Chapter 33
33
Max
Max had never been anywhere this rich. She felt so palpably out of place – an op-shop dress on a rack of Vera Wang gowns. But in this disguise she had a newfound superpower; she could speak to people without that itching self-consciousness crawling over her. She wasn’t herself so there was nothing to be self-conscious about.
Except for: which one of these guests was a potential killer? And the fact that she’d just had her heart stomped all over by the over-shined dress shoes of the Barbaranis’ Fixer. She could practically see her insides left behind in his footsteps as he’d stormed away.
Compartmentalise. Beetroot in the sandwich.
Heart on the floor.
It’s not like you actually told him how you felt.
Thank god.
Her mind was whirring with the memory of his hands, his mouth. She scanned the crowd, trying to stop looking for broad shoulders and brown eyes that could carve out your sense of time and place and sanity and—
Where the fuck was Kaine Skinner? And was that ... Raphael? Why was he carrying a tray of food? Max may have never had the social clearance to attend an event like this but even she knew that Arnold Schwarzenegger would be on the list of replacement waiters before Raphael.
The La Marca barman looked over his shoulder as he ducked through the crowd. Max’s old instincts hadn’t rusted enough in her months in Semperdom to miss the haste in his steps: an animal sensing danger, but not wanting to alert predators to his position.
Max discarded the un-drunk champagne glass she’d grabbed in her blind rush out of the mud room onto the tray of an actual Barbarani waiter and followed Raphael’s shiny hair through the camouflage of wealth and intoxication he’d disappeared into.
If I find Kaine Skinner, I will deliver him to Greyson myself. That’s what Raphael had said back at the La Marca winery, wasn’t it? He reminded Max of Rumpelstiltskin from the fairytale – speaking in riddles and hanging loopholes around her neck like a noose.
Was there a chance Raphael had seen her watching him? She remembered the warmth of his hand on her back, the way he observed her through his long lashes and hooded eyes. The fact that he admitted she was the reason he’d spoken to Grey in the first place.
Did he want to be followed?
‘You KNEW!’
Max lost sight of Raphael momentarily as Nella Barbarani launched at her, eyes wild, breath tinged with red wine, brandishing her phone like a weapon. Max could make out the caller ID under the picture of a round-faced woman with two strawberry blonde braids.
Eliza. Max recalled the name of the Bindi Bindi town vet.
‘Nella, I—’
But Nella wasn’t talking to her. She shoved past, her gaze on someone beyond Max’s periphery. Annoyed, Max twisted, losing sight of Raphael, only to come face to face with Quinton, the wildlife vet.
‘Is everything all right?’ Quinton looked bewildered as the oldest Barbarani girl stabbed him in the chest with a midnight blue acrylic nail.
‘Tell me the truth!’ Nella demanded. ‘What happened to my cat?’
‘Arnold’s fine, Nella. I told you, the atipamezole—’
‘I called the real vet!’ People were starting to stare now. ‘And I know what you did!’
‘Quinton saved Arnold, Nella.’ Jett had arrived, placing himself between Nella and Quinton, clearly more for the vet’s sake than anything else. ‘Emotions are just a bit high right now.’
He had it handled, Max decided, scanning the crowd where she’d last seen Raphael. She didn’t stick around to hear Nella’s reply, heading for the wine cabinet on the western wall, her reflection blinking back at her through the glass. Rows upon rows of Barbarani wine leered down at her like missiles.
Raphael had disappeared.
The clenched fist inside her that had curled up as Grey left the mud room was tightening. Time was rushing past like she was in a dream, stuck in the middle of a train station while everyone else was heading towards where they needed to go, getting on the right train. Everything was moving on without her and she’d never get there in time.
How desperate was she that the sight of a man, with no concrete evidence connecting him to a murder plot, looking slightly out of place had been enough to convince her she had a lead?
Delusional. Raphael didn’t even like Kaine Skinner, so why would they be working together?
Max leant against the cool glass of the cabinet, trying not to remember the window in the hotel Grey had pressed her up against not twenty-four hours before. Another waiter offered her a glass of sangue, which she took on autopilot.
Raphael hates Skinner.
The La Marcas hate Skinner.
The Barbaranis hate Skinner.
Libby hates Skinner.
Max peeled herself off the cabinet, heart thumping.
Was that the piece that didn’t fit? Skinner?
It didn’t make sense for any of them to hire Skinner.
He didn’t make sense.
