Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Luca
"Don't even think about it," she says, pulling the container closer to her side of the bed. "This is mine."
"I don't want your food," I lean in, "I already ate."
She turns red and she stabs a piece of chicken with her chopstick. "Because I'm not sharing."
I lean back against the headboard and look at the ceiling and say nothing.
Her dress is somewhere on the floor in two pieces and she is wearing my jacket with nothing under it and it hits her mid-thighs.
She is eating Chinese food in my bed with her hair destroyed, her cheeks still flushed and she looks completely unbothered by all of it.
"What do you think my father will do after this?" she asks, without looking up from the container.
I think about Keller watching the photographs surface. His daughter is on her knees, wailing, and his name is attached to the caption. His campaign team should be scrambling. For a man who uses grief as currency watching someone spend it before he can would be a nightmare.
"Leave that to me," I tell her.
I stare at her and I ask. "What was your life like in New York?"
"Are you beginning to care about me?"
I look at her.
"You just asked about my life," she says, by way of explanation.
"I asked a question."
She almost smiles and turns back to her food.
"You know, I killed three people tonight," I say conversationally. "Most people would at least flinch around me after that."
"True." She chews thoughtfully. "But father kills people too."
I look at her.
She glances at me and her eyes catch my expression and she laughs. "Are you surprised? That the brainless rich girl knows that her Daddy dearest kills?"
"I know my father isn't a good man," she says, and the lightness in her voice is doing a job, I can hear it working.
"I know he has done his share of evil." She pokes at the container. "I'm not naive about what he is. I'm just naive about what I am to him, apparently. There's a difference."
"Are you scared of me?" I ask without knowing why. But I know that I want to hear her answer.
"I was scared." She looks at me directly. "I am scared of you. You're terrifying. But you won't kill me. Not yet." She picks up her water. "Probably not ever, if I'm reading things correctly. So the fear is manageable."
She changes the subject.
"Back in New York I work in my father's office," she says.
"Or I did. I have an apartment downtown where I paint when I'm not trying to be useful to people who don't need me to be useful.
" She eats another piece. "I haven't figured out what comes after college.
I thought I'd help my father but that's clearly not my calling. "
"Why do you keep trying?" I ask. "With your father."
She is quiet for a moment.
Then she puts the container down and she turns to look at me and she says, "The same reason I keep letting you do things to me even when you have someone else in your heart." She pauses, "I just want someone to need me."
The room is quiet.
"Do you know the one time I actually felt it?" she says.
"Felt needed?" She looks at her hands. "A random night.
About two years ago. I met a man and he was in trouble and I was terrified, genuinely terrified, but I helped him and for the length of that one night I felt like someone needed me to be there.
" She pauses. "Like if I hadn't been there, something would have gone wrong that couldn't be fixed.
" She looks up at me. "Nobody has needed me like that since. "
I look at her face.
"I know I'm pathetic," she says.
"You're not."
She looks at me.
"You said I was."
"I wasn't thinking straight."
She holds my gaze and then she picks up her chopsticks and goes back to eating and I sit beside her. I think about a parking garage and a bullet and a woman who had not hesitated for a single second. Did she feel like I needed her? Because I did.
"When you let me go," she says, after a while, "I'll go abroad.
Australia maybe. Postgrad course, get a job, find a halfway decent man who might want me around.
" She sips her water. "Or skip the man entirely and do a one-night stand and get a baby.
" She looks at me sideways and her mouth curves.
"You could do me the honors. Donor-wise, we could do it naturally. " Her eyes meet mine.
"You have good bone structure and the green eyes are very—"
She stops and laughs.
I look at her laughing and I look away. I stand up. "Good night," I tell her.
She waves at me with her chopstick, focused back on the container, not watching me go.
Renzo is in the corridor. He looks at me with profound entertainment that he is making absolutely no effort to conceal.
"The whole house heard you and her fucking," he says.
"We need to get her home," I reply. "As soon as Keller reacts, we respond."
Renzo's face turns more serious. "The minute we hear from him we handle it." He pauses and then he puts his hand briefly on my shoulder. "It'll be done soon."
I nod.
He goes down the corridor and I stand there and reach into my pocket for a cigarette and come up empty. I stand there anyway and I lean against the wall.
