She faces me down, physically blocking me from the canvas, eyes wild, paintbrush gripped like she wants to shank me.
She’s so passionate about everything.
“You look like you want to stab me,” I say. “Have you ever hurt anyone, Mara? Or only imagined it . . .”
Her fist trembles, clenched around the brush.
That’s not a tremble of fear.
It’s rage.
At who, Mara? Me? Alastor Shaw? The mother, the stepfather? Or the whole fucking world . . .
“I’ve never hurt anyone,” she says. “And I don’t want to.”
“You don’t wish anyone ill?”
“No.”
“What about the man who kidnapped you?” I’ve stepped close to her now, looking down at her. “What about him?”
Her chest rises and falls, faster and faster, yet she refuses to take a step back.
“You must want revenge. He tied you up. Pierced your nipples.”
I look down at her chest. Mara never wears a bra. Her small breasts and pert little nipples are regularly visible beneath the thin material of her crop tops and dresses. All the more so because of the silver rings through those nipples that she has yet to remove.
“Why haven’t you taken those out, Mara? I think I know why . . .”
She looks up at me, those wide, wild eyes on either side of that impudent nose and vicious little mouth . . .
“Why?” she demands.
“As a reminder. You don’t want to forget. Which means you don’t want to forgive.”
Her pupils expand like a drop of oil spreading on water.
I’m speaking the thoughts right out of her brain.
“He cut your wrists. Left you for dead. No . . . worse than that. Left you as a mockery. A fucking joke. He didn’t even finish killing you, that’s how little you meant to him. He didn’t even stay to watch you die.”
The truth is that Alastor didn’t linger because he knew he couldn’t conceal himself from me.
But I’m telling Mara what she knows to be true . . . the man who attacked her sees her as less than garbage. Less than dirt. An insect, struggling and dying on the windowsill, not even worthy of his notice.
“You would hurt him, Mara. You want to hurt him. He deserves it. If no one stops him, he’ll keep hurting people. It would be more than justice . . . it would be good.”
Mara faces me, eyes blazing, face flushed.
A righteous angel in the face of a demon.
“Evil men always want to justify what they do,” she says. “And it’s not by telling you all their reasons. No . . . they want to push you, and bend you, and break you until you snap. Until you do something you thought you’d never do. Until you can’t even recognize yourself. Until you’re as bad as they are. That’s how they justify themselves . . . by trying to make you the same as them.”
There’s no space between us now. My face is inches from hers, our bodies so close that her heat and mine radiates in one continuous loop, feeding the inferno between us.
“You wouldn’t kill him? If he was here, now, as helpless as you were that night?”
She meets my gaze, unflinching. “No.”
“What if he wasn’t helpless? What if it was him, or you?”
She stares into my eyes. “Then I would tell him . . . you’re not going to sneak up on me this time. We’re face-to-face now.”
She still thinks it might have been me.
She thinks I did that to her.
And yet she’s here, now, alone in this room with me, inches apart, her lips as swollen and flushed as mine . . .
She’s more twisted than I ever dared dream.
16
Mara
The night of New Voices I’m so nervous that I vomit in the gutter on the way to the show.
Cole said he’d send a car for me at 9:00.
At 8:20 I left on foot.
I’ve come to know Cole Blackwell more intimately than I would ever have imagined these last few weeks. I honestly think I might know him better than any person in this city, because it’s only around me that he lets the mask fall. And it’s not one mask—it’s dozens.
I watch him lift each to his face, one after another, each tailor-made for the person with whom he converses.
The mask for my boss Arthur is that of a fellow businessman with an emotional attachment to his young protégé—in Cole’s case, tinged with an all-too apparent romanticism.
The mask he wears around most of his employees is of a distant, autocratic artist. He has them jumping at his wild demands, all the while making just enough outlandish requests to disguise what he actually wants . . .