She had the strangest feeling the wine was watching her, listening to her heartbeat, whispering. How did Skinner even come into this?
The room started to swim.
Because of me.
Max had brought Skinner into this – she’d kept pushing him as the lead suspect. She redirected the investigation to focus on Skinner, she’d behaved exactly like one of the prejudiced, narrow-minded cardboard-cut-out profiling cops Grey had accused her of being.
She’d behaved exactly how Libby had expected her to.
Skinner didn’t make sense. Except in one scenario: if he’d never been a part of it at all.
‘Antonella was right.’ An unfamiliar voice interrupted her spiralling thoughts.
Max turned to her left, taking a sip of sangue to try to make her shaking hands less noticeable – and promptly spat it back out when she recognised the woman standing beside her.
‘Relax.’ Sophie Kingsley sipped her flute of champagne, her blue eyes on the crowd. ‘I just wanted to say hey.’
Max would have been less surprised to see Libby swanning around here in a cocktail dress.
‘The Barbaranis keep their enemies close,’ Sophie explained as though reading Max’s thoughts, her eyes straying over to the La Marcas, where Ariana was deep in conversation with her mother and Forrest. Max couldn’t see Matteo, whose photograph she’d studied from Grey’s files, but she knew he was here somewhere.
‘Are you writing a story about the gala?’ Max asked.
Skinner. I brought Skinner into this .
‘Part of my penance,’ Sophie said. ‘Instead of a thousand Hail Marys, I think it’s going to be a thousand articles that paint the Barbarani family in a good light.’
‘You might have to get into writing fiction then.’
Sophie raised a thin eyebrow. She was gorgeous, but not in the way Nella was, not as soft, not as exotic. Sophie was harder – sharpened like a pencil just before an exam. She was cut like an athlete, taut muscles evident through her sheer blue gown and a strong jaw that could almost be masculine but was off-set by her huge opal eyes. ‘How many offers have you had, for your story?’ she asked.
No point asking Sophie how she knew Max had a story. She probably knew the background scoops on all the guests, had probably been in that mud room herself a few times, with Grey, and the cottage ...
‘None that I was willing to give it up to.’
‘If you ever want to tell your side, Max—’
‘Not interested. Sorry.’
Sophie surveyed her for a beat. ‘He told you.’
‘He didn’t,’ Max said honestly. ‘Vittoria gave me your name, and I guessed the rest.’
Sophie looked over to where Vittoria stood, talking animatedly to a group of women wearing varying shades of pastel. Max had been keeping an eye on Vittoria and found that although she was only ever speaking to her small coven of pastel, her eyes would often flutter over to Claudia La Marca – Matteo’s wife.
‘That tracks,’ Sophie said. ‘Cruella’s always hated me, even before the article.’
Perhaps it was Max’s few sips of sangue on an empty stomach. Perhaps it was the churning, gaping hole inside her that welled deeper every time she scanned the room and Skinner wasn’t there. Perhaps it was something far more primal that had to do with the fact that when she turned her head slightly, she could still catch the scent of him on her own collarbone. Either way, the result was, ‘Why did you do it? Run the story about Luca punching Forrest and everything else?’
So really, she was a cat. Pissing on a tree. In someone else’s backyard.
Sophie assessed her with those reporter eyes. Max had always struggled to hate reporters as much as her colleagues had. She understood it: reporters got to package up a bloodstained crime scene into an eight-word headline and move on, while cops had to carry the stench of it home with them, every part of it soaking into their skin, their marriages, their children. But reporters were just trying to do their job too. They had bosses and deadlines breathing down their necks, kids and partners they wanted to keep in their lives. ‘I didn’t realise how hurt he’d be by it,’ Sophie said eventually, the make-up flaking slightly in the corners of her eyes when she crinkled them.
‘Luca?’
‘Greyson. I thought we were just ... well ...’
‘You thought your relationship was casual?’
Sophie ran a hand through her hair. ‘No. I just ... didn’t think he loved me enough to be that betrayed.’
Max felt burning anger towards this woman. Anger she had no right to, but still. Was this why Grey couldn’t trust her? Was this why he’d been so convinced she was working against him from the start? Working with Raphael for the La Marcas? Keeping Vittoria’s secrets from him? Sophie was clearly smart enough to write well-researched and nuanced articles, but she’d been completely dense about Grey. Max had known him a few days and she could see exactly why Sophie’s betrayal had scarred him so much. She’d been his. The one thing he had that didn’t belong to the Barbaranis. And she’d betrayed his trust, for a story.
