by Susan Sey
“My sister,” she said, her beautiful face wooden. “She died.”
He squashed down the surge of sympathy he somehow knew she wouldn’t welcome. “You saw it happen?”
Her mouth twisted bitterly. “Front-row seats.”
Rush tried to wrap his mind around that, around watching a sibling die and being helpless to prevent it. Around being introduced in that way to the black power of a gun to give and to take away. Around an immensity of pain he knew he himself had caused countless times.
“Okay, so you were really, really young,” he said, trying to feel around, to go gently. “Impressionable. And that’s a pretty huge thing to try to understand when your world-view is still pretty small and self-centered.”
She winced and he hurried on. “Not you personally,” he said. “Just teenagers in general, you know? They tend to think they understand everything when they’ve really only seen a little slice of the world. It would screw up any kid’s head, witnessing a violent death that young—”
“I didn’t witness her death.” Her eyes snapped to his, dark and bottomless and filled with an endless sorrow that stole his breath. “I caused it.”
MARIA WAS oddly serene, given that she was having some kind of breakdown. She couldn’t say when she’d first noticed the hairline cracks in her control. Last week, last month, last year? All she knew was that Rush had noticed them, too. And, being Rush, he’d relentlessly wriggled himself into those cracks, pulling them inexorably wider, calling to the hungry, dangerous woman inside her.
And now he’d done it. He’d wrestled from her a single, bald-faced admission—I killed my sister—and it had shattered the façade. Shattered her. Or what she’d led the world to believe was her for nearly half her life.
The experience was not, she mused with a strange detachment, what she’d expected.
She’d braced herself for a muddy gush of guilt and rage and pain and regret. For a howling maelstrom of destructive energy. For anything but this profound, quiet sorrow. It rolled through her, crushing the air from her lungs and extinguishing whatever small, foolish sparks of hope she’d allowed Rush’s desire to nurture inside her.
Then Rush seized her hands, his touch hot, vibrant and so alive. It burned her, and she closed her eyes against the pull of it. Of him.
“Tell me,” he said, his voice low and steady and full of a compassionate understanding that made her throat ache. “You have to tell somebody. Whatever it is, it’s got you all tangled up inside. It’s got you hiding behind somebody else’s face and laughing somebody else’s laugh.” She felt his thumb brush her cheek, and that harsh voice went impossibly soft. “Maria,” he said. “You can tell me. I need to know.”
Tears threatened at the sound of her true name, and for a long awful moment she didn’t know if she’d be able to swallow them down. But she did. He’d asked for the truth, her truth. He’d earned that much from her, so she’d give it to him. She didn’t have anywhere else to hide anyway.
“I killed my sister,” she said.
“No, you didn’t.” He said it with a certainty, an immediacy that sent pain lancing through her. God. She didn’t want to do this. Really, really didn’t want to. She wished she could just stay right here, safe in the beautiful cocoon of his trust. But she was out of options. It was time to lay her cards on the table and let herself be judged.
“I didn’t pull the trigger or anything, no. But it was my fault anyway. My own stupid fault.”
He smoothed away a tear she hadn’t been aware of shedding with the pad of his thumb and said again, “Tell me.”
“Marisol was my twin,” she said. “Beautiful, smart, ambitious, with this sense of justice that even high school couldn’t dent.”
“And you?”
“Me?” She forced a chuckle. “I wasn’t. I was geeky, awkward, mathematically inclined. I laughed too loud, I had all these insane curls. And I was tall.”
“Totally your fault.”
“Like that matters in high school.” She gave a jerky shrug. “But Marisol didn’t let anybody torture me. She was the type to use her power for good, not evil. Which is why being jealous of her was so wrong. But I was. Jealous. Of her straight perfect hair. Of her curvy little body. Of her giant smile and her gorgeous boyfriend.” Maria sighed. “All her gorgeous boyfriends, actually. But especially Ridge.”
“Ridge?”
