34. Alexei #2
“Unlikely to be a bad shot, then.”
“Yes.” There’s no point in lying to him. “But they were also aiming from the water, under pressure. That doesn’t make for a good shot.”
“Jack said there was a sniper onshore,” Benny says slowly. “Snipers use high-powered rifles and big rounds. I watch movies,” he says, glancing at me. “What if it was the sniper who hit him?”
Since the same thought has run through my mind countless times, I swallow another wave of nausea. “The sniper would have been firing from two miles away, amid chaos, at a moving target on a yacht. It’s extremely unlikely it was a sniper’s round that hit him.”
Which hasn’t stopped me from imagining it a hundred times. I didn’t miss the careful way Jack described Lars being shot. Phrases like must have and the men think that are what people say when they really don’t fucking know.
Not that I wanted any more specifics.
I knew from one look at Jack’s face that whatever kind of shot hit Lars, the damage was fucking bad.
“It’s fucking bad, isn’t it.” Benny reads my mind with Lars-like accuracy.
“Yeah.” I lean back against the plastic chair and stare at the ceiling. “Yeah, Benny. It’s fucking bad.”
He nods gravely. “Well, there’s no point in both of us waiting around here for bad news. Make sure they know they have to tell me what’s going on, then you can fuck off. Go and shoot whoever did this. Oh, come on,” he snaps. “You know you won’t relax until you’ve killed something.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” I glare at him. “Not until I know what is happening.”
“The nurse told Jack the surgery will likely go for hours.”
“So we’ll wait for hours.”
“No.” Benny shakes his head with quiet certainty. “No offense, Alexei, but I’m not sure I can sit in the same room as you for that long without saying something I’ll regret.”
I tense. “If you have something to say, then fucking say it.”
He inhales sharply, fists clenched. “I doubt there’s anything I could say that would come close to whatever sorry bullshit you’re busy telling yourself.”
“Look.” I lean forward, clasping my hands in a conscious effort to stay calm. “We both know this is my fault. And we’re going to be here for a while. So whatever is on your mind, now’s the time.”
Benny stares at me so long without speaking that I begin to feel uncomfortable, and I’m a man who mastered silence a long time ago. When he finally does speak, it’s far from what I expect.
“The first night Lars and I were together,” he says slowly, “was in Paris, after you blew up a city block, then disappeared. Not that I knew about any of that at the time.” He half smiles.
“One minute I was in a Paris nightclub, flirting with a hot, hilarious, sexy-as-fuck tech genius who couldn’t wait to get me back to his penthouse for a wild night of debauchery.
The next, I woke up in his bed—with no memory other than a vague recollection of drinking cocktails in the Jacuzzi with Lourdes—to find he’d turned into an intense stranger, wired tighter than a control freak who’d just lost the remote. ”
“Yeah.” Even amid the hellscape of our current circumstances, I can’t help being amused by the picture he paints. “I’ve met that guy a time or two myself.”
“The mind-bending sex,” Benny continues, “was somewhat undermined when I eventually worked out that he and Mickey had not only fed Lourdes and me drug-infused cocktails, but that while we’d been passed out, they’d been playing high-tech war games to cover your escape from the country.”
“Definitely not your run-of-the-mill meet-cute.”
“No shit,” he says feelingly. “And as someone who grew up surrounded by Saudi oil money and Olympic-level debauchery, it should have been enough to send me running hard in the opposite direction. Instead, when a car turned up at my London apartment a few weeks later with an invitation to join Lars on his yacht in Greece, I found myself saying yes, even though I fucking knew I should tell him to piss off.”
I nod. “Been there too, more than once.”
“Then Ofelia called.” He goes on like I hadn’t spoken.
“Right in the middle of the party. I can still remember it, because when Lars first answered, I felt really guilty that I hadn’t told her I was there.
Problem was that Lourdes was also on the yacht, with Mickey, and we all knew Ofelia would go stratospheric if she found out.
We were all having a wild time, and then suddenly Ofelia called Lars, and just like that, Mr. Control Freak was all the way back.
” He shakes his head, his smile fading. “I’m not sure what was worse at the time.
Keeping secrets from my best friend—or the sudden, horrible suspicion that Lars was in love with her. ”
What the fuck? My head jerks up in shock.
“It made sense.” Benny shoots me a sideways look.