Sophie seemed to sense her unasked question. ‘I was desperate to prove myself at work. I was the only woman under thirty who’d climbed the ladder that far. I was working so hard, sleepless nights, diet of Red Bull and espresso, for this promotion. It was a race between me and this other guy who was family friends with the boss, you know the type?’
Max nodded. Even though she was struggling to find sympathy for this woman, she’d worked in a male-dominated industry pretty much her entire professional life. As much as she didn’t want to, she got it.
‘My mum was sick too.’ Sophie swallowed. ‘I just – I wasn’t thinking properly. I think I’d convinced myself that Greyson and I ... we’d never—’
‘It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me—’ But secretly Max was curious about the story Sophie published about the Barbaranis and the party where the boy fell from the balcony. Something told her there was more to it. Part of her was also perversely curious about this goddess-like woman who’d once slept next to Grey. Who’d kissed him hello in the morning and goodnight in the evening. Who’d held his trust, and then smashed it up like a child’s pinata.
Sophie traced a finger along her eyebrow. ‘I didn’t realise what had actually happened. I didn’t know Greyson had been the one holding that kid when he ...’
‘Jumped?’
Sophie nodded. ‘That’s what the witnesses said. He was high, drunk. They said he’d been yelling that he was an angel, that he could fly. I didn’t know it was Greyson who’d caught him, who held him until ...’ She trailed off, eyes glistening. ‘I never knew how much it was going to hurt him. I didn’t think I meant that much to him. For what it’s worth, I had the story pulled – but the damage was done.’
Max paused her next sip as realisation struck her.
‘You could have written that it was the Barbaranis’ Fixer holding on to him before he fell. At the same party where Luca punched Forrest. That kind of story would have been the difference between busting a group of teenagers for a bag of weed in their car versus taking down an international ice ring – excuse the cop metaphor. You could have made your career.’
Sophie folded her arms, champagne glass tilted at an angle at which Max would definitely have spilled half of it, because she wasn’t a living, breathing freaking moon-goddess with legs up to her neck. ‘Guess I didn’t have the guts.’
‘You were protecting him.’
Sophie sipped her champagne.
‘You should tell him,’ Max said. ‘I don’t think anyone’s ever protected him before. It’s always been his job.’
Sophie looked her up and down. ‘I don’t think that’s true.’
It suddenly dawned on Max that Sophie had sought her out. Perhaps the desire for a scoop on Max’s time in prison and the trial was more of a lucky bonus, a clever disguise: Sophie the professional reporter, instead of Sophie the ex-girlfriend of Greyson Hawke.
‘You know him well,’ Sophie said.
‘Not at all. He barely speaks to me.’
‘I find that hard to believe. The two of you spent the night in Perth, Nella says.’
Straight to it then. ‘Not like that.’
‘Like what?’ Sophie smiled. Not unkindly. But not exactly kindly either. ‘Look, I’m just surprised. Greyson doesn’t really go to Perth. He doesn’t really go anywhere.’ She sighed. ‘Is it really not like that with you two?’
‘It’s really not. We’re working together. Security.’
Fucking in the mud room.
‘Figures,’ Sophie said, tapping her glass with her middle finger. ‘He’s never going to settle down with anyone. If we’d kept going, he probably would have broken it off eventually. No one measures up to the Barbaranis.’ Her eyes flickered over to Luca, who was roaring with laughter with one of Tomaso’s scarf-clad friends – or laughing at them, it wasn’t clear.
Sophie chewed the inside of her lip. ‘I think I just always felt like his Plan B. Like Plan A hadn’t worked out for him – whatever it was or whoever she was – and I was what he’d settled for instead. Not bad, still something he wanted, but never the real thing.’
‘Plan B.’ Max’s throat went dry. All her previous thoughts about Skinner and Raphael pierced through the wobbly membrane she’d cast up around them at Sophie’s arrival. Libby’s voice grated in her ear. Your Plan B needs to be better than Plan A.
What if the bomb had been Plan A?
Forgive us all.
That meant Plan B—
What if Plan B was Max ?
‘Oh shit, guess it’s starting,’ Sophie was saying. ‘Think about what I said, you know – about telling your side ...’
Max didn’t know what she said to Sophie, or if she said anything at all. Giovanni Barbarani was the only person in this place who could command an entire fleet of Australia’s Most-Wanted socialites to a standstill.
