Kiss Kill Vanish (21 page)

“Let go of me,” I growl.

“Calm down.” He lets go, lifting both hands like he's under arrest. “You're the one who attacked me. And I didn't say anything on the phone—just listened to lover boy say, ‘Valentina? Valentina? Valentina?'”

His fake Spanish accent makes me want to claw his face, but I don't want to get close enough for him to grab me again.

“So you're one of Emilio's girls,” he says, and the regression is complete. He's the old Marcel, the real Marcel. I should never have forgotten he existed. “He usually only hooks up with slutty blondes. What's with the alias? Do you work for Cruz too?”

“None of your business.”

Those words trigger something. The teasing is over. His voice gets tighter and lower, and the anger turns to full of fury. “It was Lucien's business, though, wasn't it? And now that he's dead, it's my business to know why you were lying to him, and why one of Cruz's thugs is calling you.
Who are you?
” He extends his free arm over the pool and dangles the phone between a thumb and a finger.

“Valentina Cruz.”

His arm drops to his side, my phone still hanging loosely from it. His face reveals nothing, not understanding or anger or even shock, but the muscles in his chest go concave like the air has been sucked from his lungs.

I step toward him. Flight has failed. It's time to fight. One more step and we're chest to chest, the phone close enough to pluck from his slack fingers, but first I yank my right knee straight up as hard as I can. I don't stop when I feel my leg collide with the unsuspecting softness above the seam of his jeans. I let the momentum drive my knee upward until I'm certain it can't get any higher, and whatever used to be between me and his pelvis has been catapulted up into his throat.

He crumples without a sound. As his knees hit the tile, he drops the phone, and it helicopters across the wet floor behind him, careening parallel to the edge of the pool.

I dart forward and grab it, leaving Marcel bent at every angle and wheezing with his forehead pressed to the tile. I check, just to make sure he was telling the truth. No texts. One call from Emilio, lasting eleven seconds. Long enough to say my name several times and hang up.

Emilio must be freaking out.

Behind me, Marcel makes a strangled sound, and the anger surges again. I spin around to see him lying on his side, one hand over his face, the other between his legs.

“Don't
ever
do that to me again,” I spit.

He vomits.

I have to wait. I have to wait a while.

Incapacitating my ride home was not part of the plan. Admittedly, there was no plan, but having done it, I can't say I wouldn't do it again. I would.

“This isn't an apology,” I say as I kneel beside him and clean up the vomit with the rag and cleaner I found under the sink in the changing room.

“Noted,” he moans.

I finish with that and bring him two towels. “Lift your head,” I order. He obeys and I slide one under him. He's shivering—I hope from the cold and not some life-threatening response to testicle crunching that I don't know about—so I spread the other across his body. “Here.” I hand him my makeshift ice pack: three large handfuls of snow packed tight and wrapped in a trash can liner. I think it's pretty inventive, but he doesn't comment. His personality seems to have retreated completely.

I'm not scared of Marcel, not anymore. He's not crying, but that glassy stare screams grief more than pain. It's the movie theater all over again.

I wait. I don't know how long it will take his reproductive organs to decide life is worth living again, but I'm stuck here until they do. We're at least twenty miles north of the city, and I can't even take his car, since I don't know how to drive a stick. I sit on the floor with my back pushed against the wall. After a few minutes my butt bones ache, but he's still on the cold, wet tile, so I stick it out on the floor beside him. He's already declined several offers for help to a chair.

And while I wait, I worry. I need to call Emilio and tell him I'm alright, but then I'll have to explain what happened. He's going to freak out when he finds out Marcel knows who I am. Unless I don't tell him. If Marcel was telling the truth about answering the phone and saying nothing, I could tell Emilio the phone was in my purse or my pocket and I accidentally answered—but without hearing it or knowing it? I can't decide whether he'd believe me, or whether it matters if he knows that Marcel knows my real name. And would he care that I've been spending time with Marcel? That we're friends?

Of course he would.

