“He asked me, too. But like I told him, I’d rather stab myself with a paperclip—repeatedly.”

Morbid curiosity prompts me to ask, “In the eye?”

Stassi doesn’t even blink. “Both eyes.”

“The horror.”

A wide grin splits across my sister’s face at my less-than-subtle sarcasm. Despite everything, I grin back at her—before taking another sip of her scalding coffee.

I don’t remember a time when Anastasia Donna wasn’t my best friend. At twenty-nine and thirty-two, respectively, she inherited Dad’s olive skin and dark hair while I’ve always been a near-spitting image of our Irish mother. Physically, Stassi and I are completely mismatched. Tall against short, willowy instead of curvy. Side by side, no one would ever mistake us for siblings. In our hearts, though, my younger sister has always been the other half of my soul.

Which is why I don’t evade her touch when she brushes her forefinger over my cheek with a gentleness that just might shatter me. “You haven’t slept,” she says softly.

I haven’t slept.

I’ve barely bothered to eat.

I can still feel him. Still taste him on my lips like a curse that I have no hope of ever breaking. Why would he . . . Why couldn’t he have—

With a harsh exhale, I kick off my stilettos and draw my feet onto the chair like I used to do as a little girl. Only in those days, Mama was still alive to pull me in for a tight hug whenever my mood turned sour. Her hugs were only ever second to Dad’s, whose broad chest soaked up countless tears from me and Stassi as kids. When I saw him on the last day of the trial, there’d been no more tears left to cry.

“Laels?”

“I emailed someone I shouldn’t have.”

Stassi reclines in her chair and watches me steadily, her brows furrowed.

I don’t know what she sees in my face—want and need and debilitating lust, maybe—and I fight the urge to squirm under the weight of her gaze. “I was angry, that first time. So fucking angry and all I wanted was to pin the blame on anyone else but Dad. Obviously, it all had to be a mistake. A lie.”

And it was a lie, just not one told by Reid or the various witnesses who took to the stand or the jury who ruled unanimously that Guglielmo Donna was guilty of kidnapping and murdering the wife of the Fifth Circuit of Appeals judge in New Orleans, on a hot and humid summer night. We still have no idea why he pulled the trigger or dumped her body in the Mississippi River, only that he did.

“It was a mistake,” I utter raggedly. “What I did—reaching out to him like that—was a mistake.”

My sister audibly swallows. “Laela . . .”