by Mann, Marni
I couldn’t contain my laughter. “You must be kidding.”
“I just want to talk to you. That’s all.”
I glanced from her to the elevator and back. We were completely alone…she had me right where she wanted me. If my instinct was to run as fast and far as I could, my strength told me to stay. Emma’s voice appeared to confirm this. Just breathe, Charlie, she said. I did more than that; I straightened my spine and stood taller. I knew what Victoria didn’t; she may have called me Cee, but the woman standing before her was Charlie. The mask was off, and soon the gloves would be, too. “What do you want, Victoria? Obviously it has nothing to do with my art.”
“Considering our shared situation, I think it’s unwise for us to talk in the hallway.” She moved back through the door, hiding in the small niche that surrounded the doorframe. “Come in.”
Did she really think I would go into her suite with her? “You’re out of your mind.”
She shrugged. “If it makes you feel more comfortable, hold your cell phone in your hand and dial 9-1-1. You have my permission to press send the moment you feel threatened.”
I rested my thumb on the screen of my phone. “Maybe I should just do that right now...”
“It wouldn’t take much for them to rush in and take me down, would it?” she asked. “I’m a wanted woman, after all.”
There was no way I was going inside that room with her. She was the enemy, someone I’d trusted to take care of me, and she’d led me straight into that house of horrors. I wasn’t going to be led anywhere by her again.
“I think the hallway will be just fine,” I said. “If you have something to say, you can say it out here.” My volume rose, almost as if I knew I was willing to call her bluff.
I think she knew I was, too.
“Okay, then…the hallway it is.” She raised her open palms to me, as if she were giving up. “I’ve been thinking about you a lot since everything sort of…fell apart…for us.”
“Maybe things fell apart for you. But things have only gotten better for me.”
She looked me up and down. “So I see.” She breathed deeply. “Have you ever thought about me?”
I wasn’t going to play her game, or answer her odd questions, or tell her that it had taken until recently for me to stop looking over my shoulder and wondering if she would be there.
“What is it that you want, Victoria?” I repeated, louder this time. “It’s obviously not a painting.”
“Well, now…you’ve grown a pretty little backbone, haven’t you?” She smirked. “I’m so happy to see that.” I didn’t respond. “You’re a bright girl, Charlie…haven’t you ever wondered how I was able to get away when everyone else got caught?” she asked. “How I managed to slip out of a net that dragged down some figures from Boston’s highest positions of power yet somehow had a hole large enough for me to escape through?”
I moved warily to the side just a bit, staring into her eyes, trying to figure out the answer without needing her words. Honestly I hadn’t thought too much about that part of the whole thing. I just figured she was more devious than the men she was surrounded by. “I have no idea, Victoria.”
“It was your father, Charlie. He clued me in on the take-down…he was the one who told me I needed to find somewhere safe to go right before it happened.”
My father?
She knew our connection. Hearing her say those two words sent a pain straight through my core, it rattled, it shook, it weakened everything inside of me, and she could see it.
“Sorry…should I call him the Doctor? Would that make you a little less anxious?” She was toying with me now. “He wanted to make sure I wouldn’t get caught. He wanted to keep me from going to prison. He trusts me, you know... ”
“Why the hell would he ever do something like that?” My anger was making me bold.
“Come inside and I’ll answer all your questions.”
I reconsidered what might happen if I did that. I still had the phone tucked under my fingers.
She put her hands in the air again and repeated, “I’m not going to hurt you, Charlie. I’ve had plenty of opportunity to do that already.” Her eyes sparkled.
Could I really go in that room with her? I couldn’t help but be curious about why my father would choose to help her, or trust her with information that was supposed to remain only between him and me. What else did she know? And why would she ever risk her own freedom by revealing her whereabouts to me? Victoria may not have been one of the owners of that house, but she’d been at the highest level of authority among them. She was facing life without parole like the others. My father had told me that she’d known why the girls were recruited to work there and what would happen to them once they were inside. She was an accessory to murder—many of them, actually. Still, my desire to know was as strong as my fear of her vengeance. But as she’d said, she’d had plenty of opportunities to hurt me if she’d wanted to. I had a feeling that if she were going to do it, it wouldn’t be happening in this hotel.
I took several breaths to calm my stomach, to encourage my feet to walk into her room. When I felt like I had control of my emotions, I brushed past her without meeting her gaze and moved inside the room. I watched her shut the door and step over to the bar.
“Can I get you a drink?”
I shook my head and crossed my arms. “I didn’t come here to drink with you.”
She opened the mini-fridge and removed two small bottles of vodka. She poured each into a glass and topped them with a splash of cranberry juice. She handed me one, as if she hadn’t really wanted my answer. “You’re going to need it. Please, let’s sit.”
