42. Pasha
42
“What’s going on?” asks Daphne.
“Nothing.” I pull a folder on top of the paperwork Mak and I were just peering at.
Sofi, however, has no shame. “Paris is going to be a problem if we don’t take her out first,” she explains. “Before your parents circle back around.”
Mak and I glare at our sister, who merely shrugs. “What? She’s your wife. She needs to know. And besides, Daph is my bestie now. I’m always gonna loop her in when it involves bitches she hates.”
Daphne blushes. “I don’t hate people!”
Sofi arches a brow. “You sure? This is Paris we’re talking about. Pasha’s former fuck buddy.”
“Okay. Fine. Maybe I hate her.” She leans into me and squints at the mess of papers on my desk. “So, fill me in. Where are we hiding the body?”
“There’s no ‘we’ in this,” I warn. “If you think I’m?—”
“I think I’m coming,” snarls my wife with a sudden ferocity that actually gives me pause. “I think I don’t even have to ask you a question like that, as a matter of fact. Because I think that you know that I belong there. And I think that you wouldn’t dare tell me otherwise. I think that we’re all going to get in the car right now, I think that we’re going to take a little trip to visit this ‘old friend’ of yours, and I think that you’re not going to say one more word about how it’s safer for me to stay home and twiddle my fucking thumbs. That’s what I think. Am I more or less on the money?”
I blink.
Sofi blinks.
Mak blinks.
Then, with a grimace, I just rest my forehead on the table. Mak, as usually, is happy to provide the color commentary. “You know something, Pasha? I like her.”
Fifteen minutes later, we’re stepping through Paris’s broken door and into her house.
As soon as I see the interior, however, I change my descriptor.
This isn’t a house we’ve just broken into. It’s a fucking temple.
To me.
These walls are covered in paparazzi prints, newspaper articles, candids I never approved or knew of. It’s my face gleaming from every flat surface. And they keep going. It’s not just the office, it’s the hallways and stairway…
And in half of them or more, Paris’s face is pasted or Photoshopped right alongside mine. Me with anonymous dates I barely remember—ballerinas, movie stars, that kind of thing, the kind of women I used to waste my time with—and in each and every one of them, Paris has Frankensteined herself into the image.
I shudder. The level of effort, the amount of time this must have taken…
“You two…” Mak shakes his head and mutters under his breath as he takes in the sight of my face plastered everywhere. “You sure know how to attract the crazies.”
Daphne, for all her fire back in my office, is staying close to my side as we creep through the foyer. Her eyes are wide and horrified. “Holy shit. Pasha…”
“I know.” I grip her hand in mine a bit tighter. “I swear to you, I had no idea.”
Ewing was very open about his increasing instability. It was easy to see him spiral from vindictive to desperate. From rejection to obsession.
But Paris? She may have taken it hard when I moved on, but I couldn’t blame her for it. I did, after all, cross a few professional lines.
This is a whole other thing.
“Fucking hell, Pash. Do you see this?” Sofi holds up a framed print of my face superimposed over some other guy’s body in a tuxedo. In his arms is a woman in a wedding gown, Paris’s face edited over the model’s.
Daphne frowns. “Let me see that.”
When Sofi hands it to her, she takes a closer look. “Interesting.”
Then smashes it over the stair banister.
She doesn’t stop there. One by one, Daphne rips photos of me with Paris off the walls. She shreds and stomps and hurls them in every direction.
“You okay?” I ask my clearly not-okay wife.
“Yup!” She tears another batch of newspapers into tiny bits and tosses them up. “Just redecorating!”
“You know this isn’t important, right?”
Daphne pauses and looks at me, hair mussed, flyaways stuck to her forehead with fresh sweat. “Tell me what you’d do if Conrad’s place was covered by my face on a bikini model’s body.”
I sigh and nod. “I’d burn the place to the ground. Carry on.”
She does exactly that, straying from my side to destroy Paris’ homemade wallpaper.
When I glance over at my siblings, I catch them counting out a wad of cash that Mak hands Sofi. “What?” she asks when I glare at her. “I told you from the start this bitch was crazy. I told you not to hire her, not to fuck her—but did you listen? Nope. So yeah, I placed a bet on how long before she went off the deep end.”
“I just see the good in people,” Mak says with a mournful sigh. “It’s my tragic flaw.”
“We’re here to do a job,” I say. The reminder is more for them than for Daphne, but she rejoins my side when she sees we’re moving deeper into the house. She’s smiling faintly, I notice. Strange how attractive I find her jealousy.
It doesn’t take long for us to find the mad queen of this madhouse.
Paris is sprawled across her couch, one leg draped over the back of it and the other dangling to the floor, a big set of headphones clamped down around her ears. Her sleep shirt is bunched above her waist, pulled over on one side to expose a breast that she squeezes and kneads with one hand.
The other is buried between her legs…
While she watches a press conference I gave early last year on her laptop.
My God. Paris has seriously gone off the deep end. It takes a sick fuck to get off to me discussing Chekhov International’s Q4 financial performance.
Daphne snarls and lunges for Paris. I try to hold her back, but she slips through my fingers. She reaches the couch, plunges her arm over the side, and grabs Paris by a fistful of hair. “That’s enough!”
Paris shrieks in surprise and pain, clawing at her head as Daphne yanks her to the floor. Sofi, ever the instigator, steps up to help. She slaps Paris square across the face before she can even finish her scream.
This ought to be simple. Paris, as crazy as she may be, is a civilian.
But when her dazed eyes land on me, I realize this isn’t going to be simple at all.
The crazy runs even deeper than any of us might’ve guessed.
