20. Claire
I haven’t figured it all out yet, but I know that this is something I have to do. I will do my best to skirt the details that are muddied by her brother’s involvement, which means telling her I’m a murderer is off the table. That one is probably for the best. I’d like to think her love is unconditional, but how could anyone love a killer?
I won’t even bother burdening her with an impossible task. In reality, she’s always jokingly referred to me as the person who would ‘help her hide the body’, proving the depths of our friendship. But when the context ceases to be fictional, would the sentiment be the same?
We hop the side of the boat one after another, laughing as we do. It feels like we’re doing something wrong, and maybe we are. I don’t know what Remy would say to us trespassing on his boat, but Rhea is his sister, so it also just feels about as normal as sitting down at his table.
Rhea makes a cursory look in the cockpit space, running a hand along the seats and over the deck, but doesn’t find a key. She lets out a humph and then tips a thumb toward a door I hadn’t noticed before. “Let’s get some drinks before we get into it. You’re going to need it.”
Rhea smirks playfully, but I’m pretty sure she’s actually right. I drank half the bottle myself, but the champagne buzz is fading a little, dulled by the reality of what I’m about to do. The truth is a heavy thing—wicked and cruel. I tried to run from it, tried to ignore it, tried to surrender to it. The truth is darkness, and I’ve fought it for so long that I don’t know how to stop. So I’ll embrace it, instead. I’ll lean into it, let it slip into me so that I can learn to shape it into something that I can coexist with. I don’t know if Rhea will be able to do the same, or even if it will weigh on her as it does on me.
Though he apparently doesn’t leave the key lying about, Remy does keep the cabin unlocked. Rhea opens it easily and flips a switch, setting off a strip of blue light that illuminates the entire space. There’s a goddamn kitchen on this boat, and it’s almost as big as the one in the apartment I share with Rhea.
“Nice,” Rhea says, sounding like she’s just making idle commentary rather than actually impressed by it. I’m about to ask why she said it like it wasn’t a surprise, but then I realize she said she knows how to drive a boat. She’s probably been on boats like this her whole life and is unfazed by it.
She opens the fridge and there’s clanking of glass as she moves bottles around a minute before emerging with her arms laden. “Are we expecting company?” I tease, eyeing the bottles to see a mixture of beer and hard seltzers that she sets on the counter.
“Just thirsty.” Rhea laughs, twisting the top off one of the bottles and handing it to me before sticking her head in a cabinet and rummaging for something.
“Ooh, Doritos,” Her voice is muffled, but when she places a bag on the counter and dives back in, it confirms what I thought I heard.
“We just ate dinner.” I tell her, taking a sip of my drink while she keeps looking for whatever it is that she can’t seem to find.
“They’re for later.” Rhea says confidently. And then she makes a noise of excitement, and retreats from the cabinet with a clear plastic bag in hand. It takes a moment to figure out what the contents are, but I put two and two together and shake my head.
“Seriously?”
“Come on, Claire.” She says. “I buried my father yesterday.”
I open my mouth to try and say something that doubtless wouldn’t serve to make things any better, but I’m cut off by another voice that makes my spine tingle. “You didn’t do any of the work as far as I recall.”
A feeling like pins and needles tickles the space between my shoulder blades. I know he’s staring at me—his eyes on me always have this effect, making my skin feel like it’s stretched too tight. My heart starts beating a little faster. If he’s here, I assume he has dealt with Wes. But how did he know where to find us?
“Whatever,” Rhea laughs. “I’m going to get a little high. I think I deserve it after a week in the fucking twilight zone.” She glances pointedly from Remy, who I still haven’t turned to greet, to me. “I’ll leave you alone to get your story straight… or to bend Claire over the couch. Whatever.”
My mouth drops open, though I shouldn’t be shocked. She’s always been blunt. It just feels rawer than ever before since she hasn’t bothered to hide her lack of amusement at the fact that Remy and I have been spending so much time together. My guilt probably plays a part in that too.
I open my mouth again, feeling the need to apologize, but she sweeps past me, scooping her provisions into her arms as she goes.
