Kiss Kill Vanish (32 page)

“Don't,” I say. I need him to stop talking so my heart can break in silence.

Emilio looks down, shamed but not really shamed. Not repentant. “I wasn't exaggerating when I said we've been trying to nail him for over a decade. At this point, my bosses aren't asking questions about things they don't want answers to. They know sometimes things get complicated. Entanglements are necessary.”

It seems impossible that what he's saying is true, but what do I know about what FBI agents are allowed and not allowed to do? “How old are you really?” I ask.

“Twenty-four.”

I snort. “You know, my sisters are legal and prettier than me too. I'm sure you could've had either of them.”

“They aren't prettier than you.”

I twist my grip on the hem of the T-shirt, hoping I dig holes into it.

“And they're idiots,” he adds. “They don't go places with your father. He doesn't tell them things. You were the one with the most potential.”

“Potential? I was clueless! I didn't even know what my father really did!” I laugh in spite of the tightness in my chest that's making it hard to breathe.

“I was wrong,” he admits. “But by the time I figured that out, you were providing valuable access to everything happening in Key West, while Victor had me going back and forth between Miami and Bogotá. Once he found out about us, I didn't need a good excuse to be in Key West. He just assumed I was trying to wiggle my way down there to be with you.”

“Wait, you
knew
that he knew about us?”

Emilio shrugs. It stings, another lie, another slap on my cheek. Making me fall in love with him, lying to me, breaking my heart—he answers to it all so easily with a shrug.

“You told him,” I say.

“Not exactly, but it wasn't hard to give him just enough of a clue. It was a gamble. He could've flipped out. And it worried me that he never let on that he knew, but then it all made sense when he threw us together in Montreal, and I realized he was testing my loyalty.”

Those words dig through me like claws. So this is betrayal. I thought I'd understood it when I found out who Papi really was, but this is so much bloodier and irreparable. My whole body feels like torn flesh.

I stare at the familiar angles of Emilio's face and remember looking up at him on the yacht's upper deck. I was blinded by moon glow on cheekbones, and folk music, and the smell of the sea. He was too beautiful to doubt, or I was too stupid to see.

Not anymore.

“So you never planned on running away with me. You were never coming back for me. The money to steal, the family to protect—those were all lies.”

“They were necessary for my cover.”

“
We
were a lie,” I press on, leaning toward him. “Say it.”

“I'm sorry.”

“You're not sorry if you'd do it all over again.”

He doesn't deny it. “There's something you need to see. Stay here.” He stands and walks off, leaving me alone.

My eyes settle on his badge while I listen to him rustling around in his office. It's lying open on the floor between me and the bed, the gold eagle shiny and frozen. It's so patronizingly noble I want to grab it and hurl it at his head again when he walks back in. I don't get the chance, though. He comes back holding a laptop, sees me staring at the badge, and scoops it up.

“I hate you,” I say. I don't know if I mean it, but it feels good to say.

“Fine. If you want to hate me, go ahead, but there are a few things you have to see first.” He sits on the edge of the bed and opens the laptop. “Sit.”

I don't want to sit beside him. Cooperation feels like submission, and I'd rather chew broken glass than let him think I respect his
authority
. Plus, from this distance it's easier to have him see just my rage. It's louder. It's surface. But if I sit beside him, he'll know I'm being hollowed out by this hurt, and that would only make it more unbearable.

“Valentina, you can't keep choosing to be ignorant. It's time to grow up. Sit.”

I sit—beside him but not touching him—hating him, trying not to smell his aftershave.

He angles the laptop in my direction. “They're in reverse chronological order. That took place last week.”

I barely hear him. I've muffled his voice, putting it behind the splashes of color on the screen. It's a photograph. There's a lot of blue. The sky is that hopeful shade of morning that appears after the fog has burned away. There's much less green, only a patch on either side of the shot, but it's a vibrant jungle green that brightens the whole picture—fat, shiny leaves under fuchsia blooms. They're potted plants on either side of what looks like a driveway. In the middle of the driveway is a daffodil-colored dress, not too bright or that cold butter-pale, but the perfect in-between.