Marcel pulls the ice pack out of his pants, crushes the ice between his palms, and shoves it back down his pants.

Friends is the wrong word.

My head hurts. I need to tell Emilio the right thing, but Emilio's mind has become foreign terrain. I can remember his touch, the smell of his skin, his laugh, but I can't predict his reaction to this. I can't really predict his reaction to anything. That makes me nervous.

Maybe I never knew Emilio that well in the first place. I was so quick to forgive him when he explained why he did what he did, but now Marcel's words burn like the glowing end of a cigar. One of Emilio's girls. Slutty blondes.

Nobody would be holding a gun to Emilio's head, forcing him to be a womanizer.

“You're his daughter,” Marcel's voice interrupts my crisis.

I curl my fingers into fists. “Yes.”

“Were you working with Lucien?”

“Not exactly.”

“What does that mean?” He lifts his head, and his face confirms it: his injures are only half physical. He looks broken.

“I ran away from home three and a half months ago. I had no idea Lucien was working for my father until the night he died. Emilio was the one who figured out that he was being paid to keep an eye on me.”

“I don't get it. He was babysitting you without you knowing it?”

I flinch. “Pretty much.”

He grunts. “Is this the part where you tell me you're not nineteen?”

“Is this the part where I knee you again?”

He drops his head into the towel and shudders.

“I'm not sorry,” I say. “About that, I mean.”

“You already made that clear.”

“Good.”

He's silent for only a moment, but it's long enough for me to realize where the questions are about to turn. “So you didn't just meet Emilio the other night.”

And the last wall crumbles. The pressure of lies, of being a liar, is finally enough. “No.”

“Emilio's your what—your boyfriend?”

“Yes.”

“But . . . you ran away and he didn't come with you.”

“I didn't tell anyone that I was leaving.”

“So you left him.”

“I left everybody. Everything.”

“Why?”

I don't answer. There are limits.

But Marcel smells blood. “Why?”

“I'm not going back,” I say.

“Is that why Emilio was here, to make you go back?”

“No.”

“He's one of your dad's enforcers, though.”

“My father doesn't use that kind of enforcer on his children,” I mutter through clenched teeth, though I'm not sure what he has done with me is any less disgusting. I'm part of a loyalty test. A
test
. For someone else. I push it from my thoughts. “Emilio didn't know I was in Montreal. My father did, which is why he was paying Lucien to watch me. We think my father sent Emilio to Montreal to see if he'd report back that he'd found me.”

“That makes no sense,” Marcel says. “Why wouldn't he?”

“He wouldn't rat if he was more loyal to me than to my father. He wouldn't rat if he wanted to run away with me instead.”

Marcel picks up his head again and stares me down. “Valentina Cruz, you're insane. If you knew who Emilio really was, you wouldn't be throwing away your life for him.”

“You don't know what you're talking about. I'm not throwing away my life for Emilio. My life had to be thrown away because of who I am. And when I left, I thought I'd never see Emilio again.” I stop to catch my breath and feel that sick ache in the very bottom of my stomach from having said too much. What has Marcel ever done to be worthy of my secrets?

“Fine,” he says. “Then why are you still here? Why isn't he with you?”

“You can't just leave Victor Cruz without a plan,” I say. “He's taking care of the people who would be . . .” I'm so ashamed I can't finish.

“Punished,” Marcel says for me. He's pulled himself into a sitting position facing me, legs bent and arms resting on knees. He shakes his head. “You win.”

“What?”

“Your family is worse than mine.”

I ignore him. It's true and insulting, but we seem to have come to a tentative peace. He may be almost capable of driving me home. “How are you feeling?”

“Like an idiot. I thought you were a fugitive from the law. I thought Lucien was in love with you. And I thought you were putting up with me out of guilt over Lucien's suicide. So I was zero for three.”

One for three,
I silently correct him. Marcel didn't guess where my guilt over Lucien comes from, but it's real. It's tethering me to Marcel when I should be staying as far away from him as possible.

“But maybe Lucien
was
in love with you,” Marcel adds.