“Ridge Calloway. She met him when he was fresh out of the police academy and she was doing a summer internship at the station house. Prepping herself for a brilliant career in law enforcement. Marisol was always planning ahead.” She smiled at him, and it was small and wretched but genuine. It was the only kind she had left. “So he was a few fabulous years older, and he had one of those faces that belonged on a recruiting poster for the Marines. They made an astoundingly good-looking couple. The kind who actually stun people with their beauty. To this day I don’t know if I wanted him for myself, or if I just wanted to be Marisol, but when she broke things off with him—she said he was getting too possessive, if you can believe it. Who would complain about a guy like Ridge Calloway wanting you all to himself, Jesus!” She shook her head. “So when he started calling me? Well. It was a dream come true, right? He’d been blinded by Marisol’s physical perfection and her surface charm, but that wasn’t enough to sustain a man of Ridge’s depth. He’d want something more. Somebody more. Somebody deeper. Somebody more like . . . well, me.”
She laughed but she wasn’t amused. She didn’t sound amused either, judging from the wince in Rush’s eyes. “So when he asked me out, of course I went. Because I wanted him. Wanted him in the worst way. It was like a physical hunger, this want. This love. I craved him, you know? It was like I’d die if I couldn’t have him. Which made it relatively easy to overlook a few troubling facts.”
“Like?”
“Oh, like his insistence on keeping our love a secret. We wouldn’t want to hurt Marisol’s feelings, would we? Like the fact that, when we talked, it was all about Marisol. But hey, he had to heal, didn’t he? He needed closure, and my hard-hearted sister wouldn’t even speak to him. So I talked to him instead. About her. Her schedule, her friends. Her dates. Was she seeing anybody? Was it serious? I told him everything he wanted to know, right down to the minute. And when he turned up in the school parking lot the morning before our prom with his service revolver and an ultimatum for Marisol, I told myself I was as stunned as anybody.”
Nausea quivered in her stomach as that day came back to her in the vivid Technicolor of her dreams. “Was I really stunned? I don’t remember anymore. You want to know what I do remember, though? I remember the way the heat radiated up off the parking lot. I remember the way Marisol rolled her eyes and told him to get lost. I remember the way she looked at me, with pity and compassion and understanding. Understanding, Rush. Can you imagine? She should have been angry at me. Furious. Here she’d given an unbalanced stalker the old heave-ho and I, in my infinite selfishness, had brought him right back into our lives. But she wasn’t pissed. No, she understood. She understood that I was just that desperate, just that pitiful, that I’d not only want my sister’s leftovers, but I’d yearn for them. I’d crave them. Sell my soul for them.”
She huffed out a disgusted laugh. “I was in love. In deep. Beyond reason, for sure. But it was pretty obvious by then that the feeling wasn’t mutual. Marisol was the Garden of Eden, and Ridge wasn’t about to let himself get kicked out. He swore up and down he just wanted to talk, but Marisol, she was a smart cookie. She didn’t chat with angry, armed men. So of course Ridge handed over the gun.”
“To Marisol?”
“To me.” She stretched her lips in a grotesque parody of a smile. “The neutral third party.”
“Shit.”
“Tell me about it. Because then it was in my hands, his service revolver. I’d never held a gun before. It was heavier than I’d imagined.”
“They always are.” Rush brushed a lock of hair away from her sticky cheek.
“He had a clutch piece,” Rush said. “Ankle holster?”
“It’s a classic for a reason.” She shook her head. “But I had a gun, too. I should have shot him. It should have been automatic. And I tried to, Rush. I really tried. At least I think I did.” Nausea crawled up her throat, thick and suffocating as memory. “But the gun was so heavy, and I didn’t know how the safety worked, and he was so fast. He’d shot her before I could even point it at him.”
“Maria,” he said, his voice rich with pain and pity. “God, you can’t—”
She cut him off. She didn’t want his pain or his pity. She just wanted him to know.
“Then he asked me to shoot him.”