When I hear the door shut, I feel him move behind me and fight to maintain my composure. It nearly slips when his voice comes near my ear, his breath tickling the shell of it. “You shouldn’t be out here.”
Biting my lip, I take a little breath to try and get back into the right rhythm and turn to face him. I don’t smile—just raise an eyebrow, challenging him to answer the question I’m about to ask. “Why? You going to punish me?”
I meant it to come across saucy, but when the words actually leave my lips, I feel the blush creeping over my skin.
“Don’t tempt me.” Remy groans. I realize his face is serious, his eyes molten at the possibilities of what I just said. I don’t even know where that came from, but I like the effect it had upon him.
“Where is he?”
Remy knows who I’m talking about, though he looks irritated at the mere thought of him. “Not where he belongs.”
I wait for him to elaborate.
After a moment, he does. “He belongs six feet under the ground. But he’s been neutralized for now.”
I think about asking why he is keeping Wes, but I decide to bite the bullet myself before he can put the proverbial gun to my head. “I’m telling Rhea the truth.” The silence between us unfurls as he appraises me thoughtfully and I wait for him to say something. He doesn’t, so I rush to fill the quiet. “She deserves to know what’s going on. I can keep you out of it, but I—”
“No.” He shakes his head.
“Remy,” I start to protest, but he lifts a finger, prompting me to stop trying to argue with him before I ever even begin.
“I’ll fill in the gaps.”
He doesn’t say how he’ll fill in the gaps, and I don’t ask. I simply trust that he will.
I dust a finger along the rim of my beer, the champagne forgotten as I try to organize the chaos in my head into something that will make sense. I’m not sure that’s even possible, so I tip the bottle back and chug it before I can stop to notice how bitter it is. When I set the empty bottle back down, I exhale a laugh. “Do you have anything stronger?”
Something flickers in his gaze—judgement, perhaps—and then he cracks a grin and steps forward. His move pushes me back against the counter as his body lines up with mine, his hips just barely pressing into my stomach as he reaches over my head and produces a bottle half-full of dark liquor. “Will bourbon do?”
I don’t bother looking at the label. I’m too enamored with the way his arms are caging me in as he retreats slowly. My eyes flick down to the stretch of tight abs that peeks out from the bottom of his shirt. I angle my palms behind me so that I can grip the counter, better to resist the random urge telling me to reach out and touch him.
It’s not until he steps away and tilts his head a little that I realize he’s waiting for an answer. “Yes.” My voice wavers, but he seems to assume it’s uncertainty that makes that happen and lets it go. He turns to another cabinet to gather glasses, and I find myself staring at his ass.
“I’m going to go sit down.” I say in a rush, barely managing to get the words out before backing through the door as fast as I can without breaking out into a sprint.
Rhea sits on the bench, a joint pinched between her fingers, her legs curled under her, and a not-entirely-unamused smirk on her face. “All good?” She teases, taking me in.
“Yes.” I shrug, swiping my hair off my neck and sitting down opposite her. There’s a small tabletop between us, and I drum my fingers against it until she laughs and hands me the joint. I take it simply to occupy my fingers, but when I take the first hit, it fills me with a sort of impending calm, like it’s filling my lungs with all the air that’s been missing since the night Remy and I were together.
I’d never done any sort of drug prior to meeting Rhea. We don’t do it often, but she uses it every once in a while to de-stress after exams and I use it every once in a while to supplement my lack of social skills when I let her drag me along to parties and events that are outside of my comfort zone. It’s about as taboo as underage drinking on a college campus, but we’re lucky to have our own place off-campus and live in a state where it’s been legalized. I don’t know if it’s legal in Costa Rica, but it hardly matters. I don’t think murder is legal anywhere, and that ship has already sailed into hell with a spot saved for me.
I pass the joint back to her, regretting that I didn’t change out of this stupid dress. It feels absurd to be sitting here with her smoking weed on a docked boat with my tits on display… particularly given the things we’re about to discuss.