“He wasn't,” I say with more conviction than I feel. “I was an assignment.”

I shut my eyes and think of my last few seconds with Lucien, the pressure of his lips on my cheek. And what about all those paintings? At some point, the project became real to him. At some point, I became more than an assignment. I'm sure of it, and the realization makes me unspeakably sad. “I'm sorry.”

“For kneeing me? I thought you weren't sorry.”

“I'm sorry about Lucien.”

My understatement echoes off the walls until the silence swallows it. “I'm sorry I . . . grabbed you,” he says. “That was not . . . I don't know. Lately, sometimes I feel crazy.” He runs both hands through his hair but leaves his head in his hands like it's too heavy for his neck to pick up. “Not a good excuse, but . . . yeah.”

“Okay.”

It's not that his words don't feel true. They do. I believe that he's sorry and I'm not scared of him, but I also know we won't recover from this. This fragile grief buddy thing we have won't survive the night we just had. He won't call me again. If he does, I won't go out with him. Weird, once broken, can't be fixed.

“You want me to take you home?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

Seven minutes.

The café is calling, but I'm not going to clean. Not tonight. I've earned a break from the depressing reality of minimum wage, so I'm going to play the mandolin for the entire night instead. I've been curled up in my closet since Marcel dropped me off fourteen hours ago, minus a few trips to the bathroom and one to the kitchen to steal two handfuls of oyster crackers from Nanette's cupboard. That water stain on the ceiling is starting to look a lot like the Virgin Mary, or maybe Texas. I don't know what that means.

If only I'd been able to hear his voice, I wouldn't still be lying here in my cot like a mental patient. I'd have hope. I'm too tired for hope, though. Spending all last night scrubbing blinds and swimming made for fogginess all day and a deep fatigue now, but I can't seem to sink into sleep. I'm floating on the surface. The bleach and chlorine didn't help, either. My eyes and hands burn, but I'm too busy replaying every unreal moment with Marcel to go borrow some lotion.

I can't believe I missed Emilio's call.

I can't believe I told Marcel everything.

Six minutes.

The phone and I are on a break. I refuse to look at it, but I can feel it emitting its magnetic gamma rays or whatever from the floor beside the crate.

The second Marcel pulled away from the curb, I called Emilio. I had to. I was scared, and I knew his voice would make everything right again.

It went to voice mail. I didn't leave a message.

What doesn't make sense is that he hasn't tried to call me again. He hasn't even sent a text. If there was something so important that he was actually calling me after all these days, why wouldn't he at least text?

Thinking about it makes me even crazier: I hate the phone, but I have to check the phone, and then I have to throw the phone at the door, because the phone deserves it. The noise isn't nearly as satisfying as I'd hoped. It's more of a bang-thud than a clatter, and then Pierre barks something in French from across the hall that I have to assume is a string of swear words. I'm not sure which ones.

Five minutes.

I can force myself into Emilio's brain and almost make sense of things. It's the unworking of a math problem, though, looking at the facts and deducing his thoughts.

He called. He expected me to pick up. Instead he got silence, maybe the whir of the heater or some other ambient pool noise, and possibly some suspicious breathing, thank you very much, Marcel.

Emilio hasn't called back because he thinks something has happened to me. Papi would never hurt me—he knows that—but maybe he thinks one of Papi's enemies has gotten to me, or he could think Papi sent someone to collect me and take me home. If that were the case, that someone could have my phone and be ready and waiting to report back if Emilio calls.

I like that answer. It means Emilio hasn't given up on running away with me, or decided the risk is too high. He just has no safe way of getting ahold of me. He could be on his way here now, but it seems like too much to hope for. I shouldn't let myself even imagine it.

Four minutes.

I want to kill Marcel. I really do, but then I remember the times when he's seemed so different, so genuine. It makes me wonder if, under different circumstances, we couldn't actually be friends. Then I remember how he grabbed me and threatened me and terrified me, and how I crushed his testicles with my knee. So maybe not.