18. Evelyn
The bathroom door jerked open, and I shrank away from it. Laszlo slammed the door behind him, locking us inside. What had I done to upset him? I back peddled, my heart stopping.
“There’s someone in the penthouse,” he said, all fire.
He stalked forward, and I moved desperately out of his way. A cloud of rage swirled around him, and I couldn’t find the words, but I knew the drill. The Family had a protocol if there were feds looking around the Mount.
I was living my mother’s life.
Adrenaline worked its way into my body, and together, we studied every shadow in the video feed.
“What did you hear?” I asked him.
“I didn’t hear anything. They’d been in the bedroom.”
My lungs deflated like a spent balloon. Oh no. The one place he didn’t have a camera. I trembled, wrapping the cotton robe tighter around me, my breathing so shallow that I was feeling faint. I leaned against the edge of the bathtub.
He opened one of the vanity drawers, pulling out a knife, still sheathed.
“I’m going to go look. Whoever broke that frame was sending a message,” he growled, yanking open the door. “You stay in here. I can’t be fucking worrying about you too.”
His tension put me on edge, and my entire body prickled, wanting to escape and hide.
He was a man who had a knife in his bathroom.
Wasn’t that the kind of man I was running away from?
My father was volatile, explosive.
Would Laszlo be like that?
When we met, he was literally handling a bomb. That was as red of a flag as I could hope for. Maybe it seemed green because of how familiar it was.
My soul crumpled, and he was already down the stairs before I remembered.
“Wait, the picture?”
He couldn’t hear me, and I had to run out of the bathroom after him, looking over the landing.
“Do you mean the broken picture frame?”
He stopped, halfway down the stairs, his lean body coiled and prepared to strike. His hand tightened around the hilt of the blade.
“Yes.”
“That was me!”
“You’re certain?”
“Yes. I’m sorry, I knocked it over, and the glass broke. I picked up a few pieces, but…” My voice trembled with fear.
Laszlo took several slow breaths. His eyes were stormy, a firmness to his lips. He hadn’t slept, and his under eyes were taking on a bruised purple. It felt like his paranoia was getting the best of him.
“I’m sorry for scaring you, Belle. I’ll clean it up.” He took the stairs two at a time and paused when he came to my side.
We stared at each other, our breath becoming mirrored as our mutual anxiety depleted. His mouth opened, closed. Opened. Whatever he wanted to say, he thought better of it. He was on edge, and something told me it wasn’t just that I’d gone in to work.
Our adrenaline was spent, leaving us exhausted.
He left me alone in his room, and again I heard him settle down against the wall in the hallway. Why didn’t he just come into his room and claim me? What was wrong with me?
Worries kept me tossing most of the night, and I finally pulled myself out of bed when I couldn’t stand it any longer. He was already up, in the kitchen, drinking some black coffee.
He slept as well as I did from the looks of his messy hair, but he’d changed into a clean shirt and thick, black pants. He still looked great, and I was underdressed, wearing his hoodie that went down past my knees and nothing else.
“Morning. Well, afternoon. A present arrived for you.”
“A present?”
He brought me into the library, and I sat down on the sofa, with him joining me. In his hands was a slick, black box, with a picture of a modern cellphone on the label.
“I have to work today. While I’m gone, will you do me a favour?”
I jumped at the opportunity to please him.
“Of course!”
“I’ll help you set up your new phone, then I want you to order some more stuff for yourself. Anything you need, toiletries, clothes. This arrangement has to continue for a while, for both our sakes. I need you to look the part. I would spoil my girl.”
My heart choked me, then promptly fell to my guts. He would spoil his girl, but this wasn’t real. None of it was real. I slumped into the sofa, the weight of our fake relationship bearing down on me.
Eventually, he’d send me away to my new, charmed life.
“Is Idaho nice?” I muttered.
“It looked it from the pictures. I’ve never been, but it suited you.”
“Why don’t you just send me away? It’s not like you care about me.”
