14. Reid
REID
PLAYLIST: SAIL – AWOLNATION
Avery walks with me to the back of the studio, past her bed, and my eyes fall onto a massive wall that must be at least thirty feet long and is full of notes, wildly connected with lines and arrows.
“What is this?” I ask as I get closer to it.
“Everything I know and have learned about Hedda,” she says. “And by everything, I mean everything.”
She walks up to me and stands next to me, staring at the wall.
“This is how I met her,” she says. “My father, god bless him, but he was a horrible man.”
Before I can stop myself, “You believe in God?” slips over my lips.
“Of course I do,” she says. “Without faith, everything is worthless. Without God, I’d be nothing.”
I am utterly taken aback because of all the people I have met, she is the last person I’d expect to believe in God.
A grin cracks on her face.
“Don’t let me mess with you, Shaw. I don’t believe in anything but my own capabilities. I am the creator of my life, not some woo-woo man in the sky. I don’t follow men; I follow my heart’s deepest desires.”
I shake my head in complete disbelief, and yet I allow a small smirk to tug the corner of my mouth up.
“You know,” I say, “This might be the first time I agree with you on something.”
I risk a glance from the corner of my eye at her.
She meets mine for one second before she says, “Whatever,” and dives back into explaining.
“This is the first job I ever did,” she says, pointing at a circle labeled ‘Holly Haydn’. “I was twelve back then. She taught me how to blend in and become essentially invisible.”
I watch Avery closely, and while I expected this to be a happy memory for her, her expression is hardened. With her jawline, I see every muscle she is flexing. Heavily.
“Two years later, my father died,” she says, “And I was lost. I had her as the only person to give me some direction. Something she shamelessly used.”
Her head twitches slightly. Followed by the rolling of her shoulder. It is a habit I have noticed several times now, and it dawns on me that it is her way of removing uncomfortable emotions. A very important tell, because it means she does feel something.
“How did she use it?” I ask.
Avery breathes in deeply.
“For her gain. It took me a long while to realize she was getting information from me, and she took things I was after before I could get them. We did three jobs together in the past, because I couldn’t have done them alone.”
She walks further to the right.
“This here was the first big thing we did together,” she says, pointing to a circle with the ‘2006 Heist Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam’ written in it. “I was sixteen back then.”
She scoffs and stares into emptiness for a moment. I watch her, and while I try to convince myself this is all just another performance, I know it is not.
This is a real part of her that she is giving me.
Apparently, catching Hedda is more important than not trusting me with all this information.
“I evaded her afterward,” Avery finally says as she snaps out of her memory.
“Until I met her at a fundraiser where they exhibited royal jewelry, one of the pieces being the diamond collar, you know it as Case No. 244-NY-2012-004471, unresolved. It was me; I stole it by misleading her, because that’s what she did to me in 2006. It was my revenge.”
And once again, she falls silent. It makes me wonder… because Avery Zayne is usually never at a loss for words. While I do believe everything she is telling me right now, I feel there is an ulterior motive.
She was in my home, even if she denies it.
I know it.
Maybe she is still having me watched.
Knows I am suspecting her.
And tries to regain the power with the move.
“The second time was the heist of a Lake Como house, the Lumiere’s mansion,” she continues.
“I couldn’t have done it without her. We both almost died that day; I got shot twice in the back, and I still carry those scars with me as a reminder to never trust anyone,” she says, turns, and pulls up her blouse.
Two old gunshot wounds in the left middle of her back, right where the ribs end.
“Was it Hedda’s fault?” I ask because the most important part was the ending, where she mistrusts everyone.
“Yes,” she says.
“Why would you do that again and again and again?” I ask her. “You knew she used you already. You knew she was a conwoman, someone you had a fallout with, and yet you work with her again?”
She smiles faintly.
“In my line of work, there aren’t many good ones.”
I don’t believe one word of that sentence, because she averted her eyes before she said it.
“And the real reason?” I ask. I’m not letting that go.
Her eyes flash at me.
“Why do you fuck with Rachel?” she asks me, shooting back at me. She is not one to be backed into a corner.
