The Serpent's Curse by Lisa Maxwell (read an ebook week .TXT) 📕

“I’ll walk you out,” Theo said.

“Let me,” Cela told him. “You stay here and finish.”

The two women had built a fragile truce between them in the weeks before this, but their argument earlier had shaken something loose in Viola, something that she couldn’t put back in the place it had once been. Now that she was faced with the prospect of speaking with Cela alone, Viola felt suddenly nervous.

Cela led the way toward the front of the house in silence, and Viola wished she could find an excuse to avoid the conversation that was about to happen.

“You were awful quiet today,” Cela said when they reached the small vestibule before the front door. “I mean, after we had words.”

“It seemed better to listen,” Viola said truthfully. And to think…

Cela nodded, as though agreeing. Then she let out a long sigh. “I don’t know that I like you, exactly,” Cela told her, “but I want you to know that I don’t bear you any ill will. Jianyu trusts you, so I’m willing to trust you too. I’m willing to start again, if you are.”

It was a bit of grace that Viola did not feel she deserved.

“I owe you an apology,” she told Cela softly.

Cela simply stared at her, quiet and waiting, not giving so much as an inch.

When Viola had aimed Libitina back in Morgan’s ballroom, she’d thought she was doing the right thing. Later, she’d told herself that she hadn’t known who Cela was. How could she have known that Jianyu would be working with a brown-skinned girl? But now she wondered how she could have been so shortsighted. Now she wondered why she had aimed to kill. Had it been from desperation or the heat of the moment? Or had Viola taken one look at Cela in the rumpled servant’s uniform and seen only the other girl’s brown skin and curling hair? Had Viola heard her mother’s voice in her ears, as she had earlier today?

She couldn’t know for sure, but if Jianyu had not stepped in front of her blade, Viola might never have thought anything of what she’d done. If she had not heard Abel speak a little while before, she might never have wondered why she’d made that particular choice. And she would have been worse off for it.

“I can’t take back the things I’ve done,” Viola said finally.

In response, Cela’s brows rose and her lips quirked as though to say, That’s not much of an apology.

Viola bit back an answering smile at the other girl’s backbone. Cela was right. “I am sorry for what I did,” Viola told her. “For what I assumed about you, and for the ugliness in my heart that day. You and your brother,” she said. “Your kindness and your bravery… it humbles me. I will work to be worthy of it.”

“It’s not about working for it,” Cela said with a frown. “Everybody’s worthy from the moment they’re born, and maybe if more people understood that, we’d have a lot less ugliness in this world.”

The words struck an odd chord in Viola, one that vibrated through her in ways she wasn’t ready to hear.

Before Viola could respond, Cela frowned. “I’m betting everything I have on the two of you, you know. I’m trusting you to keep Abel safe.”

“I will do anything in my power to see that you and your brother come to no harm,” Viola said.

“I’m going to hold you to that.” Cela gave Viola a small nod before she went back to join the others, a sign that maybe the future between the two of them didn’t have to be so fraught with tension.

By the time Theo’s driver finally dropped Viola off back in the Bowery that night, it was much later than she’d intended it to be, far later than was acceptable or easily explainable, and she could only hope that her brother was too busy to notice. Her hopes were dashed, though, when she stepped through the back kitchen entrance and saw her brother waiting. With him were Johnny the Fox and another of his lackeys, Razor Riley.

“So nice of you to finally join us, Viola,” Paolo said. “I imagine you have a reasonable explanation for where you disappeared to for so long.”

She lifted her chin, defiant. “I went out.”

“Out…” Paolo’s tone was dangerously amused. “I’m afraid you’ll have to do better than that, little sister.”

Torrio smirked at her. “She was probably with her friends on 127th Street.”

Viola couldn’t stop her eyes from widening. She’d thought she’d been careful, but the Fox was wearing a triumphant look on his ugly face. She’d thought she had everything under control—Nibsy and Paolo and the danger the Order posed. But if her brother knew about Cela and Abel…

“Ah yes, the eggplants you’ve been visiting.” Paolo flicked his cigarette to the ground, then snuffed it out with the sole of his polished shoe. “When, exactly, were you planning to tell me about them?”

She took an instinctive step back.

It was such a stupid thing to say. Eggplants. It had been a joke in her family, a bit of absurdity that they’d used between themselves to pretend they were only having a bit of fun. It wasn’t hatred. It wasn’t the sort of evil you had to confess to Father McGean before you went to mass. It was a joke.

But it wasn’t. It never had been.

It turned Viola’s stomach now to realize how easily she’d been a part of that ugliness, how easily she’d allowed herself to use their hatred as a way to belong. When her family had arrived in this country, they’d had so many troubles—and for no reason at all. They’d been hated by the pale Germans who had long ago made themselves into members of the community, and by the freckled Irish who already spoke English when they stepped from the boat. They were too strange with their rosary beads, too dark, too unwanted, and so her family had reveled in the small knowledge that it could be