Seductive Secrecy (Shadows series) (41 page)

Lilly tried to drag me down every time her voice entered my
head. I was done letting her slither in.

“My mother was an addict who didn’t love anyone but herself. But I don’t need to explain that to you, she has nothing to do with my father, and she has nothing to do with me.”

She sniffled. “That’s funny…she seemed to think she had a little something to do with you, when she sold you to the mansion.”

My head was reeling. “What the hell does that mean?”

“You’re as simple as you are pretty, Cee.” Her legs spread a little wider and her arm lowered, but she kept the gun pointed at me. “We
may not have been friends, but she stayed in touch through the years, calling me when she had something important to say,
something to brag about, which was never more than a one-night stand and the eight-ball he paid her with. My life was always fine whenever she asked. But then one day, it really was fine; I was in the mansion. I had the man she’d made a child with. I had
everything.
” Her eyes glazed over as she spoke. “She called again and told me she was dying. Wondered if I’d be willing to help with the garbage she was
leaving behind.” She laughed. “She didn’t actually call you
garbage
… that’s just a little something I threw in. But I told her I’d make sure you were
well
taken care of.”

“That’s not possible.”

“No?” She tapped the barrel of the gun on the tabletop to
emphasize her words. “Did you really think the Recruiter just showed up in your lobby by coincidence…or in the bathroom stall next to the one you were masturbating in?”

I’d always wondered how I’d been targeted, what made the mansion choose me when I’d never even been remotely involved in any activity that would have drawn their attention to me. When I had asked my father, he didn’t know. He just said I fit their criteria. But this…this I couldn’t believe.

“Lilly? She sold me to the mansion?” My voice wasn’t any
louder than a whisper.

Even with her body burned to ashes and scattered among the flowers and the pond of the Public Gardens, Lilly was still casting her shadow over me. 

“She just wanted someone to take care of you, hon. That’s all. It was the one good thing she ever did. She just happened to ask the wrong person.”

I didn’t feel relief. I wasn’t actually sure what I felt. I was too confused with the bitch who was standing in front of me.

I glared at her. “So all of my suffering, everything I went
through, was because of you?”

“You were a puppet the whole time, sweetie,” she said sloppily. “Everyone was working your strings.” Her eyes slid to my father, and the horrified look on his face. “Everyone but your daddy.”

“You’ve never been this cruel, Victoria,” my father said.

“I’ve never lost everything I ever wanted before…and to your
whore of a daughter no less.”

I saw Cameron become coiled; his jaw clenched, and his arms tensed and flexed. I could tell he was ready to jump into action, to bring this to an end. But I couldn’t let him risk his life for me. I put my hand on his arm to calm him down. “Victoria, I never meant to take anything from you.”

“
Shut up, you fucking whore!
” She shook the gun in front of me, and I flinched again. She was completely terrifying now.

“It’s true. I only wanted to do the right thing, to save the other girls, to bring justice to the ones who lost their lives.” I looked at my
father, my eyes pleading with him. And his eyes were apologizing to
me.

“Charlie,” he said softly. “I’m so sorry you were ever involved in this.” His hand brushed mine. “I love you.”

Just breathe, Charlie.
Emma’s voice came to me.
Close your eyes and breathe.

Once my lids were shut, I heard violent movement: feet scuffling on the floor, a clamor of furniture and the three of them shouting. I held my breath. I tightened my muscles, scrunched my face, my arms held my stomach while I braced myself for the pain that was about to blast through me.

It didn’t come.

Instead the noises grew louder. My eyes shot open and there
was so much action I could barely catch the faces and arms and hands and the gun that were all flapping and slashing through the air. I could no longer differentiate the sounds. Not the yelling. Not the scream when the gun went off.

There was red.

It was blood.

A tide of blood that pooled on the floor, spreading from beneath them. Victoria was on top; my father was underneath her. Cameron was kneeling and rocking beside them. I didn’t know who the blood came from. I didn’t know who had risen from the pile, but someone
had gotten up and was walking toward me, their body shielding me. The screams were getting louder. And then I realized it was my
voice.

The screams were coming from me.

Because there hadn’t been just a single gunshot.

There had been three.

THE BUZZING OF THE TATTOO GUN
kept me in the moment,
each time the needle pierced my skin it reminded me of why I was here, and how we had arrived. The last time I’d heard this noise was when
I’d had the date of our accident inked on my finger. Those numbers were just above the heart that Emma and I had gotten done for graduation. Like that little symbol, this piece would also serve as a reminder.

While I straddled the long bench, a leg dangling over each side, Cameron sat in front of me. His shoulder was red from the hours he’d endured under the tattoo gun and shiny from the ointment that the artist had rubbed over his skin to start the healing process. Cameron’s body might have already been decorated in ink, but the meaning of this piece was completely different than the others. He’d
designed a tree, similar to the one on his back. But this one had
leaves, rich, lush, multi-hued leaves that covered the long, healthy branches. There were birds flying from the treetop, five of them, all different sizes; some were only an outline, while others were filled in with color. In the center of the trunk was a scar. Cameron had marks all over his body, but they were from his childhood and had been given as punishments for nothing that truly warranted such violence. This one he’d earned by being a hero.