* * *
"—The Rotterdam consignment needs to clear by Thursday or we pull the entire thing down, don't make me act rashly now."
Renzo appears in the doorway. I hold up one finger and keep the phone to my ear.
He mouths something. I look at him and he mouths it again.
Miss Keller is ill. I end the call. I inhale slowly and set the phone on the desk, I roll my collar and I walk to her room.
She is buried under the sheets with only the top of her head visible, dark hair spread across the pillow, completely still. I go to her and press my hand to her forehead.
She is burning.
"Cold compress," I tell the maid hovering in the doorway.
"And the first aid box. Now."
The maid goes. I sit on the edge of the bed and look at her pale face and the two moles beneath her eye standing out against skin that has lost all its usual color. She stirs slightly at my hand on her forehead but doesn't wake.
The maid returns and I take the box and check her temperature and the number makes me set the thermometer down. Renzo's phone rings in the corridor. I hear him answer it, hear his voice drop into the clipped register he uses for these calls, and then his footsteps approach the doorway.
"I need to handle this," he says quietly.
I don't turn around. "Go."
A pause. "She'll be alright, Luca."
"I know. Go."
His footsteps recede.
I get her medications from the box and I coax her half awake with a hand at her jaw and she opens her eyes to barely slits and looks at me without full recognition.
I tell her to swallow and she does, obedient in unconsciousness. She will never be this obedient when she is fully herself. I give her water. She drinks and her eyes close again.
I sit back in the chair beside the bed and I watch her.
The afternoon moves through the room in long stripes of light across the floor and she breathes, occasionally shifts and I watch.
I tell myself I am here because she is valuable until she isn't and then I stop telling myself things because the chair is close enough to the bed that I can hear her breathe and I find I don't want to move it.
Evening comes and she hasn't woken up properly and I am still in the chair when Renzo appears in the doorway again. He looks at me sitting in the half dark beside her bed and he has the sense not to comment on it.
"Keller conceded," he says quietly. "He's granted access to the database. Full authorization, no time limit." He inhales to deliver it. "He wants his daughter back."
I look at her face, her pale skin, and the dark lashes against her cheek. The slight furrow between her brows even in sleep.
"I'll handle it tomorrow," I tell him.
Renzo nods and goes.
I look at her.
"Time to go home, princess," I say, very quietly, to the room.
She doesn't stir.
* * *
I wake in the darkness and it takes me a moment to understand that I am in her bed, on top of the sheets, still dressed, with a crick in my neck that suggests I have been here for several hours.
I sit up and in the faint night light, I see that she is sitting against the headboard with a glass of water, watching me with careful eyes. She has been awake for a while. The color has come back into her face and she looks tired but present. The vacancy in her eyes from the fever is gone.
"It's night," she says. "You fell asleep in the chair. I didn't want you getting cold." She sips her water. "I was too tired to get Renzo so I just moved you."
I look at her.
"You moved me."
"Well, I pushed you and you fell into bed. Potayto Potahto," she says without apology. "How is your neck?"
I reach up and press my hand to her forehead. The fever has broken, her skin is warm but no longer burning, and I exhale something I hadn't quite realized I was holding.
"I ate too much spice," she says. "I'm fine."
I nod and I put my hands on my knees and I am about to stand and I say, "Your father fulfilled his end of the arrangement."
She goes still.
"You can go tomorrow," I tell her. "I'll have Renzo make the arrangements in the morning."
I start to stand but her hand finds my arm.
I stop.
"You're really letting me go?" she says. Her voice is quiet and has none of its usual armor in it.
I turn to look at her. "I have no use for you now, princess."
The words come out clear. "I got what I wanted."
She looks at me.
The room is very quiet and the light is low. Her dark hair is loose around her face and she looks at me with those blue eyes that have never once done what I expected them to do.
"But I haven't gotten what I want," she says softly.
She leans in and she kisses me. She bites my lower lip, sucking it between hers, opening me up with raw hunger. Her tongue slides against mine, tasting like fever-sweat. At first, I let her, allowing her heat to flood my veins before I push her away.
"You don't understand," I say, voice rough. "I have used you. I have no need for you again."
She sits on the edge of the bed, eyes locked on mine. "I understand."