Rain sluiced down the window, a sudden rainfall temporarily chasing away the fog. A chill accompanied it, or maybe it was the icy glare on his face. His eyes narrowed at me, his lips firm in a straight line. He hated me. I was nothing more than a problem for him.
I pouted at his lack of rebuttal and he left the room without a word. I curled my legs up to my chest to comfort the ache in my tummy, the hurt in my soul. I wished I knew what was wrong with me, and why everyone was so eager to be rid of me.
But when he returned a few moments later, it was with a thick duvet, and he draped it over me. In his other hand was a hot water bottle, and he adjusted my legs, placing it on my lap. Concern tainted his handsome features, as if he knew my abdomen was cramping without my saying a word.
“Don’t put it on bare skin. You could burn.”
“Thank you.”
Storm clouds had gathered in my chest, but he sat next to me on the sofa, opening the cellphone.
“We’ll set it up together, and I’ll show you how to use it,” he said, ignoring our previous conversation.
As he demonstrated how to use my new gift, I caught sight of a genuine spark of interest in him. He spoke about it with the same exuberance that I spoke about making jewellery.
Seeing his passion softened my brooding mood. He added in his credit card information and bookmarked several sites for me, showing me how to use the different apps. When he handed it to me, his hand brushed against mine, that simple touch sending my heart rate into overdrive.
And in the contact list, there was him. Only him.
Laszlo Szász.
“The guys already think I spend too much on my wardrobe. That means you will have to outdo me. I’m talking about luxury dresses, Belle.
A whole closet of clothes that make you feel good.
I’ll send them to my tailor, make sure they fit perfectly.
That’s your job for today. The cards on there don’t have limits.
Give me a heads up if you want to buy a car on it,” Laszlo teased.
“Can’t drive, remember?”
“I’ll have to teach you. There’s no quicker path to freedom.”
The next day, I found Laszlo in the library. The drizzle created soft beams of light that didn’t quite reach the shadows of the room.
It was cozy, comfortable.
I wished I could say the same about our relationship. He hadn’t spoken to me after setting up my phone, locked away in his office until after I went to bed. I paused in the doorway, watching him for a moment before he noticed me staring.
“Hey, Belle, good timing. I was about to come get you.”
There was a stack of sketch books on the desk.
“I thought you might like a place of your own to work. Draw. Whatever.” He gestured around at the large bookshelves, the sturdy desk, the worn leather chair. “I never use this place, so it’s all yours, if you want it.”
“Thank you,” I said, and a shadow of a smile crossed his face.
He gestured to the notepads. “Sometimes drawing can help when there are no words. But you can do whatever feels right for you, Belle.”
He had a nervous tic of twirling one of his rings around his index finger when he was uncomfortable. I entered the room, reached out to touch his tattooed hand, and stilled the motion. The anxiety didn’t dim, and he gave me a tight smile.
I wanted to make things better between us.
“My name isn’t Belle. It’s Evelyn. Evelyn Blake,” I said.
His head tilted to the side, his silver eyes narrowing as he scanned my face.
“What would you like me to call you?”
My mother named me Evelyn because where Eve was deceived, Lyn was obedient.
But my grandmother told me that Lyn meant someone flexible, someone with a tender heart, and a great wealth of life to give. I needed to remember that part of myself, and stay true to who I was in this messed up situation.
“Will you call me Lyn?”
Laszlo relaxed, stepping closer to me. “Okay, Lyn.”
Hearing my name—my chosen name—on his lips stole the breath from my lungs.
“Does anyone else know your real name?”
“No. Not even Roxy. I started to tell her but she stopped me.”
“Good. No one will. In private, you will be Lyn, but everywhere else, to everyone else, you’re Belle Smith. Okay? I have your IDs already made.”
His gaze dropped to my lips, and I realized they’d parted in shock. I’d been struggling for over a month to get my government IDs, and he did it, just like that? It was the wrong name, but did that even matter?
“Thank you, Laszlo.”
