I wait at the bottom of the stairs for Maria to come from Kat’s room. She carries a tray full of uneaten food with her.
“Is she still refusing to eat?” I snap.
“Yes, sir,” she whispers.
“Fuck!” I shake my head in annoyance. “Did you tell her I said she had to eat?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
She looks down at the tray of food rather than answer me.
“Maria?”
“She said you could go fuck yourself, sir,” she says, her voice barely even a whisper this time.
I scrub a hand over my jaw. Starving herself so I’ll pay her some attention is so fucking reckless. Maria fidgets as she stands in front of me, waiting to be dismissed.
“Maria?”
She looks up at me and her eyes are shining with tears.
“Why are you crying?” I snap at her.
“She’s so sick, sir,” she sniffs. “She keeps throwing up throughout the day. Even when she only drinks a little water, she’s sick. I wait outside her room like you asked and she doesn’t even sing or shout for you anymore.”
“She’s playing you. You cannot trust her. You hear me?”
She nods.
“Go,” I tell her, and she scurries off down the hallway. I rest my head against the wooden banister, wondering what the hell I’m going to do about Kat and her hunger strike.
“You are certainly living up to your reputation as the most ruthless man in Chicago lately, big brother,” Joey say as she walks up beside me.
I’m not in the mood for her games either today. I’m still pissed at her for the stunt she pulled. “Leave it, Joey.”
“What? I’m paying you a compliment. I mean, there’s cruel and then there’s Dante level of cruel,” she says with a wicked laugh.
“What the hell are you on about?”
“Kat,” she says with a roll of her eyes. “You’ve outdone yourself.”
“She’s breathing, isn’t she?” I snap. “No thanks to you.”
“Yeah, but come on. Depriving someone of any human interaction or any kind of mental stimulation at all is probably one of the cruelest things you can do to a person. Well played, brother.” She pats me on the back as she says it, but her voice is dripping with sarcasm.
“Are you suggesting she should be rewarded for trying to escape? For trying to take my child away from me before I even got a chance to know about it? I should let her walk around here like she used to?”
“Everything is so black and white with you. Everything you do is extreme. It doesn’t have to be that way. You can still punish her while making sure she doesn’t have a full-scale mental breakdown in the process,” she says before she starts to walk down the hallway.
“Joey,” I call after her.
She spins around, a smile on her face because she knows she just played me.
“She’ll be sleeping soon. Take her some magazines or books or something tomorrow morning.”
“Whatever you say, big brother.”
