Kiss Kill Vanish

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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Advance Reader's e-proof

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HarperCollins Publishers

This is an advance reader's e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

[dedication tk]

Cover

Disclaimer

Title

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Also by Jessica Martinez

Copyright

About the Publisher

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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“J
ane, darling, you have to keep still.”

Darling.

I keep still. My muscles are screaming to stretch, release, contract, do anything but press my bones and blood into this pose for one more agonizing second, but I keep perfectly still.

“If you weren't so beautiful, I wouldn't have to be such a perfectionist,” Lucien mumbles.

My skin prickles. I stifle the cringe, but skin will be skin. “Maybe taking a picture would work better for this one,” I suggest.

Only half of his face is visible from behind the easel, but it's enough to see his eyebrow
think
about raising itself. That single eyebrow holds enough disdain to be the most expressive barely moving eyebrow in the world. It's saying:
Ridiculous. A picture
.

What's ridiculous is that I was stupid enough to suggest it. I need to be necessary to his process. He has to find my presence as vital as breath and paint and canvas.

“I can't paint from a photograph when it's my living, breathing muse that inspires me,” he says, voice slippery and melodic like it gets when he's about to wax poetic. Sometimes, like right now, there's a hint of faux-British in it—just enough to remind people he went to boarding school in London, not consistent enough to sound remotely genuine.

It's pretentious, but I prefer it to French, which he knows baffles me yet slides into anyway. He only does it every once in a while, to remind me how charmingly bilingual he is. Like everyone in Montreal doesn't speak both. Aside from me, of course.

“Painting from a photograph isn't an organic artistic experience,” he rambles on. “Rembrandt, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso—none of the great portrait artists painted from photographs. Can you imagine da Vinci infusing all that life and passion into the
Mona Lisa
if he wasn't actually in the woman's presence?”

I stare hard into the wall behind him to keep my eyes from rolling. He deserves to be mocked; I wish I could do it. The old me would do it. But Lucien has no sense of humor, so no ability to laugh at himself, and in the most literal sense of the word, I can't
afford
to insult him. Instead, I say, “I'm no Mona Lisa.”

And Lucien is no idiot. He presses his lips together, clearly reading my thoughts—
you're no da Vinci
—which is probably why he doesn't respond with another affected monologue. He resumes painting, eyebrow back where it should be.

Lucien is not a terrible artist. The last two or three portraits have at least felt like me, if not actually looked like me. Dark hair, dark eyes, and I recognize the heart-shaped face because he exaggerates it every time. But honestly. Da Vinci. And as for referring to his
muse
as if
she
's not present to hear how weird this is—it's like he's pulling me into his pretensions, making me complicit in his annoyingness.

Still, I say nothing. Some days the layers of make-believe are wrapped around me so thick, so tight, it's hard to breathe.

Lucien tries to educate me because he thinks I'm a simple, ignorant girl living in a big city for the first time. If he knew that I grew up with a Klimt hanging in the dining room, a Dalí in my father's study, and a Degas over my bed, he'd lose the smug smile. If he knew that I'd wandered galleries and auctions in London, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Dubai, that I know my Manet from my Monet and my van Gogh from my Gauguin, he'd stop trying to teach me something.

If I told him who my father is, pouring his knowledge of the art world into my sweet little head would be the last thing on his mind.

I stare at the wall. I keep still. I don't think about Miami, or my father's cigar-sweet smell and crinkled hands, or Emilio's sad eyes. Instead I think about the ridiculousness of this pose, of the costume, of what I've become.

The pose, well, I've done worse as far as comfort goes. I'm sitting in the curve of a gleaming grand piano, on the hip, so to speak, leaning back on one palm, holding the other hand in front of me with a skinny, ebony cigarette holder between curled fingers. It's cheesy and seductive, and my wrist is sore from the leaning, but at least I'm not perched on a diving board like last time. It's the absurdity of it that hurts more than anything.

My costume is glitz and pizzazz, straight from the Roaring Twenties: black sequined flapper dress with a fringed hem and beaded spaghetti straps. It's the kind of thing I would've worn to a party in my former life. Not to turn heads in the way my sisters love turning heads in their slinky cocktail dresses with slits up to there, but to be different. To stick out.

I don't try to stick out anymore.