There he was, on the landing of the white, marble stairs – an explorer standing on the conquered ridge between two snow-peaked mountains.
A prisoner before a firing squad.
It wasn’t Skinner. It had never been Skinner. He was just an idea, a phantom – Plan B.
So who ...?
Libby had handed her the torch, told her where to point to make everyone look in the wrong direction while ... while what?
Max had to shine the spotlight somewhere – but where? What had she missed?
She pushed through the crowd, ignoring the grunts and gasps as champagne and wine sloshed out of glasses. Giovanni raised his own glass of sangue. Grey said he’d be there, with Giovanni, at the bottom of the stairs – he’d argued he needed to be standing beside him, in case Skinner took advantage of Giovanni’s position.
But Gio had said he’d rather be strung naked from the chandelier and sing the Greek national anthem than make it seem like he needed protection.
And it wasn’t Skinner they were watching for.
Where the fuck was the Fixer?
Everyone Max pushed past was a potential enemy behind their masks of polite intrigue, listening to Giovanni thank everyone for being there in far more humble tones than she would have expected from the man who had yelled at Grey for having a sip of wine not an hour beforehand.
Emilio Barbarani’s portrait glared down at his son. Max’s gaze caught on the old man’s chin glistening in the waxy light of the crystal chandelier.
The jawline. Clean shaven. But still. There was something ...
Vittoria ascended the stairs, her black hair slipping down her shoulders like spilled oil. Grey said the only reason Vittoria hadn’t wanted him to see the note was because he’d recognise the handwriting. So Max had been right the first time – Vittoria knew who wrote it.
I know how to hurt my husband.
Max had guessed at the time that Vittoria had been talking about an affair, or at least a potential affair, in revenge for one that had maybe happened before. Something that would hurt Giovanni more than death.
That’s why Max shouldn’t have pulled that trigger the second time. She wasn’t Evan’s wife, she didn’t know how to hurt him. Not properly.
Wives knew how to hurt their husbands. All wives, not just women like Vittoria, with all the floor to ceiling wine cabinets, ski-jump noses and crystal chandeliers that her fortune brought her. Women like Libby Johnston knew too. It was a knowledge that ran deeper than any surface differences like social class. Deeper than blood. It was primal. Eve had known it too. An apple and a snake to bring a man’s entire empire down.
It didn’t make sense for Libby to want Skinner dead. The people Max hated the most in the world, because they’d taken everything from her – Evan, and the drunk driver whose name she never spoke – death would have been the worst fate for them. Because death was peaceful. Final. These people didn’t deserve an end.
What if Libby wanted him to suffer like she had? Medieval. Eye for an eye. A cage for a cage?
Libby said she wanted Skinner underground. What if she didn’t mean dead? What if she knew from the start that Max would never have been able to pull the trigger?
Max looked back up at the portrait of Emilio as Giovanni raised his glass in the air. She ran through what Grey had said about Emilio’s underground thief traps, his secret passageways running under the property to hide his wine and all his other secrets.
Libby’s voice again. Skinner is a rat.
A rat who didn’t know he was playing a part in a deadly game. A rat in a trap.
What had Raphael said to them, at the La Marca winery?
If I see Skinner, I will deliver him to you myself.
Raphael with the plate of food, disappearing near the wine cabinet.
She was almost there, both in her head and at the stairs – to warn Giovanni that ... what? That there was no Skinner? That the rumour about Skinner had been a Plan B in case the bomb didn’t work? That Max had walked onto his property as an unwitting magician’s assistant tied to invisible ropes?
But she was almost there, she could almost see through the thicket of trees Libby had deliberately placed in her way ...
The crowd applauded something Giovanni said. Max tried to use the shifting momentum to pull towards the wine tycoon. Four rows from the front. Three. Two.
Giovanni’s voice pounded through her like a deep bass. ‘My father used to say “the secret is in the wine”, but I know the secret is also in hard work, passion and dedication. And it is because of the hard work, passion and dedication of many people here tonight that I am able to finally make this announcement.’ He paused for effect. ‘It is my great pleasure to announce that we will be starting developments on Hotel Barbarani in ...’
Pow. Pow. Pow.
Three shots.
Chest. Shoulder. Head.
The white stairs of the grand staircase behind him were already splattered with his blood and sangue wine by the time Giovanni Barbarani’s body fell.