“Lars never stopped asking Lourdes and me about Ofelia. At first I thought it was sweet, how much he cared. Then I noticed that he never asked about her in front of Mickey. After that, I began to notice the effect that talking about Ofelia had on him. Her name was like a magic spell that could work either way. Sometimes, after we’d talked about her, he’d become a manic, pill-popping fucking machine who couldn’t get enough of me.
Other times, he’d withdraw completely, working late into the night and downing Red Bull like a start-up founder before launch. ”
The worst of it is that I’ve seen Lars react exactly like that.
“Then I started to remember bits and pieces from the past. Some were stories Ofelia had mentioned. Others, I’d actually witnessed myself—like how happy Lars was when he turned up at Ofelia’s twenty-first, then how he wound up hitting you after you kissed her.
One of the waiters saw it,” he explains, when he sees my face.
“Then there was that time years ago, when Lars took Ofelia to Zinaida’s burlesque club in London.
When Ofelia told us that story, she just talked about how you turned up and caused a mad scene.
But I started to wonder why it was that Lars had taken her there in the first place.
And then I started to wonder if the only reason he’d become so close to Mickey—and to us—was so he could get close to her.
“It didn’t help that he’d made it extremely clear that his thing with me was strictly casual.
” Benny smiles wryly. “As far as red flags go, he might as well have had one waving over his head that read emotionally unavailable. Either way, I’m ashamed to admit that the more I fell for him, the more I began to resent Ofelia and the hold she seemed to have over him.
” He gives me a rather acid look. “Especially since I knew she was completely obsessed with your equally unavailable ass.”
I stare at him, my mind whirling. How the fuck did I miss all of this?
I know that Lars sleeps with women as well as men. The truth is that I’ve never given much thought to anyone he sleeps with, male or female, because, frankly, none of them ever last.
But when I think back now, Benny’s right. The only times I’ve ever seen Lars truly lose his shit over anyone, it’s been Ofelia. The night he took her to Zinaida’s club, he was so pissed off when I turned up that I genuinely thought he might hit me. The night of her twenty-first, he actually did.
I’ve always put his anger down to Ofelia being Mickey’s sister, and that Lars knows I’m an emotional basket case who’ll likely hurt her.
Never once has it occurred to me that he might have his own reasons for wanting me to back off.
“Then Ofelia was kidnapped.” Benny stares hollowly at the opposite wall.
“I was on the yacht when you called Lars to tell him what had happened, and that Roman and Darya knew about your relationship. Lars was so quiet when he told me, it was almost like he was shell-shocked. He stared at me like I wasn’t there and said: ‘They’ve told her parents. That’s it. It’s over.’
“It was ten in the morning and he had a massive project due, but he opened a bottle of Akvavit and sunk half of it in one go.”
He grimaces. “I couldn’t handle it, I guess. So instead of just shutting the fuck up, like I knew I should, I twisted the knife and said it must be hard to watch his first love getting married.”
Jesus. “Harsh.”
Benny gives a choked laugh. “He didn’t even try to deny it. Only when he spoke, I realized I’d also had it completely wrong.” He looks up, and the pain in his eyes hits me like a dark storm. “Lars said, ‘If she ever hurts him, I’ll fucking kill her with my bare hands.’”
At first I think I’ve misheard him. Then, as the truth slowly settles in, sadness and guilt twist into a hard ball inside me, and just like that, I can barely breathe again.
Only this time the room isn’t spinning, and I don’t feel sick.
This time, I can’t breathe because I’m afraid that if I do, I’ll start crying like a fucking child. And if I start, I don’t think I’m ever going to be able to stop.
“It wasn’t Ofelia that he’s been in love with all this time,” Benny is saying. His voice seems to come from a long distance. “It was you. It has always been you.”
I hear him, but only barely.
I’m thirteen years old in boarding school, and Lars and I are in my single bed, coding after lights out. Suddenly I feel him go hard against my leg. When I turn to look at him, his eyes are wide with equal parts horror and longing.
“Sorry,” he whispers when he sees my face, mortification washing over his own.
A strange, intense sense of protectiveness rushes over me. I put an arm around his thin shoulders and hug him close. “It’s okay.”
“Everything suddenly made sense,” Benny says. “The manic moods. Lars’s obsession with Ofelia. The way he’d drop everything, no matter what was going on, the moment you called. I even thought that maybe you’d . . . been together, at some stage.”
I stare at the floor, still unable to speak, my head rushing with memories.