Spotless (17 page)

“He gave me that nasty look and said that when I was done stitching the client, I should stitch myself,” Creepy-hat recalled in a brittle voice as he scratched his scar again. “And after that, he pulled out a knife and slashed my face. He sectioned two facial nerves . . . Can you believe I’ve lost taste on that side of my mouth? I would
never
do that to a client!”

Creepy-hat and March’s collaborations were bound to fail miserably one after another, I guess, because, as Creepy-hat said this, we both heard screams and gunshots coming from behind the tiled room’s black door. I saw his expression harden in a split second, but he didn’t move to escape. He certainly knew we were trapped, anyway.

“Don’t worry, honey,” he said in a firm voice, one I assumed he intended to be reassuring.

Moments later, the black door was smashed open with a loud cracking sound. Creepy-hat might have been insane, but he was still well-trained. He efficiently dodged the bullet that was fired at him as a greeting, and I heard it shatter the tile somewhere behind me.

Was I happy to see March standing in front of us? Hard to tell. I was so terrified, so exhausted that I’m not even sure I felt anything anymore. Of course, not getting your kneecaps removed, your liver fiddled with, or whatever Creepy-hat had been planning on doing to me, all these things spoke of a positive outcome, but I couldn’t focus on that. My eyes were locked on the sight behind March’s shoulder, and it was difficult to focus on anything else. The fake police officer with the shaven skull was hanging a few feet away from the door. I say “hanging” because a knife had been used to pin his throat into the hallway’s grayish plaster wall, and his feet were no longer touching the ground. His eyes wide open, he was producing eerie gurgling sounds as blood poured from his neck in a steady flow and dripped on the tiled floor.

I was mesmerized.

I raised my head to look at March. He was holding that same rather scary-looking gun I had seen before. I know it’s a little unfair, since he
looked extremely pissed, and a little out of breath, but I thought of what he had told me in the woods about wanting to tenderize me, and it made me wonder if he had done this on purpose. Had he been waiting behind the door for the right moment to intervene, as a punishment for escaping?

“You don’t need to pretend to be saving me again. I really don’t know anything . . .” I was so tired; I didn’t see the point in trying to believe in this play anymore, and my voice was down to a whisper.

Incomprehension flashed on March’s features before his ever-reliable poker smile came back to mask his thoughts. “Good evening, Mr. Rislow. I’m sure you won’t mind if I recover my client.”

My eyes shifted to Creepy-hat. He looked tense but collected, scalpel still in hand, like he was weighing his options. “I seem to have no choice. Will you go easy on my assets, though? You have no idea how hard it is to find and keep decent employees these days.”

Creepy-hat hardly looked worried, and since he was implying that March’s killing his men was little more than a running gag between them, I assumed both assholes were on the same page, and he had never intended to let me live in the first place. I stopped caring. I thought it was a little cruel for March to keep acting like he was going to save me, though.

“Go away.”

March took a step toward the table and placed his hand on my forehead. “It’s okay. We’re leaving.”

Tears welled in my eyes again, and this time I spoke louder. “I said, go away! All you people do is lie to me! He said he doesn’t work for the Board. He works for your
master
!”

I registered a certain confusion on March’s face before he raised his gun to his colleague. “Island, what are you talking about?”

I went on, still sobbing. “He said you’d bring me back to him anyway because you’ll never leave the pack!”

His eyes widened at this last word, and Creepy-hat paled, his own eyes darting around for a possible way out. To my surprise, March parted
his jacket to place his gun back in its holster. He no longer seemed mad: all I could perceive was cold determination as he spoke to Creepy-hat. “We’re done here. I’ll take care of any new developments and inform the Queen that your mission is over.”

Upon hearing this, Creepy-hat smiled at me tenderly. “Don’t worry, sweetie, he’s bluffing. He’s not going to kill me. He’s smarter than that.”