“Comfortable?” Lucien asks.

“Yes.”

A lie. As much as I'd love to love the flapper dress, it feels like I'm wrapped in sandpaper. Since I put it on I've been fantasizing about ripping it off my body and scratching my skin till it bleeds. It doesn't help that the feather headband squeezes my temples and the plume flops over, tickling my cheek. But still, it's better than the 1950s bathing suit, and the Regency gown, which, humiliatingly enough, actually took his help getting into.

“Don't sigh like that. It changes the slope of your shoulder.”

I un-sigh, but he frowns, so I half sigh. Half-un-sigh? He scowls. It's all so polar and intense, the way he responds to me. I'm either something to be fawned over or annoyed by; there is no in between.

Nobody from my old life would believe this of me, this subordination. Valentina Cruz was sub-nothing. She had no idea that spitfire and spunk and guts were a luxury. I miss being her.

“I'm serious,” Lucien says. “Stop sighing.” There's a glint to his voice, a flash of something metallic and unyielding, reminding me of what my costume and his flattery occasionally make me forget. Power. I hand it to him at the door of this lavish loft. But sometimes I start acting and he starts acting, and the whole charade makes me forget. I shouldn't forget. This is business.

Lucien pulls his brush across the canvas and glares at it.

When I really look at him, I have to admit it: Lucien isn't ugly. But he's one of those people whose personality is so pungent it soaks through his skin from the inside out. That first day outside the Metro station, maybe, I saw lemony hair, blue eyes, features all in good symmetry even if his face seemed a little thin. Now that I know him, though, those eyes are too deep-set and narrow, the tan is a suspicious orange, and his nostrils are freakishly small.

It's his costume that irks me most, though—not that he'd admit to wearing one. He's dressed as the quintessential artiste: windswept bedhead we both know he spent time and sculpting gel perfecting, scruff on his cheeks, rumpled clothes with the designer labels clipped off, and wire glasses that sit like two
O
s on his face when he actually remembers to put them on. Nonprescription, I'd bet. I'd wager a lot on it, actually, but gambling has always been my vice. I've bet on all sorts of things and people I shouldn't have.

The door swings open. I can't see it—I'm facing the opposite wall without permission to move—but I hear it, followed by the unmistakable clunk and clatter of a drunk man stumbling into a table, followed by the drunk man cursing out the table.

Lucien scowls but doesn't lift his eyes from his brush. “Marcel.”

“Lucien.” The voice is not as drunk sounding as I'd expected. It's swimming toward hung over, maybe floating on its back hoping the current will take it there. “Lucien's model.”

I don't respond. I'm not getting paid to converse with repulsive siblings. I'm getting paid to keep still.

“We need to talk,” Lucien says, his eyes still on his brush, still on his canvas, still full of sulk. He's such a child.

“Not now,” mutters Marcel.

“Yes, now.”

“But you're clearly busy with . . . with . . . with . . .”

Jane.
I'm not saying it. I've been introduced to Marcel close to a dozen times, at least three of which he's been relatively sober for. But today, Lucien doesn't even say my name. No—what he thinks is my name. Either I'm not alive, or not to be shared this afternoon.

“. . . with arts and crafts hour,” Marcel finally says.

“I'm finished for today.” He puts his brush down a little more decisively than usual. “Jane, go put your clothes on.”

Put your clothes on.
As if I'm perched on the piano naked. I'd allow myself a glare in his direction, but he's reaching for his wallet, coaxing green bills from a stack—no, a pillow—of fifties with his thumb, one at a time . . .
three, four, five, six
.
Of course. The power. This is why I check mine at the door.

He holds out the cash, and I slide my hips off the piano, taking the wad from his hand without touching his skin. The slips of paper are soft as clouds between my fingers. Three hundred dollars. My impulse is to kiss them. I don't, and I don't ask to look at the painting either, since I know what the answer will be. This is only the second sitting for this portrait. It'll be another five or six before we move on, and I'm not sure I care what any of them look like anymore either. Money in hand, I make my way to the guest room.

When I emerge, I'm myself almost. My boots, my leggings, my sweater, my expression. The cherry lipstick refused to be rubbed off completely, so my lips are still a little stained, and the “glossy curls” Lucien annoyingly demanded have been finger-combed out, the ironed ripple effect gone.