Remy joins us a moment later, dropping onto the bench beside his sister and setting up the glasses on the table in a perfect line. When he sets the bottle before her, Rhea straightens a little, her eyes lighting with excitement. “You’re bringing out the good stuff.” Her eyes flick from the bottle up to him, then to me, guarded with suspicion. “What’s going on?”
Remy is silent as he pours two fingers in each glass and then slides one to Rhea and one to me before taking the last for himself. He doesn’t sip it though—he stares into it solemnly, leaving Rhea to stare at him. I, on the other hand, don’t hesitate, taking a long pull.
It’s smooth and just the right blend of sweet and strong, tracing a warm path from the tip of my tongue down to where it settles in my stomach.
“Okay,” Rhea says, puncturing the quiet. “You guys are scaring me.”
I don’t even know where to begin. I just know that if I don’t start somewhere, I’ll never start at all. Remy is quiet because he’s giving me the chance to tell my own story, to control the flow of information. He told me that he read the entire police report, and coupled with what I’ve told him, he has a pretty complete picture of everything. But it’s my cross to bear, my tragedy to carry on my shoulders until I learn to heal again instead of just ignoring everything, if that’s even possible.
“Before we met, I tried to kill myself.” I clamp my mouth shut, not sure why I decided to start there. I know she’s seen the scars—they’re light, faded well thanks to a prescription cream Addie gave me and the fact that I didn’t cut deep enough. It’s the true mark of friendship to accept everything about a person without knowing everything about them, and we’ve never needed to discuss this. Rhea has never asked about them, and while I’ve caught her gaze lingering, I think she’s always just assumed that I went through a phase where I liked to hurt. I’ve never given her any reason to think otherwise. Since she has been a part of my life, I’ve never had a reason to want to throw in the towel. I’m not suicidal anymore—just homicidal.
“Claire—” Her voice already sounds like it’s about to break on a sob for me, so I shake my head.
“No, Rhea. If you want to know what we do, you need to be strong like I know you are. You need to let me talk and save your pity for someone else.”
“I would never pity you.” She says, sounding hurt. She reaches across the table, holding out a hand that I just stare at for a minute. “I hurt for you when you hurt, but I don’t pity you.”
I don’t have any words for that. If I go off script, I may cry, and I really don’t want to do that. I feel like if I start crying again, I’ll never stop. So, I simply drop my hand in hers, a benefit to her more than it is to me, and carry on. “You know I got emancipated so that I could enroll in school earlier. I did that because I couldn’t stay in my last foster home any longer. He was a really bad man…” I bite my lip. “One of the worst I’ve ever met.”
I’d say the worst, but is what Wes did worse? Sure, they never got the opportunity to rape me themselves, but they were turning me over to people who would do so much worse than what Eric did. Something about being complicit, and being complicit on the scale that he is, makes me think that he’s the greater evil. And that I should drive a blade between his ribs, too.
She stays blissfully quiet, and I focus on my nails, the pink polish cracked and chipped. I don’t even remember when we had them done, but I know I tried to paint my life with a coat of polish, shiny and pretty to keep people from looking too closely. But it’s cracked with time, peeling off in some places while holding stubborn in others. “He came to my room for months before I couldn’t take it anymore. It’s the kind of thing that you just learn to dissociate from. I’d leave my head when he was in my bed, and then after he left, I’d pick up the pieces. Once you get used to that sort of violation, it’s easier to stomach the rest of the world’s injustices.”
I can’t stomach the thought of looking at either of them right now—I don’t want to see their disgust. I saw Remy’s once already, and it was nearly enough to destroy me. He looked at me like I was damaged, and while it hadn’t been enough to stop him from fucking me, I know it’s enough to keep him holding back. If Rhea looks at me the way Remy did when he had me pinned to the wall as I confessed my darkest secret, I think my heart may just stop beating.
But as much as I don’t want to look at them, I’m turning the conversation over to Remy. He hasn’t figured it out yet, so I suck in a breath and pull my hand out of Rhea’s so that I can squeeze my own palms together, locking the fingers to try and keep the nervous energy from showing. When I look at him, Remy is watching me. My heart skips a beat, threatening to quit, but I’m not sure whatever I’m seeing in his eyes—which look more amber than green tonight—is disgust. It looks like anger, like pain, like the things that skitter around inside us so rarely that we don’t even have a chance to put names to them.