His smooth, pale face was so beautiful up close. He was usually unreadable, but in those private moments, I came to see that he hid little from me. His every emotion was written plain as day on those lovely features.
He reached out, hesitating, and then my cheek was cupped in his palm. I was hungry for his touch, and I turned until his thumb was on my lip.
I kissed the tip of his thumb, and a rumble went through his lungs like a gathering storm. He didn’t pull away, and I opened my eyes, staring at him intensely. He pushed his thumb in deeper, and I wrapped my lips around it, my tongue tasting his salty flesh.
The air grew heated, and he recoiled, as if he were afraid of what would happen next.
“I’ll let you get set up. Call me if you need me,” he said, leaving the room before I could beg him to stay, to touch me again, to hold me and tell me he wouldn’t send me away.
There was something magnetic about him.
About us.
Something that crackled in the air, but it had shifted. Instead of being drawn together, there was an opposing field pushing us apart. Watching him walk out the door left me with an aching loneliness.
I plunked down in the leather chair, running my nails across the leather.
My lower lip quivered, and tears burned behind my eyes. I blinked them away. I opened the fresh drawing pad and a new pack of pencils.
I was weak, a replica of my mother and all her sins.
My grandmother told me that sometimes feelings could be complicated, that two opposite things could feel true at once. My mother called it hogwash, but as usual, my grandmother was right.
I wanted him to send me away, and I wanted him to tell me I could never leave him.
The graphite tip hovered, my mind blank.
I’d never struggled for things to draw before.
Ever since I was a child, I always had ideas, thoughts, curiosities.
I began swirling the pencil around the page haphazardly without purpose, only stopping when my stomach ached with hunger and I realized I’d been in there for several hours.
The page in front of me was almost black from my repetitious scrawling.
In the mess lived his hand tattoos, drawn from memory, overlapped on top of each other.
I didn’t go back to the club, just as I promised, but every day I asked Laszlo if Roxy had been seen, and every day he told me not yet.
We entered an uneasy rhythm of our strange life together.
We were both processing what happened.
Neither of us wanted to talk about it, but it hung between us like a fog.
The weather did not improve.
Laszlo worked from home most of the time, in his office, and I got the sense he was trying to make it so I wasn’t lonely. Every afternoon, he took me to practice driving for an hour. Not in his sports car but in a black boxy thing that made me feel like I was a secret agent.
The rest of the time, I read in my library, or drew in my sketchbooks. Sometimes I’d catch him watching me in the doorway, but when I lifted my head he’d slip away, so I got in the habit of not giving away the fact that I noticed his presence.
I liked it when he was close.
Some days, when I was feeling particularly bored, I watched movies in his personal theatre. A few times Laszlo joined me, and in the dark, he didn’t realize I could see him mouthing the words to all the old musicals.
When I was four, I began spending the summer with my grandmother. The secular summers, she called them. She said it was important I was exposed to pop culture, and those months were like a crash course in how to blend in with the other apostates, but strangers could always tell I wasn’t like them.
I still studied the movies for clues in how to be normal.
I wished she were still alive. It had been two years since she passed away, and I hadn’t even had an opportunity to visit her grave. I mentioned it to Laszlo in passing.
The next day he found where she was laid to rest next to three of her five husbands, and we visited it together. That put something to rest in me, too. Knowing she was cared for in whatever afterlife there might be.
Her headstone read she was a beloved grandmother, and I wondered who put it up. Knowing her, she paid for it herself once she got the cancer diagnosis, taking care of all her funeral arrangements.
A few days passed before I felt strong enough to find the mafia flick from my hiding place.
It was about someone who disposed of bodies for the Russians, and they called him a cleaner.
The movie was ugly, and scary, and I watched it like homework, trying to understand the world that Laszlo lived in.
That I lived in. It was familiar to the hierarchy of the Family, but the Father didn’t kill witnesses. The men in the movie did.
Laszlo had to know that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the bomb, though. No one would believe me. Not after I slept with him. Not after I moved in with him. I wasn’t a witness anymore; I was an accomplice.