Page 44 of The Carnage We Keep

The slow trace of a female fingernail down my bicep pulls my attention away from thoughts of a topless Bella sprawled across my bed.

Yeah, now is probably not the time to be thinking of the little nightmare’s A+ tits. Even if the date I’m on is entirely a superficial and, if I’m being honest, lame attempt to course-correct myself, it still feels like a shithead move to be thinking about one woman’s naked body while you’re out to dinner with another.

I file that little idiom away. Pretty sure Grandpa Vito would get a kick out of it.

I ignore Vivienne’s annoying finger on my arm and concentrate on parking my pride and joy safely. Then I throw it in park, kill the engine, and get out.

My date stays where she is, probably waiting for me to come around and open the door for her.

Think again.

Look, it’s not like I’ve promised her a ring, a house in the burbs, two and half kids, and a dog. But I can at least recognize that it’s a bit of a shitty move to take someone out just to make sure your head stops wandering back to a certain Murder Muppet with absurdly perfect tits.

Now that’s a string of words I never thought I’d find rattling around my head.

I do pause when I hear her open the passenger door. But only to make sure she doesn’t slam it shut too hard.

“You seriously have a sweet car,” she gushes, closing the door with an acceptable amount of force before clip-clopping her way across the street in her towering heels to join me in front of the restaurant.

“I know.”

If we’re splitting hairs here, what I have is an exceptionally sweet, staggeringly gorgeous example of auto-engineering perfection.

“I mean God,” she drones on, shoving her arm through mine. “I think I’m gonna ask my dad for one for my birthday.”

“You should,” I say on autopilot.

Good fucking luck.

There’s only about six hundred 1965 Aston Martin DB5s still estimated to be in the world, and about ninety-five percent of them are privately owned by people like me who will never sell in a million years. As $1.5 million vintage luxury cars go, it’s pretty much top of the mountain. So even if Vivienne Bellandi’s obscenely wealthy, connected, and powerful Vegas-based mafia don daddy entertains her request for a one point five million-fucking-dollar birthday present, he’s going to learn pretty quickly that finding one for sale at any price is next to impossible.

The hostess at Christopher’s greets us warmly when we step in. I give her my name for the reservation, and she immediately ushers us to a candlelit table near the back of the cozy restaurant.

Vivienne pouted when I picked her up on campus and told her we'd be eating in Hawthorne Hollow. I guess she assumed I’d be driving us into the city for a Michelin star dining experience.

Yeah…no.

Christopher’s is a five-minute drive from campus instead of an hour. It’s the nicest restaurant in Hawthorne Hollow, but it’s also the place you go with your parents when they visit you at school. It's not for hot dates.

And yes, that was on purpose.

In hindsight, I might have been a little bit of a dick to Bella at the cliffs.

Fine, a massive dick.

But in my defense, I’d spent the entire walk there assuming the box in my hand was just some other elaborate attempt to fuck with me. I mean, that does tend to be what Bella excels at and delights in doing.

Case in point: technically, she did "take care of" the body from the alley behind The Seven Bells. She didn’t just leave it there for some poor schmo to find so the police could start testing it for DNA or clues.

But Satan’s little princess also made sure the body was found by a fisherman at the main docks, its eyes scraped out and a fucking heart carved into its chest.

I have heart, douchebag!

Yeah? Then do it with heart when you get rid of the body.

Needless to say, the heart carved into the chest isn’t lost on me. The eyes I have no fucking idea, but we can probably just chalk that up to Bella being Bella.

At least there wasn’t a single molecule of DNA on the body. I have someone who works at the Hawthorne Hollow Police Department forensic lab that I pay for information via a couple of proxies, and that body on the docks was clean when they found it.