But all of them were evidence of his survival.

With his body angled, I was able to compare his new piece with the old one that covered his entire back. “It’s good?” he asked.

I smiled. “Yeah. Beautiful…like you.”

Though Ryder had been in Cameron’s life almost constantly, he still felt as if he’d spent all those years alone. Like the black tree that ran up his spine, he had felt barren, empty; he may have had roots, but he was lacking in leaves, in life. His soul had been missing color.

I had changed that.

Our experiences together had changed that, actually.

And our time in Italy had changed it the most.

I’d closed my eyes when Victoria’s insanity escalated into
violence.
What I hadn’t seen in my father’s dining room was Cameron
charging
Victoria and bringing her to the ground. My father was closely
behind him. But as Cameron tried to wrestle her for the gun, before he had a chance to tear it from her fingers, it had gone off. His flesh had taken the bullet that was supposed to hit me. It punctured his shoulder. And even with a wound as painful as his, he continued to fight her. During the struggle, my father rushed toward me and shielded my body. With Cameron injured, Victoria was able to get in one final shot. The bullet hit my father in the back, piercing his heart as it exited. Cameron reacted on pure adrenaline, clamping his hands around the gun and trying his best to pull it from Victoria’s hands
without it firing again. But it went off one last time while it was
pointed
toward her chest. She died only a few feet from my father, their
blood mingling on the floor between their bodies.

Following their deaths, Cameron and I spent an extra week in
Italy, meeting with the police and giving our statements. We arranged the transportation to bring my father back to the States so he could receive a proper burial. His will had been extremely specific: he was
to be interred in the plot beside his father’s, in the cemetery where
Emma was buried, as it turned out. I would be able to visit them
both and decorate their graves with flowers. Two people I loved, who’d helped me find light in my life, both gone now but sharing a space in
my heart and in the ground. I visited much more often than I used
to.

It was the only time I heard her voice anymore.

I always knew something would happen to disrupt the
relationship I had built with my father. Moonlight’s reading had told me that long ago. We’d visited the psychic just before my father had turned in all the evidence he had regarding the mansion. Her telling of Emma’s future and mine was accurate. So I always held in the back of my mind that her reading of his future would come true as well. She told him our paths would lead us to happiness together, only to lead us away from each other again. In spite of her vision and her
warning, he’d insisted on carrying out our plan. He practiced
science,
not psychics, and he didn’t believe her reading. At that time, I
believed our loss of happiness had to do with the danger of bringing down the mansion. Much time had passed, and once he’d set himself up
safely in Europe, I began to believe her prediction was more
symbolic.
Hadn’t we been led away from each other
me in Boston and him in
Italy? I’d convinced myself that it was true. I never believed our
separation would be so permanent, or that it would end so violently at the hands of Victoria.

And I never would have imagined that I’d find out about Lilly’s attempt to make sure I would be taken care of after she was gone. I had a lot of rethinking to do where she was concerned. It would be much easier now that her voice wasn’t in my head anymore, cursing
me for who I was
or, rather, who’d I’d moved beyond being. I
hoped she was finally at peace. Maybe knowing she’d done something loving after all, I was able to finally let her go.

I wasn’t able to do the same for my father. Hearing him say he loved me just before he died was painful in a way I wouldn’t have
expected. I became attached to the idea that I finally had a parent
who
loved me; in the weeks after he passed away, I was an emotional
wreck. I wasn’t able to focus on the moments we had shared, or the words we’d spoken and written. I could only dwell in the pain I felt from his absence. I wondered how hearing someone say they loved me could cause so much darkness. Cameron reminded me that it wasn’t
the love that had brought the darkness; it was the ebb of our
separation
that had led to it, and the flow of his permanent absence that
followed
after his murder. He asked me to create a piece showing that
darkness, hoping it would dispel the pain once and for all.

I’d stood in front of my easel for almost two straight days, using my brush to fully ignite the emotions that sparked inside. I didn’t
work from a sketch; I had no image that was begging to be
represented. I just painted whatever came. Cameron sat on the couch behind me the whole time. He knew I needed his presence to get through this,
and I did. But what I created on that particular canvas was
something neither of us had expected. It wasn’t an image that was directly inspired by my father.

It was something more.

There were two boxes, side-by-side, each with a woman’s face staring out from their center. The one on the left wore a mask.  Her lids were heavily coated in shadow and liner, her lashes extended, her lips glossed and plumped. She averted her eyes, staring instead to the space beneath her. The one on the right was adorned in much more natural colors, with hair curled simply around her cheeks. Her green eyes glimmered with wisdom as they gazed straight ahead. A night sky formed the background, like a star field on the curtain of a theater stage. I couldn’t wait to show my creation to the Professor.