CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
"Revenge Is Best Served Cold"
Tao smiled in quiet pleasure as her eyes took in the chaos of the backstage.
The bustling space was filled with show producers, makeup artists, hair stylists, and designers all barking out orders at each other simultaneously, a symphony of controlled panic that Tao recognised and had always found oddly grounding.
It was a total ruckus, but for Tao it felt like coming home.
She had spent years moving through spaces exactly like this one, had learned the rhythms of them, the specific language of backstage urgency.
She moved through it now like a current through water, undetected by the living bodies around her, brushing past racks of clothing and rolling carts and assistants with their arms full of emergency alterations.
"There isn't a bull in sight and yet this is absolutely chaos," Sidius remarked, narrowly avoiding a model who was walking at high speed with her eyes on her phone.
"It's an acquired taste," Tao said. "This right here is what getting ready for a gladiator fight looks like."
"That is a very strange analogy," Sidius replied.
"And yet completely accurate." She moved deeper into the staging area. "Now. What's the plan?"
"You said you had one," Sidius pointed out.
"We're here for a show," Tao said serenely. "So we're going to watch the show. I just need to find my moment."
She moved through the backstage like a tiger working the edge of a clearing. Calm, deliberate, unhurried. Everything she did had always been this way. Her enemies had always made the mistake of expecting fury from her when what was actually coming was precision.
"Monica, you're closing the show," the head producer called out. "Fifteen minutes."
Monica was across the room, being touched up for the third time, a small constellation of assistants orbiting her with utmost attention, probably because many of their professional reputations were attached to how she looked when she stepped onto that runway.
She looked extraordinary. The white architectural gown she was wearing was exactly the sort of thing Tao herself would have chosen, which was not a coincidence and was not lost on her.
Monica stood a little apart from the other models, her expression carrying a hue of brightness. She was truly savoring the moment.
Good. Let her. Let her have the feeling of it, the full weight of everything she had built on borrowed ground, so that when it was taken away the contrast would be complete.
Tao moved to the stage entrance and waited.
?
The lights went up. The crowd applauded as the show drew toward its close, that particular swell of collective attention when something important is about to arrive.
The models before Monica had done their work.
The runway was cleared. The staging area went briefly still in the held-breath moment before the final walk.
Monica stepped toward the curtain. Tao stepped with her.
The spotlight found Monica the moment she emerged and the room responded, the applause rising, cameras lifting, the collective breath of a crowd watching something they would remember.
Monica walked with particular confidence, she had to, paid a very high price to be here and intended to enjoy every moment of it.
Halfway down the runway, the lights flickered.
Once. Twice. Not a technical fault. Something else. Something in the air changed, a pressure shift that the crowd felt without being able to name, people glancing at each other and then back at the stage uneasy alertness.
Monica stopped walking. Her smile stayed in place for a moment by reflex. Then her body registered what her mind was beginning to understand.
"Monica," came a voice.
The voice carried through the room the way sounds carry in silence, finding every ear at once. Monica turned.
Tao stood on the runway.
In the flesh, as she had always been, golden olive skin, brown curls, her chin at its habitual slight elevation, her posture exact. The full and unmistakeable presence of her, alive in every quality except the technical one.
Monica's blood ran cold. The colour left her face so completely that even through the stage makeup the change was visible to the front rows.
"You're supposed to be dead," Monica said. Her voice had lost its shape entirely.
"Am I?" Tao tilted her head. Her expression carried none of the fury Monica had perhaps expected. Only a kind of absolute certainty. "In the flesh. Did you miss me?"
"You— I killed you," Monica said, her voice cracking. "I watched the life drain from your eyes. I was there. You were dead."
"You were very thorough," Tao said pleasantly, walking toward her as if she was taking a stroll. "The embalming was a particularly thoughtful touch. And the lilac roses. You remembered that. I was genuinely moved."
Monica fell to her knees. Her hands went to her hair.
She was shaking her head back and forth and the words coming out of her were broken and without order, fragments of denial mixed with fragments of confession, her fa?ade slipping.
Everything real in Monica had surfaced at once and it was terrible and it was loud and the crowd watched it in complete, stunned silence.
"This was supposed to be my moment," Monica choked out. "This was mine. I built this. I worked for this."
"I know," Tao said, and there was something in her voice that was neither cruelty nor sympathy but simply the truth.
"But you built it on my ground, Monica. And this—" she looked out at the room full of cameras and frozen faces and the runway where Monica was on her knees in a white gown that belonged to someone else's story, "is exactly the moment you made for yourself. "
The doors at the back of the venue opened.
The sound of it cut through the silence like punctuation. Police officers moved quickly down the centre aisle, the commander's voice carrying clearly through the room.
"Monica Blanchard, you are under arrest for the murder of Lila Marchetti, the attempted murders of Priya Masahati and Taron Montgomery, and for the murder of Tao-Lee Montgomery." He said before continuing to recite to Monica her rights.
The room erupted. Every camera in the building was already rolling. Monica looked from the officers to Tao and back to the officers and the mathematics of the situation resolved in her face, slowly coming to realize that there was no next move.
"Do you know who I am?" she said, as they pulled her to her feet.
"We'll find out soon enough," the officer replied, and cuffed her wrists.
Monica's eyes found Tao one last time as they walked her toward the doors. Tao met them, holding the door, saying nothing.
"Good luck," Tao said quietly as the doors closed behind her.
?
Outside the venue the press was already assembling.
The story had already broken, moving through every platform at the of light.
Monica Blanchard arrested at the Roman Cavalier show.
Murder. Four victims. The video of her breakdown on the runway already being shared in real time by everyone in the front row who had had their phone out.
"That was brutal," Sidius said, beside her on the steps. "And I have witnessed a very great deal."
"I thought it was perfect," Tao said. "Nothing beats closing a show with a finale. I just helped her give the performance of her life." She shrugged. "She would have wanted a memorable exit."
Sidius looked at her sidelong. "You are a complicated person."
"I'm aware," Tao said. "I'm ready."
She had done what she had come here to do. Monica was going to pay for what she had done in every way available to the living world, and that was enough. That was more than enough. The rest was not Tao's to oversee.
She turned away from the venue, the press and the gathering crowd, and didn't look back.