Rush didn’t say anything, only held her cold hands in his warm ones, his eyes steady and patient as he waited for the rest. So she gave it to him.
Chapter 25
“HE CRIED and asked me to kill him. And I’m standing there,” she said, “with my ears ringing and my vision doing that broken filmstrip thing. My sister’s crumpled on the pavement like an old doll and I was trying—Christ, I was trying to pull the trigger. But I was too slow.”
“He shot himself.” It wasn’t a question.
“That’s what they tell me. I didn’t see that part myself because I’d passed out. That’s what I do when I try to pull the trigger on another living being.” She laughed, a jagged, bloody noise. “Even, apparently, a living being who’s just murdered my own twin sister. My mother’s never forgiven me for not blowing his ass to kingdom come when he asked me to. It was the least I could do, in her opinion.”
“She would have put that on your conscience?” he asked quietly. “Taking a human life?”
“People do a lot of horrible stuff in the grip of passion.” Maria shrugged. “My passion just happens to be aroused by exactly the wrong things.”
Understanding flooded those cool gray eyes. “A flaw you’ve spent your life trying to erase.”
She spread her hands. “It’s a goal.”
“You were a child, Maria. A teenage girl. You made a mistake, a horrible one, but—”
“But nothing. Marisol’s dead.”
“Yeah, she is. And that’s a shame. I’m so sorry for your loss.” His quiet words thudded into her, both painful and beautiful. Her loss. Nobody ever talked about her loss. Her guilt, sure. That had been covered, ad nauseam. But her loss? No. It had always been her mother’s loss, her family’s loss, the world’s loss. But suddenly it was her loss, too. Her tremendous, profound, world-altering loss, and she ached for her twin the way she’d ache for her right arm if it suddenly went missing.
“But, Maria?” Rush leaned forward, pinned her with those sharp, uncompromising eyes. “It’s not—”
“—my fault?” She squeezed his hands, so strong and warm around hers, and smiled, though it was a little shaky. “Please don’t forgive me, Rush. This isn’t confession, and I’m not telling you any of this in the hopes that you’ll grant me absolution. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why I can’t love you.” She shook her head hard. “No. Honesty. This has to be honest.” She forced herself to meet his eyes. “I could totally love you. I want to love you. God, in the worst way. But I won’t do it.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m dangerous when I love, Rush.” She said it softly, which didn’t do a damn thing to diminish the slicing pain of having to say it. “Don’t you see? I don’t have any checks, any controls. I love too much, too hard and too unwisely. It already cost me my twin. I can’t let it cost me anything—anybody—else. Particularly not you.”
“I wasn’t going to say it wasn’t your fault.”
She blinked at him. “What?”
“Earlier. When I said ‘it wasn’t’—and you cut me off to refuse my forgiveness? I wasn’t going to offer it. I wasn’t going to let you off the hook.”
He still had her hand between his, and she left it there while she stared at him, dumbfounded.
“After last night, after what I told you about myself, did you really think I wouldn’t understand? Of course you didn’t actually kill your sister, but there’s fault and there’s fault. It’s not what you did but what you found inside yourself. There’s some deep, scary, uncontrollable passion in there. And you’re right to be wary of that. Believe me, I know what it is to live with some dangerous shit inside you. Taking responsibility for that isn’t easy and you had to learn way too young about the consequences of being thoughtless and impulsive. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. But you have to live with those consequences, Maria. There’s no undoing the mistake.”
It took a few tries to find her voice. “I’m not trying to undo—”
“Of course you are. You’re not mourning Marisol; you’re trying to be her. As if straightening your hair, dressing to the nines and earning that badge she wanted so bad is going to ease your mother’s pain or your guilt.” He smoothed his hand over the smooth fall of her hair. “This is pretty, Maria, but it doesn’t help. You’re not looking at your problem. You’re trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. And you’re not going to solve it if you won’t look at it.”
She gaped at him, her ears ringing from the brutal truth of his words. Finally she cleared her throat. “You seriously weren’t going to forgive me?”