Because it’s convenient, I tell her in my mind.
Something I’d never speak out loud. Rachel is the only person I ever broke the rules for.
Because of convenience and desperation. For both of us.
We don’t love each other. We’re friends.
With benefits. Out of convenience. And I understand what it must be like for her with Hedda.
Hedda was the only person there for her after losing her father. She was lost and a teenager who needed someone to latch onto. Someone to give her direction and wings—and that’s what Hedda did. In her own way, making Avery someone in her image.
I avert my eyes back to the wall.
“So you did Paris together,” I say when my eyes fall onto a circle with ‘Paris’ in it.
“We did,” she says hesitantly. “I needed her as a distraction, something loud.”
“What’s this?” I ask, pointing at an X she drew somewhere between ‘Paris’ and ‘FBI heist’.
“Doesn’t matter to you,” she says in a very dismissive tone.
“Everything matters,” I say.
“What matters is this,” she says and points at a list of objects and artifacts she has assembled, numbered, and classified.
133 in total.
I read through the list.
“You can strike out most of them, because we found them in her brownstone.”
“Strike them out,” she says and hands me a red pen.
It feels wild writing on a wall. Doing the one thing parents always forbid as a kid.
It takes me a moment to strike out everything we cataloged in the raid.
“Interesting,” she says.
“Why?”
“The only thing you didn’t find were the most valuable paintings. Gallilee, Mona Lisa, The Card Players, The Scream, Spring,” she says, walks over to the center, and draws a circle. “And the hat,” she says while writing Lincoln’s hat into the circle.
“Do you have any idea why?”
“Yes,” she says. “Because she can be easily shipped and moved. Every object is scanned at some point. Canvases can be rolled and declared absolutely unworthy, like an architect's plan. With the right cover, no one will look into you.”
“So you think she is out of the country?”
“Not necessarily,” she says. “She might want us to believe that. The best hiding place is right under one’s nose—“
Her voice trails off.
Her gaze becomes unfocused.
“I’ll be damned,” she whispers.
“What?” I ask urgently, but I am not getting an answer. Instead, she mumbles something to herself.
“She was on board so easily because of it—“
“Avery,” I say, and grab her to get her attention. “Tell me what you know.”
“I—“ she looks at me in horror. There is fear. The same fear I saw for one second the day I caught her.
Her eyes flicker wildly.
“That bitch,” she says suddenly, removing herself from my touch to walk around back and forth in front of me.
“Avery!” I finally shout. “You tell me right now.”
She stops in her tracks.
A wild look on her face.
We gaze into each other’s eyes for a moment.
I don’t dare break the moment.
“The day I broke into the FBI,” she finally says. “She shouldn’t have been there. I went to her house earlier to convince her to do it with me. It was too easy. And then she—anyway, I decided to do it solo. Which is why I wasn’t on top of my game. We had been drinking; I didn’t plan properly—“
Her voice trails off again. A rock appears in my throat, and I don’t know why.
“And then she came to your rescue?” I ask.
“She did. She shouldn’t have known. She shouldn’t have agreed. She told me she took the same route I came through, the one she said she’d never use. She said the best way was through the front entrance.”
The hair on my arms stands up.
“We can’t find her, because we have been looking in all the wrong places,” she says and finally stops pacing.
I stare at her. Her eyes are wide. Flushed cheeks.
She is worked up. Emotional. Moved. Her chest is heaving up and down.
It is such an emotionally loaded topic for her.
I have never seen her this emotional before, and there is only one thing I can imagine someone cold like her would be this emotional about.
I have a million other questions about where she’s heading, but there is only one I need an answer to right now.
I close the distance between her and me.
“Avery,” I breathe out. “Did Hedda ever touch you?”
The reaction happens in real time, in slow motion. Her pupils dilate, followed by a swallow, a twitch of her head, the rolling of her shoulders, before she slips back into her baseline of cold arrogance.
I know the next thing I will hear is a lie, because I got too close to her.
“No,” she says distantly.
“Liar,” I say.
A derogatory look radiates over me.
“Are you here to pretend to trust me?” she asks.