Its too much to bear, leaving me feeling like he’s just staring at me without any of my clothes on, so I glance away. When I look back, I tip my head toward him, indicating that I’m tagging him in for this part of the relay. He nods his understanding and angles himself a little more toward Rhea, who turns to him. Now that I know her attention is on him, I can stand to chance a glance at her. Her eyes are glistening, but unlike Remy’s, it’s the green in them that’s prevalent tonight. Her glossy lips quiver as she tries to hold it together while she waits, bewildered, for her brother to continue to crush her view of the world.
“Do you remember when I broke up with Monica?”
A strange heat spills through me at the mention of his ex-girlfriend, who I’d only ever known as the quiet but pleasant housekeeper at their Oregon estate. Monica felt like she was the house manager who made sure that everything was running smoothly and organized the cleaning and cooking and everything, while Rhea and I just stayed under her roof every summer and winter break. Though Rhea is cordial with her, they’ve never seemed terribly close, and yet she’s never seemed like just ‘the help’ either. But thinking of her as Remy’s girlfriend—a girlfriend he had wanted to build a life with—is the hardest thing to imagine, and I don’t know what it is that makes it that way.
“You mean when you brought her best friend over and fucked her in the kitchen?” Rhea laughs, but it’s condescending, disbelieving. She doesn’t understand the direction our conversation is taking her. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad one.
Remy ignores her, taking a sip from his glass and then watching as he swirls the contents around. He’s told me this story, although maybe not all of it. And it was probably easier to share it with me than it would be with her, because in doing this, he is about to shatter the view she held of her father… the view she holds of the world. She’s about to see just how cold a place it truly is.
“You also remember when dad took me to Amsterdam before that happened?”
Rhea makes a face like she doesn’t understand why he’s switching directions, but she closes her eyes a moment and then nods. “Yes. You were in a mood when you got back. It wasn’t long before everything happened with Natasha.”
“Yeah,” Remy agrees. “We went to stay with Davos for a few days.”
“I was pissed that you guys were taking vacation when mom wasn’t doing well.” Rhea chuckles. “It felt like you were just running away.”
“I was being recruited.” He smiles, and I think it may be the first time I’ve seen a smile on his face rather than a smirk or grin. And it’s not even a happy one. It’s a sad, wry smile, meant to cover the pain of the memory he’s dredging up. “That was the weekend I found out what our family business really is. That was the weekend I found out that our father and Davos and thousands of others make their fortune off the backs of others.”
A crease appears between her eyebrows as her confusion deepens, and then Rhea seems to remember I’m here and something clicks in her mind. It’s just the first piece of many, but it falls into place, and I can see recognition following when she looks at me. “You mean…”
“They take women.” Remy sighs. “Children and men too, but the women are their greatest asset.”
“Take them.” Rhea repeats slowly. “Like… Taken? Like, Liam Neeson hunting down his daughter Taken?”
I can’t help myself. The laugh bubbles out of my throat before I can stop it, so I hold up my hand in apology and chase it away with another sip of bourbon that drains my glass. The alcohol burn warms my chest, but my toes are cold.
It’s not funny, and my laugh isn’t because I’ve found anything about it amusing. It’s because it’s all fucked, because I’m fucked, because how fucked is it that it was Rhea’s last pick for movie night, and we watched it the night before Remy came along? We manifested our shitty future that night. Better to stick to cartoons from now on, I think.
“I guess.” Remy shrugs. “I’ve never seen it.”
Rhea looks momentarily gob smacked. Under any other circumstance, I’d have told Remy he was absolutely going to watch it, but I doubt I can stomach that movie ever again knowing what I do now.
“It’s a highly organized operation, Ray. I’m talking government officials in not just our country, people who work in the law and public service, people on all sides who facilitate the actual destruction of innocent lives.”
Rhea watches him for a moment, and then laughter breaks across her face and her chest convulses with it as she turns back to me. It takes a moment for her to still enough to be able to speak, but when she does, her voice is still strained in her attempt to reign it in. “Good job, guys. You had me for a minute.”