“Nope. I’m the honesty police.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Forgiveness is your department.”
RUSH STOOD against Einar’s counter the next morning and watched as Maria searched, with meticulous care, every drawer and cupboard in his cousin’s kitchen. She applied the same professional thoroughness to the tiny bedrooms, then the minuscule bathroom and finally the sitting room. She even inspected the chicken coop—what was left of it—and the slaughter shed. Then she came back to the kitchen, her lips tight, her brows pinched.
“No luck?”
“No.” She squinted out the window toward a patch of frigid blue sky. “I was hoping to stay low profile on this, but I’m going to need a warrant to search the plane. I’ll make some calls this afternoon.” Her eyes snapped back to his, dark and troubled. “But first I want to go back to the Stone Altar.”
“Why?”
“I’m thinking about installing motion-sensitive surveillance equipment.”
“You have that kind of stuff handy?”
“Of course not. But I could have some sent up.”
“I commend the outside-the-box thinking, Maria, but I’m not sure it’d be worth the effort. Even if you managed to drill a hole in the frozen wall big enough to stash a camera, this kind of cold is hell on batteries. They wouldn’t last six hours.”
“I know.” She sighed. “But I need to search the mine more thoroughly anyway. I might as well check out surveillance possibilities while I’m there.”
“What are you searching for?”
“Cash. If there’s a stash there, I want to take it into custody before Einar’s back on-island.”
“How will you connect supernotes in the mine to Einar, though? They could belong to anybody.”
“Yarrow, for example?” She blew out a frustrated breath and the curls on her forehead danced. Rush grinned at them in spite of himself. Maybe Einar was in some deep shit, but Maria had kept her promise. She was flying her curly-headed freak flag this morning, and he loved it.
“I stand by my logic,” he said now. “Yarrow’s the one with the connections to move supernotes. And you yourself explained how exactly she’s motivated to hurt Lila by screwing around with black magic. So why aren’t you looking at her?”
“I am,” Maria said. “As a victim, though, not a criminal.”
“A victim?” Rush stared. Yarrow was a tough kid, all hard eyes and scathing words. He couldn’t imagine her being taken at any game she chose to play. “A victim of what?”
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br /> She hesitated. “Of who.”
“What?”
“A victim of who, not what.”
Rush’s brain did a few confused circles, then his mouth dropped open. Oh God. First smuggling counterfeits, then black magic, now she wanted to accuse Einar of—He broke off, unwilling to follow the logic through even inside his own head. That would make it too ugly. Too real.
“Sexual abuse.” Maria supplied the conclusion grimly but without hesitation. “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”
“Why? Why on earth would you think that?”
“I can’t explain it. I just know it when I see it.”
“See what? Okay, Yarrow has a crush on him, but so do half the girls on the ski team. So what?”
“A crush? You think she has a crush? Jesus, Rush, she’s in love. Completely, irrationally, worshipfully in love. And I think Einar is taking advantage of that. Of her.” Her eyes were dark, direct and full of pained regret. “I don’t take any joy in pursuing this,” she said quietly. “But Yarrow’s an innocent, if troubled, child. We protect her safety before we protect Einar’s feelings.”
Rush shook his head, though not in denial as much as to impose order on the crazy, disjointed thoughts tumbling around in there. “Maria, come on. I know Einar. I’ve known him his whole life. He couldn’t—”
“Of course he could,” she said. “Even if he’s not sleeping with her, he could be using her feelings to manipulate her into any number of illegal acts, up to and including moving supernotes. It happens all the time.” He opened his mouth to refute this blanket condemnation of humanity, but she cut him off. “All the time, Rush.”
He shut his mouth and looked at her. At the pain in her face, the fierce determination to protect an innocent, a keening drive to punish the guilty. And suddenly he understood.
“Maria,” he said, his stomach churning with echoes of her experience with misguided love. “It doesn’t happen to everybody just because it happened to you.”