There were two couches in her suite. I took the one closest to the door, while she reclined on the opposite one. Our gazes locked, taking each other in as we’d done so many times in the mansion—maybe even admiring the other’s beauty. At one point, I had considered this woman a friend, the mother figure I’d never had. But all she’d done was betray me. I remembered the feeling of wanting her to be pleased with my performance in the mansion. I couldn’t believe I’d ever been so needy. And yet something in the way she looked at me now—outside of that infernal house, with no mask concealing the truth of her features—made me feel unworthy…unloved. Inferior. In my head, I knew that I didn’t give a damn about her opinion of me anymore. But something in my heart told me I’d been a disappointment to her.
Until that moment, the only person who ever could have made me feel that way had been Lilly.
“You look beautiful,” she said, her eyes finally dropping to my outfit, then back up to my face. I assessed her as well, her long dark locks were curled and hanging across her shoulders. Her full figure was clad in a tight, fitted suit. She didn’t look any different; she was still as hard as I remembered, but her lids appeared tired. “Love has really made you blossom.”
That comment told me she knew about Cameron, too.
“Who knew all it would take was monogamy to make you really happy? It was the complete opposite of what you were wallowing in at the mansion—before the mansion, even. To be honest, I never thought you’d choose Cameron. There’s something a little too…I don’t know… good about him. He’s like a grown-up boy scout with a gym membership. I definitely wouldn’t have chosen Dallas for you. But I guess it wasn’t for me to”
I didn’t need to listen to her anymore. “Why are you here, Victoria? And more than that, why am I here with you?”
She smiled and slowly crossed her legs. “I see you like to get right to the heart of things these days.”
Victoria wasn’t one to be dominated by others, in any aspect of her life. I may have been the one asking the questions, but she was very much in control of the conversation. There were still questions lingering, questions I was sure I already knew the answer to. But I wanted to hear them come from her.
I didn’t give her a chance to answer the others before I fired another. “How much did you know?”
She laughed, as if the
re was even a reason to ask that question at all. “I knew everything, hon.” She seemed only slightly bothered by it. “From the moment you entered the mansion, I knew it would happen. It was only a matter of time. You were going to be killed; your death had been ordered.”
“Is that all you knew?”
She leaned back into the cushions, her hands resting in her lap, her fingers looping together. “No…I knew who Hunter was, and his relationship to you. I knew how much it was going to hurt you when you realized you had just been fucked by your best friend’s father.” She was darker than I’d thought. “Oh—and I knew about Thunder, too…your favorite stallion in the whole stable. I’m guilty, Charlie, for all of it.” She pursed her lips. “Every last bit.”
Her invasion of my life hadn’t stopped when the mansion was dismantled. She was still watching my every move.
Worse than that, she had absolutely no shame about it.
She was right, I did need this drink. I swallowed as much of it as I could stomach. “You fucking bitch.” I considered throwing the glass at her, but I didn’t want to waste the liquor.
Her head tilted and her brows knit together. “I deserve that.”
“You deserve a hell of a lot more than that. That was just for knowing that my best friend’s father would be fucking me up the ass.” My voice was getting louder, and I knew there was a chance that it was carrying through the walls. But I couldn’t stop it, and at that point I didn’t care to. “I can’t believe you can sit here with a straight face and tell me that you knew they were going to gut me, and you did nothing to stop them.”
“Don’t be so naïve, dear. They would have killed me if I’d tried to stop them.”
“I don’t give a shit what they would have done to you.”
“Well, I do. Which is why I did nothing to stop it. I wasn’t about to risk my life for yours. You certainly wouldn’t have risked yours for me.”
“You’re wrong, Victoria—I did risk my life. I risked it every time I walked into that fucking house. I just didn’t know it at the time.” I gulped the rest of the drink in my hand. “And now I risk it every time I leave my goddamned house.” I’d done so well casting off the shadow the mansion had dropped over me. I’d been determined not to let it haunt me anymore. Now it was back in my face, taunting me with truths I really didn’t need to know.
She released a deep breath, and the tightness in her face began to relax. She looked weary, more than anything else. “You have to understand: my loyalty was to the mansion and to the men who ran it. I wasn’t allowed to be your friend; my job was to make you think I was, to earn your trust. Had I not done that, I would have been next on the operating table. I did what I had to, to save my own skin.” She leaned forward, resting her forearms on her knees as if she were taking me into her confidence. “You see, Charlie, we’re not all that different; we’re both whores. The only difference is, I was fucking the men who held all the power, and you were fucking the ones who gave it to them.”
My head was fuzzy. She was right: we’d both been fucking for our lives. We’d just been working different sides of the bed. It may have explained her reasoning a bit more, but it didn’t excuse her choices.
I was losing patience. I was tired of analyzing her motivation.
I wanted answers.
“I know you didn’t come here to tell me your side of things, and you sure as hell aren’t here to ask for my forgiveness.”
She smirked. “Not in the least.”
“So what is it that you want?” I asked again. I was tired of repeating myself.
She halted before she said it, as if she wasn’t sure she wanted to anymore. “I want your father.” She tried to smile, but it fell crookedly across her face. “You have nothing to worry about as far as he’s concerned. I’m the only one who knows you two are related…I’m the only one who ever watched the monitors.”