Something dark filled March’s gaze as he glanced at my naked form, the blood running on my leg, and the equipment surrounding me, and his jaw clenched imperceptibly as he confirmed Creepy-hat’s statement. “You’re right. I’m not going to kill you.”

If you ask me, I’d say he did, but March seemed to be an expert at playing on technicalities. I caught the look of surprise in Creepy-hat’s eyes when his former colleague lunged at him and easily wrenched the scalpel from his slim hand. A black-gloved fist brought him crashing face-first against the instrument tray, and I barely saw the small blade shimmering under the surgical light before it plunged in his nape, above his shoulders. My eyes squeezed shut at the sick noise of bone cracking. Creepy-hat slumped on the floor with a quiet whimper, much like a wounded puppy. I was so out of it that I didn’t even feel vindicated that the man who had been planning on disassembling me minutes ago was now a disarticulated lump sprawled on the floor.

March undid the straps holding me to the table, and I was free. Yet I didn’t get up. I still couldn’t feel my right leg, and my body wouldn’t move. Rolling to my side, I managed to curl up a little. I stared at the tiled wall, physically and emotionally drained. All I wanted to do was wait—not wait for something specific, just wait. March had other priorities. His dark jacket landed on me to cover my naked body, and I registered its unusual weight again; I figured it was bulletproof. He bent over me and reached to clean the cut Rislow had made earlier and place a few transparent strips across the wound.

“Butterfly bandages. You’ll hardly see the scar.” His voice was soft and soothing. That’s what he did, I realized. He got me hurt, and then he
smoothed me back into shape, only to do it all over again. Until when? Or what?

Dismissing that depressing thought, I snuggled into the warmth of his jacket, breathing his scent and slowly recovering from my state of shock. “How did you find me?”

“I didn’t. Ilan did.” The muscles in his jaw tightened. “He pulled every string in Paris’s underworld to find this place.” I could tell he was grateful for that, and a weak, cheesy part of me wondered if maybe March had been scared that I would die, if maybe . . . he cared a little.

A low sound broke our exchange. Below us, what was left of Creepy-hat was trying to speak. It was almost inaudible, a wet, raspy murmur, but we both heard the words before he passed out. “You picked the wrong side.”

March didn’t even blink, but somehow, I got the feeling that Rislow’s point had landed close to home. Perhaps in that secret place within himself where he locked away his doubts about this odd job and the pact he had made with me. Ignoring his victim’s insinuations with disconcerting ease, he helped me put on his jacket, cradled me in his arms, and carried me through a maze of decaying and deserted hallways. I tried to avert my eyes every time we passed the still form of one of Rislow’s men. I counted seven bodies, including the bald guy now decorating the wall, and as we reached what seemed to be the entrance door, I wondered if there were more.

Once we were outside, he walked us through a sinister park. Granted, it didn’t help that the sun was setting and we were in fall, so half of the trees were leafless already. There, despite the declining light, I got a better view of the building, an abandoned mansion with several broken windows and brick walls that threatened to be swallowed by brown ivy. A dilapidated signboard dating from the nineties helped me connect the dots. We were less than an hour away from Paris, in a small suburban town called Maincy. The place had been a private clinic at some point until it had been shut down. On the estate’s rusty gates,
several other public signs regarding a series of city-approved building permits suggested that the project to rehabilitate the clinic had fallen prey to France’s inextricable administrative maze for the past twenty years, allowing the place to turn into some sort of improvised haunted house for Rislow’s sick enjoyment.

When he stopped in front of a brand-new black BMW, I assumed Ilan had played fairy godmother again and replaced the unfortunate Mercedes. March helped me into the passenger seat and worked on fastening my seat belt—safety first, right? As he adjusted the belt, I noticed a few dark stains on his jacket, some on the shoulder, another on the front, near my breast. Without thinking, I brought my hand up to touch them.