“No,” I say, and scoff.
“Who’s the liar now?” she says derogatorily and turns away.
So she knows.
She knows why I came here.
But right now, I am not playing her.
But I will not let her get away with this.
I grab her shoulder.
She reacts fast.
Turns, hits my arm away, and pushes me backward into the wall with her forearm pressing against my throat.
Her lips purse in pure disdain.
I could free myself, but I don’t want to. Anger is good. Anger is what makes people reckless with their secrets.
“You’re angry,” I say to provoke her. “That’s good.”
Her arm presses harder into my throat, so much so that I have slight trouble breathing.
She is so close, panting heavily, and the warm air from her lungs caresses my skin. She is roughly a head taller than me, and she makes an impression with her dark eyes and angry gaze. A feral lioness who is triggered.
“You have no right,” she says.
“It’s not about right,” I say through gritted teeth, because my throat hurts. “It’s about how much things have to be set right, how hard I’ll go after her.”
“As if you care about me,” she says derogatorily. “You hate me. And you do well to do so.”
“I don’t hate you,” I say.
“You’re a fucking liar yourself,” she shouts, pressing me with her body into the wall. “You despise me for lying, but all you do is lie to yourself.”
It gives me a stitch in my chest.
Because technically, she is right. I lie. More than I’d like. I do hate her. Parts of her. Things she does. But not all of her.
“What did Hedda do to you?” I ask to navigate the topic to the only relevant thing in all of this.
“I’m not telling you shit because you can’t be honest either,” she says and pushes herself off me and walks over to the massive window front, staring outside into the glowing Manhattan night.
I watch her for a moment.
It is a decision I don’t make consciously, but one my body makes for me.
“I don’t trust you,” I say. “I believe you were in my apartment, and you stole Cleopatra’s bracelet and the elephant skin from Fullerton. I am here to try to get close to you so you trust me enough to lower your guard around me.”
She doesn’t react at first.
“I’m vegan,” she finally says as she turns.
“Um—yes?” I say, not knowing where she's heading with it.
“I. Am. Vegan,” she says again, emphasizing every word. “I don’t do elephant skin or ivory or anything else that hurts animals. I love animals. I’d never be cruel to an animal. They deserve to be treated with love and respect.”
“Oh,” I say and gaze at her. My lips part as I realize what she just gave me.
She gave me a part of her humanity.
She loves animals.
“Hedda forced me to eat her pussy,” she suddenly says with a detached voice, leaning against the windows and pointing to the X on the wall. “She taught me how to fuck since I was twelve. I didn’t know better back then.”
I didn’t even realize I held my breath until my vision gets blurry. I gasp for air as I look at the woman who went through so much horror. All I want to do is seize her, hug her, and bring Hedda behind bars.
“Don’t pity me,” she says, looking at me with an icy look. “I don’t need nor want it.”
“I don’t pity you. I am sorry for everything that happened to you.” I say, and add, “Thank you for telling me all this. It must have been hard talking about all of this.”
She looks at me, and I see the humanity in her for one more second, before her mask slips back on.
“No, it’s not,” she says. “I don’t feel anything.”
This one sentence might have been the most honest she has ever been, and yet, it is a lie.
“You do feel,” I say. “You're just not letting yourself feel. Big difference.”
She stares at me with her dark eyes in an unreadable gaze.
Moments pass.
Her eyes harden as she closes the distance between us.
Her hand on my left cheek.
My breathing flattens as a pull surges through me.
“Don’t let your brain convince you I can be fixed,” she says darkly. “I am not the poor girl with a bad story that made her this way. I am the villain because I love to be one.”
While I heard what she said, I didn’t process it. All I can think about are those eyes, staring into mine. All I can feel is her touch on my skin. All I long for is her lips to meet mine.
My chest heaves up and down.
My lips part with heated air caressing them.
Her other hand grasps my cheek to cup my face.
She is so close now.
So close that our noses touch, and I can scent her skin.
“Walk away,” she whispers with a shaky voice, “Walk away, or I will be the villain in your story, too.”
Too.
The villain in my story, too.