When she sees me, it’s like everyone else in the room vanishes to her. The tension melts from her body, she sighs with relief and reaches for me. “Pasha! Baby, you’re here!”
Mak mutters, “Shit, man. She’s out of her mind.”
I back away and Paris’s hand falls through empty air. She’s still smiling, though, even as Sofi’s handprint reddens on her face.
“I know why you’re here.” She giggles and pinches her nipples through her shirt. It looks like she hasn’t washed it in a week. “I know what you want, baby. I’m all yours.”
I hold up a hand to stop her. “I just need some answers, Paris. That’s all.”
“Oh, like an oral exam?” She licks her lips, biting the bottom one as her gaze homes in on my crotch. “I love oral…”
“Stay right where you are. How do you?—”
Daphne strides around to stand in front of Paris and folds her arms over her chest. “How do you know my parents?”
“I don’t! I don’t even know you!”
“Funny, since you’re the one who helped Brittany nearly kill me.”
“Pasha?” Paris whines and reaches for me. “Baby, please, help me!”
I study the way her eyes dart around the room before settling on me again. The way she’s clearly not taking care of herself, yet throwing her body at my feet—metaphorically, anyway.
I’ve seen this before. Many, many years ago. Those were some of the darkest moments in my life.
And my mother’s.
“Paris, listen to me.” I gentle my voice, crouching down, though not close enough for her to touch me. “I need you to answer the question.”
Daphne looks at me like I’ve lost my mind. I try to signal to her that I’ve got this; she needs to trust me.
“I need you to help me find the Hamishes,” I continue in a soft croon. “You remember Stewart Hamish, right? And his wife, Ophelia?”
Her face screws up and sours. She starts to shake her head. Tiny motions at first, then more and more, until I start to wonder if her neck can handle the side-to-side thrashing. “No! No, no, no! They promised! They promised and they lied!”
“What did they promise, Paris?”
She points at Daphne with a nail that’s been bitten down to the quick and hisses. “They said they’d take her away. So we could be together, baby. Just you and me.” She bares her teeth at Daphne. “You’re not supposed to be here!”
“What about my baby?” It takes all my self-control to keep my voice calm and even. “What were you going to do with my daughter?”
“Just… just give her to them. They want their kid and her kid and everyone’s kid and I know, I know I said I’d never have any, but if that’s what you want…? If that’s what you want, Pasha, I can give that to you! I can take out my IUD and?—”
“Don’t worry about it, Paris. We’ll figure something out.”
Daphne starts to say, “Pasha?—”
But when I hold up my hand, she falls silent. “Listen, Paris.” I inch closer just so I can soften my voice even more. “I’m so proud of you. Thank you for telling me the truth.”
“Really?” Paris beams at me, tears springing into her eyes. It’s almost heartbreaking.
“Really. Now, I need you to help me a little bit more, okay? And then I’m going to take very good care of you.”
She purrs and blushes, running her fingers through her matted, tangled hair. “Okay.”
“I know you’ve only met the Hamishes briefly. I never let them come to my office directly. Do you remember that?”
“Uh-huh.”
“So tell me, how did they get a hold of you? How did they find you and talk to you?”
She giggles like I’m being ridiculous. “Brennan, silly! Remember? You were all up his ass about that contract for a hot minute. He’s always had my number just in case he finally decided to meet with you.”
I force myself to unclench my fists. Fucking Brennan. “He called you?”
“Uh-huh.” She bites a fingertip. “Well, he called to meet me here. And we talked, and he helped me get a hold of Stewart so we could get everything ironed out. And then we—Wait.”
I frown. “What’s wrong, Paris?”
“Nothing. I just… I’m not sure I should tell you. You’ll get mad.”
I force a smile. “I won’t get mad. Just tell me.”
“Well, nothing’s free, right? Brennan helped me, so I helped him. I had to, he said. Thank God he didn’t last longer than a few minutes.”
A myriad of emotions whirl through me. Fury, followed by something close to compassion. That sick fucking bastard. That absolute fucking monster.
I rise to my feet as my stomach churns. “Thank you, Paris. You were very good. I’m going to make sure you’re very well taken care of.”
My wife and siblings are all stunned into silence as we retreat, leaving Paris on her knees in the middle of the floor. She’s singing softly to herself under her breath. I catch my name in the lyrics more often than I’d like.
My skin crawls.
“Mak,” I order out of the side of my mouth, “use one of your burners and call it in. Make sure she’s given the best room with the best care. Somewhere that will allow us to keep tabs on her.”
He’s already dialing the phone before I finish. “On it.”
Sofi heaves an exasperated sigh and runs her hands over her face. “I hate this. I fucking hate this, Pash. This is too easy.”
“I agree.” Daphne makes a face like she’s swallowing back her own bile. There’s nothing but disgust in her eyes when she looks down at Paris. “She shouldn’t get off so easy.”
“Oh, I agree. And I know she’s not, which is why we’re doing this instead.” I stride over to the dining table and pick up a pile of mail. “Judging by the looks of it, Daddy cut her off. The power company is about to do the same.”
“And the phone company,” Paris blurts suddenly. Her face lights up and she blinks at me. “You’ll fix this though, right? You’ll make it all better? I’ll pay you back…”
I hesitate to answer. Paris’s behavior disgusts me—there’s no denying that.
But so does my contribution to her mental state, shattered as it is. Brennan’s abuse may have been the final straw, but I hammered a fair number of nails into her coffin long before we got here.
I was once a monster. No better than Brennan.
I’m not that man anymore, though.
I’ll never be that man again.