And everywhere else, there's blood.

“That's Bogotá, in case you're wondering,” Emilio says.

I wasn't wondering. I was examining the patterns on the death-smeared pavement. They're not at all like the blood flower. There was a dripping elegance to that, gravity styling the gore into something graceful. This isn't graceful. This looks like someone took a fat brush to her insides and wiped it clumsily around. Footprints here, long dashes there, and I can see from the stains on her upturned bare feet that she was walking in her own blood before she was dragging herself in her own blood before she collapsed in her own blood. The center of that perfect-yellow dress is scarlet and so is one side, though the top is miraculously spotless and her face is clean too. She is small-chested. Pretty. She's wearing white flower earrings and a gold cross around her neck. Her smooth black hair is tied in a white ribbon. She's young. Younger than me.

“Name's Yolanda Rojas. Fifteen years old. Her father, Javier Rojas, was caught stealing from Cruz—skimming profits from the dealers who worked under him—and Yolanda was payback. That's typical Cruz style. He didn't have Javier killed—just blinded. And he may or may not walk again, but as I said, it just happened last week, so he's still in the hospital.”

I can't look away.

Emilio clicks to the next shot.

This one is dark, all shadows and mixed shades. It must've been taken at dusk, or maybe right before a storm. There are more people, but it's less personal—five rigid corpses lined up in a row like little dolls, hands tied, feet pointing skyward. Dolls. Broken dolls. They have no heads.

“Decapitation is a relatively new thing for Victor. It freaks people out, though, draws more media attention to the deaths. These five worked for another cartel, so this was most likely retaliation for something or other. That one took place three weeks ago, but he pulled a nearly identical stunt back in September.”

I stand up.

“You've only seen two,” Emilio says. “I've got nineteen in that file, and that's only a fraction of the murders we can pin to him.”

I turn my body away from him so he can't see my face.

“Hard to look at, aren't they? It's easier to sit there and accuse me of being a monster.” He grabs my arm—not hard, but his touch startles me—pulls me toward him, and turns me around before I can jerk away. “Decades of
this
. This is why the FBI doesn't care if I have to shoot a scumbag drug shipper. And this is why they'll turn a blind eye when I get involved with a
willing
young woman to get access to information.
You're not the victim here. You're the daughter of one of the sickest, most dangerous men in the world, and you can't even stand to look at a couple of pictures of what he's done. Do you want to know exactly what Victor's sick goons did to Yolanda Rojas before they shot her?”

I might vomit. Emilio's face is close to mine, but I refuse to look at him. I stare at the wall, blurry through the tears that are pooling and betraying me. Why am I seeing Papi's face in my mind? There it is. Jovial, like he's just thought of something to say that will make me laugh. I can't scream that it's not true. I see now. Emilio's staring at me, waiting for a response, but I won't give him one.

“I can't believe you're here,” he says, dropping my arm. “I can't believe you found my badge. And the timing. You're forcing my hand here.”

“What are you talking about?”

He raises an eyebrow. “Don't tell me you've forgotten. This is the first weekend of December.”

“The Vizcaya Gala,” I mumble.

More castle than mansion, Vizcaya is where Papi chooses to gather his people—art dealers and buyers, celebrity artists, the wealthy of Miami who buy Warhols like they buy Ferraris, the segment of socialites who consider themselves erudite, and of course the pretenders who know nothing but spend enough to make up for it. They all flock to Papi's annual gala for the auctioning off of his latest acquisitions, to bleed money all over one another as publicly as possible.

“I have good memories of Vizcaya last year,” Emilio says.

Finally, I look at him. No, I glare. He can't seriously be reminiscing about the first time we met.