Remy’s eyes cut to mine. I don’t need to contemplate what he’s thinking—his helplessness is written all over his face.
“Rhea.” My voice is soft, giving her pause enough to really look at me and realize as long as I’ve known her, I’ve never joked about anything like this. Making this all up for a laugh would be tactless, and she seems to realize as much. I don’t know what I’m supposed to say from here, but I don’t have to, because Remy resumes speaking.
“The night that I…” A quick, apologetic glance at me sends chills over my skin. I lift my glass to my lips by habit but remember that it’s empty, so I decide to help myself to more as he speaks. I’m not sure that all that I’m drinking is even enough to help, because I still feel oddly sober. “The night that Claire and I got into an argument, it’s because I found out about her past. I misunderstood and I judged her, and she was so desperate to get away from me that she trusted Jovich to take her to the airport.” He clears his throat. “But he didn’t take her there. He took her to someone that he knew was involved in the organization… someone he knew would get rid of her.”
Before I even realize what I’m doing, I’ve poured my glass full to the rim. I take it between my shaky hands and sip some off the top so that it doesn’t spill over when I lift it to my lips.
“Davos had some of his guys in the area, and Jovich delivered your best friend to them as well as if he’d served her up on a platter.”
My skin burns, but I don’t know if it’s from the anger in his words, the rage that the situation makes me feel, or the way he has taken personal offense to the injustices against me.
“Claire…”
Remy doesn’t give her a chance to finish whatever thought she’s having. “When you realized she was missing, I put two and two together. When Jovich came back, I got him to confess that he turned her over to Davos and I thought maybe I could appeal to him. But by that time, the auction was already starting.”
“The—” Rhea swallows thickly. “The auction?”
“Usually, assets are taken to one of their locations and assessed to determine their worth. But thanks to Jovich, they realized that Claire was important to you, which would make her important to me. And they used that to expedite the process.”
Rhea sucks in a gasp and presses her hand over her heart. “Remy…” I warn. I’m not sure she can take hearing any more of this.
“You were right, Claire. She needs to know.”
I stand and slide onto the bench next to Rhea, wrapping my arms around her. I’m not sure she even realizes I’m there until she reaches one hand up and rests it over my forearm lightly. This time, the comfort is more for me than her.
“Auctions are secure, encrypted. There’s no warning for them, they just send out an invite and no matter where you are, bidding begins. That’s what they did to Claire. I tried to outbid them, I tried to bargain with Davos, but he wasn’t willing to help. So I killed Jovich for betraying us and I traced his GPS. He was an asshole, but he was a stupid asshole. I killed most of the men who were going to deliver Claire to Davos, but I took one of them hostage.” He glances at me for just a moment before focusing back on his sister. “Wes is Davos’ son.”
Its silent as that revelation settles around us. I still don’t know much about Davos, but he is obviously horrendous to do what he does. If I never hear his name again, it will be too soon.
“Wes? Like—”
“Yes.” Remy agrees. “The man you sat next to at dinner sold Claire like an old car.” He winces, realizing those words could be construed as careless, but they don’t hurt. What hurts is the way Rhea is watching her beliefs of the whole world come crashing down around her.
“But Wes is Tristan Ryan’s cousin. That’s how we met.” She shakes her head, trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense to reasonable people.
“Yes,” Remy nods. “And I don’t think that’s a coincidence that he just wandered back into your life.”
“What?” She laughs now, disbelieving. “You think Tristan boring-as-paint Ryan orchestrated running into me over the summer so that he could hope I had a friend his cousin could kidnap?”
I’m not sure if Remy is going to tell her the most disturbing part of everything that’s happened, the part that will burn the ashes of her shattered innocence. “No,” Remy dismisses that idea. “Claire was never part of the plan. That was Jovich’s doing.”
The night air suddenly feels cold, and I wrap my arms tighter around her. “No, Ray. Claire was never part of the plan.” He swallows, struggling to say the words. “It was supposed to be you.”