s proud of it, as if she’s been waiting all these years to tell me, wanting me to rejoice with her—is fucking sickening. It makes me want to retch, to turn away and hurl up everything in my stomach onto the concrete.

“I suppose you also betrayed Landon,” I say bitterly. “I suppose you orchestrated it all with your fucked up agenda and managed to pin it all on Dad, make it look like he ratted out Damian’s brother.”

She shrugs. “Landon deserved what he got. And so did your father.”

It’s not a surprise to hear her confirm it at this point, but her words still make my blood boil. I want to step forward and hit her, to drag her to the ground and wale on her until she looks as fucked up as whatever body they pulled out of the car did—the body that was supposed to be her.

“You did,” I grit out. “You fucking framed Dad. You’re the reason we left Chicago so fast. Why we had to hide for all those years, why he said we could never come back. You forced him to run before Damian could kill him.”

Her face turns impassive. She no longer looks like she’s enjoying this little walk down memory lane. Maybe it’s because I don’t seem impressed by her fucked up scheme to wreck my dad’s life. To wreck my life.

Or, who knows, maybe I was just collateral damage. She obviously has no fucking problem with that.

“We women need to look out for ourselves,” she says, her voice cold. “Men think we have no place in their business, in their mafia, except to be ornaments on their arms and satisfaction for their desires. Look at me now, Grace. I’ve changed that.” She jerks her chin. “Those men behind me? They work for me. They obey me. They do as I tell them, not the other way around.”