“That’s how you figured it out?”
“That was the first sign. I watched the way he treated you…it was so different from the way he acted with the other girls. He was so soft when he was with you, so gentle. So interested in what was happening with you. He was only like that with one other person in the mansion: me. All it took after that was a little prodding and the answer I was looking for fell right at my fingertips.”
He was soft with her, too? It made sense now, why he’d told her that the mansion was going to be taken down, and why he’d want her safe.
“There was more than just a professional relationship between the two of you, wasn’t there?”
Her head tilted back and her hair fell from her shoulders. Her chest started to rise and fall a little faster. “I care for your father. Deeply.”
Hearing her call him that made my skin crawl.
“We have a richly-shadowed relationship, Charlie. I want us to be together again.”
“Again?” I realized how little I actually knew about him.
She sighed. “He didn’t tell you.”
It was a statement, not a question.
I tried to recall all the conversations I’d had with my father where he’d mentioned Victoria’s name. He had said he’d dated women in the past, but he never referred to anyone specific or how serious the relationships had been. As far as I could remember, he’d never even so much as hinted that there had been anything between them. Then I remembered a line from one of his letters.
Men have a difficult time opening up sometimes. We’re challenging animals. But give him a chance. In much the same way, there are people in my life with whom I wish I would have shared my feelings. It’s too late for that now. But it isn’t too late for you…
It all came clear.
He was talking about her.
I was ready to take the drink out of her hand and swallow it all at once. “If you love him so much, why aren’t you with him right now? Why are you here in Boston, tormenting me with your bullshit confessions?”
She downed half her glass and set it on the coffee table. “While we were still in the mansion, I had obligations that your father wasn’t happy about, and I can’t blame him. He could have had any of the girls in that house…he could have done it just to spite me, if he’d wanted. But he didn’t. Not even once. He’s a good man.” She sighed. “Unfortunately, I didn’t have the luxury of saying ‘no’ to those who demanded my services. It started to eat at him after a while.”
The picture was coming even clearer. “So you fucked around with the other owners while he pined for you, and eventually he stopped waiting. Why would he ever want you now?”
She smiled again; she practically beamed. It didn’t suit her…it was actually a bit disturbing. “Because I’m not being controlled by them anymore—I’m not being controlled by anyone. I’m freewe both are. I can fully give myself to him. He loves me. I know he wants to be with me.”
“And what the hell does that have to do with me?”
“Charlie…let’s not insult each other’s’ intelligence. You know exactly why I brought you here.”
I played it all back in my head, the steps that had led to this moment: Jameson’s offer from an anonymous collector, the business card he’d given me at his showing, the invitation that came…to Cameron.
She used Cameron to get me to Jameson, and Jameson to get to me.
“So you used Jameson to set up a meeting with me because you thought that would be the easiest way to reach me. Cameron probably wouldn’t have responded to a request like that because he had no idea who you were…and Professor Freeman would have required a lengthy introduction before he connected us. You went to all that trouble just so you could reach me…so I could put you in touch with my father?”
I didn’t need her to nod her head or even answer verbally. Her expression told me I was right. “Dig a little deeper, sweetheart…you’re almost there.”
“You know I’m going to Italy next week to meet him, don’t you?”
She clapped. “You’re really good at this!”
“And wer
e you at that club watching when Cameron gave me the tickets, too? Were you listening as we made our plans and decided what to take with us?”
She shrugged and smirked again. “The villa he chose looks very, very nice.”
My stomach churned.
“Why would you even bother to go through any of this? Why didn’t you just follow me to Italy and track him down yourself?”
“Because I love him,” she said so softly. “And I respect him.”
“And so you stalk his daughter so she can help you get back into his good graces? That’s how you show him respect?” Something occurred to me as I said it. “He’s not going to want to see you, is he? You think if you show up with me, he’ll forgive you.”
I saw her eyes flash a mix of anger and defeat. I heard it, too. “I know things will never be right between you and me. You have no reason to want to help me with anything. And you may or may not believe this, but I came to you because I didn’t want to jeopardize his safety by showing up out of nowhere. I wanted to go in the right way.”
It wasn’t just her voice that had softened. It was her face, too. Maybe the mask had given her more authority than she knew she had in the world. Maybe underneath, she was just an insecure woman who’d given her body to more men than she was comfortable admitting, and now she was trying for something real. The similarities between us were clear. But it didn’t make me feel anything for her but pity.
“Will you please just talk to him?” she asked. “I’m not asking just for myself. I’m asking for your father, too. We had something together. I just want to have a chance at happiness away from the mansion.”
I laughed at that. “Don’t we all?”
I wondered what my father would have thought about all this. Would he trust her enough to reveal his location to her? Considering their past in the mansion, maybe it had nothing to do with trust; maybe it was all based on desire and love. I had found happiness; I had a true connection with someone else, a feeling that my father had told me he wanted for himself. I didn’t know if it was my place to keep that from happening, just because of my hatred for the object of his love.