A cool wetness coated my fingertips. Red transferred from the fabric, staining my skin. I stared in horrified fascination. This wasn’t March’s blood. More likely that bald guy’s, and perhaps the blood of a few others. Against the pasty, almost bluish white of my skin, it looked surprisingly dark. I inhaled the earthy, metallic scent permeating me, a combination of fresh blood, dried leaves, and musty walls. I probably zoned out for a few seconds, since the vision of his hands cleaning mine with a small wet wipe surprised me. I couldn’t remember having seen him move to fetch it.

He was thorough, gentle, wordlessly wiping my fingers several times, insisting on getting under each nail—out of habit, no doubt. His hands were warm. He was a different man from the March I had seen maim Creepy-hat minutes ago, the March whose jacket was drenched in the blood of the men he had killed, and I found myself unable to reconcile those two faces of a same coin. Once he was satisfied with my hands’ state of cleanliness, he folded the wet wipe over and over, until all that was left was a tiny reddish square that he carefully slid into a plastic bag. He then moved to work on removing most of the bloodstains on his jacket with a second wet wipe.

His eyes were focused, his gaze empty.

“Are you sad?”

He paused upon hearing me murmur the question, but didn’t look up at me.

“No.”

I felt my eyes tear up, but I had no idea why. “Don’t you regret it . . . when—”

I heard him swallow. “No. After a while, you no longer think about it. You don’t think about anyone specifically.”

When his hand resumed wiping the front of the jacket mechanically, I wrapped my fingers around his wrist to stop him. “But you’re sad . . . right now.”

His eyes still wouldn’t meet mine, but I saw the corner of his lips twitch in a derisive smile, not even enough to reveal a dimple. “Let’s call it a general sadness. I’m not sorry for any of them, Island.”

I let go of his wrist. “No. You’re sorry for yourself, for what you are.”

Whether my assumption was true or not, March didn’t bother with a reply. He disposed of the second wipe and took the wheel.

FIFTEEN

The Contessa

“I returned for you, Cathy, for your love! Even after the aliens reinitialized my brain, you were the only thing I never forgot!”

—Breyannah Steel,
Galactic Passions

I think I slept a little on the way back. It was now dark, and the colorful lights of Paris’s Boulevard Périphérique danced before my eyes. The large dual ring road marked the administrative and social boundary between Paris and its suburbs. You either lived on the good side or the bad one, and crossing it was in many ways the incarnation of the Parisian dream—a long climb up the proverbial social ladder until you were rich enough to afford a tiny chunk of the capital’s outrageously overvalued housing market.

I rolled my head lazily to watch March as he drove us. Something bothered me, had been gnawing at me since we had left Maincy, and I needed it out of my system. “Why didn’t you ask Rislow who he was really working for?”

“Because he wouldn’t have talked,” he said, his eyes never leaving the road.

“Wrong. You didn’t ask because you already knew. You looked shocked when I mentioned the pack thing. So who’s the guy?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

I let out a little grunt. “March, your
colleague
tried to extract my kneecaps and my liver. I worry.”

“I told you not to leave.”

“It won’t happen again.”

“Good.” He nodded. There was a long pause before he resumed speaking, in a low, almost resigned tone. “His name is Dries. I have no allegiance to him. I only serve myself and my employers.”

I stared at him for a couple of seconds, winded. Had March just been honest with me? “So . . . you think he heard I had the diamond and cut a deal with Rislow?”

“No. Rislow was certainly lying.”

I was tempted to tell him that there would have been no reason for Creepy-hat to lie, even less so when he was alone with me and trusted I wouldn’t be able to repeat anything, but as I reflected on this, a detail caught my attention. “Where is he from? Dries sounds Dutch or something.”

Or maybe South African . . . but I couldn’t bring myself to say it because the idea that he might in fact be the tall man from Pretoria made me sick to my stomach. I remembered my nightmare that Creepy-hat had interrupted: my mother’s body going limp after a gunshot wound. She had been murdered. By that man?