It was Papi who introduced us. Emilio was Papi's newest minion, eager just like all the others, but different too. More intense. And he was so beautiful I couldn't not watch him work the crowd, laugh at Papi's jokes, charm the women with the biggest rocks on their fingers like he wasn't afraid of anyone. From the dew-drenched lawn I watched him go with Fernando down to the jetty to smoke. But then Fernando left. He was finally alone, so I took a deep breath and joined him, my heels in one hand, a drink in the other. I remember how the stone was cool and wet, and I could hear the Atlantic licking the pier beneath us. Cigar smoke coiled out of his lips. I asked him if he'd ever swum in the ocean at night. He smiled. He asked me if I knew what a mandolin was.

I hate him.

“What are you planning?” I ask.

“It's what Victor's planning that's more interesting. He's paranoid. Thinks everyone is a spy.”

“It's not paranoia if it's true!”

Emilio cracks his knuckles, and I'm struck by his ability to tune out my emotion. Has he always been so good at that? I'm not sure.

“He has the yacht here in Miami to collect a shipment coming in on a cargo boat that's supposed to be carrying plantains. That should be happening in the morning,” he says. “In a few hours, actually. And then of course the Vizcaya Gala is going on tomorrow night—like his little party will distract people from the fact that he has fifty-five million in coke sitting in Biscayne Bay.”

Fifty-five million dollars. It's so improbable it's almost funny. But Emilio isn't smiling. “What are you planning?” I repeat.

“The drugs are being seized, and Victor's little party is being raided. And I can tell what you're thinking, so no, you're not running off to warn anybody about anything.”

“You can't tell me what to do. You don't own me.”

“And yet I can't let you wander out of here either.”

“You're going to arrest me?” I sneer. “I haven't done anything illegal.”

“If I do take you into custody, it'll be for your own protection.”

“I bet.”

“This investigation is too important. We've finally got everything we need to convict him of the worst of it.”

I picture Papi in a prison cell. It's what he deserves and where he belongs, but it's too pitiful. He's still my father.

“But your being here . . .” Emilio's eyes travel over me. “That makes everything more complicated.”

“I don't believe you,” I say.

“Which part?”

“I don't believe you were allowed to use me.”

He laughs, but his face is tight. “At the end of the day, it's not about what you believe.”

“That's it, isn't it—why you didn't want me to come back to Miami? Nothing to do with my own safety or screwing up the investigation. I could get you in a lot of trouble.”

“No.”

“Afraid they'll take away that pretty badge?”

He closes the laptop, like that'll shut me down too.

“So now what?” I push on recklessly. “You can't just kill me like you killed Lucien.”

He stands and walks out of the room, leaving me on the bed. My words continue to ricochet around the room while my thoughts argue with one another: If he made Lucien's death look like an overdose, why couldn't he do the same to me?

Except Emilio would never hurt me. But this man is not Emilio. There is no Emilio.

I look frantically around me for something . . . something I don't know what. Heavy or sharp. There's nothing.

I hear the drawer in his office opening and closing.

A sharp-cornered frame gleams from the bedside table. Tempting, but too small. I grab the lamp by the neck. It's heavy enough, but it's not like I can hide it behind my back.

Footsteps. He's coming.

I rip the cord from the wall, grab the lamp with both hands, and slip into the space between the open door and the wall. Trembling, I move my hands up the neck of the lamp to where I can grip it best, swing it behind my head, and wait. He isn't hurrying. The footsteps down the hall are deliberate, each one followed by the softest
clink
. What is that clink? His watch?

My arms tingle. My heart pounds. Sweat pours down my neck, and I pray it doesn't make me lose my grip on the lamp.

“Valentina?” His shirt passes by me on the other side of the hinge, inches from my nose. He stops where I can't see him on the other side of the door. My heart. He must hear it.

He takes another couple of steps forward, and I see all of him, or the back of him, with the source of the
clink
in plain view
.
Handcuffs. They dangle from his right hand. No time. I nudge the door with my hip so I have enough room to swing. But the hinge creaks.
Now.
He's turning.
Now. Now. Now.
Every muscle in my body contracts as I bring the lamp over my head and down, and his face turns just in time for me to see the shock in his eyes as the lamp explodes against his forehead. The sound of a million chimes shatters over us. He staggers backward, crunching over porcelain, a web of blood stretching over his face, skinny scarlet lines pouring down.