Chapter 16 #2
She lifts her water glass to her lips, barely wets them, then sets it back down. “I swapped the earrings before her funeral. Nobody noticed. Diamonds out, pearls in. I thought pearls were more humble.” A very small shrug. “For the gate.”
Vesper was at my mother’s funeral? I…I don’t remember that. But would I? I was a little girl. Still in pigtails, clinging to my father, completely unaware he was my mother’s real murderer. I couldn’t even see through my own tears.
“Do you believe in heaven?” I ask.
She pauses again, even longer this time. I fight the urge to roll my eyes.
“I believe in what’s in front of me. I believe in hell. And if there’s a hell, there must be a heaven, wouldn’t you think?”
I laugh. It comes out cracked. “Spoken like a politician, but still a good answer.” I tap my earlobe. “May I?”
“Of course. They’re yours. From what I understand, they were always yours.”
The waiter returns to the table, interrupting us for a millisecond. Without even opening her menu, Vesper orders an omelet, steamed potatoes instead of fried. And crostini on the side with huckleberry jam. I blurt out the breakfast burger because it’s the first thing I remember.
Once the waiter leaves, I pop the earrings in, one at a time. Left, then right. I have to do the second one twice because my hands are a little wobbly and unsure.
It didn’t hurt to get my ears pierced, but it took me until I was fourteen. Long after Mom had passed. Just like she said, the fear of pain is far more unbearable than the pain itself.
I clear my throat, hard, because if I don’t say something snarky and disrespectful in the next four seconds I am going to cry in a public restaurant.
“So, what is this? My inauguration into your cool club?”
“It’s an invitation.” Vesper’s tone cools by a few degrees. “To prove to me that you can be something more than you have been.”
“Ah.” I widen my eyes at her. “You mean elbows off the table?”
“I mean I know things about you, Sylvie. Some corroborated. Some not.” She lets that sit like a threat.
And it works. I certainly feel threatened.
“But I know enough to know that you act first and think later. That is not what PALADIN is. Every person in that compound has a soul, and I intend to keep every one of them intact. We do not operate out of vengeance. Or ego. Or whim. There’s a balance to this world that we are trying to hold while we are still learning what that balance actually is.
” Her hands don’t move. “Which is why every kill, every mission, and every breath goes through me.”
“Bit of a control freak, aren’t you?”
“I carry the guilt for all of us. I pay the consequences for the bad decisions.”
“And who gets the credit? Who gets to celebrate the good decisions?”
“Credit? Celebrate?” She examines the words like a specimen she’s holding up with tweezers. “That’s the kind of statement that tells me you don’t understand what it is we do.”
“Enlighten me, then.”
“I want to welcome you with open arms.” And for one second she almost sounds tired.
“But I need to know you can believe in something larger than your own agenda. Prove that to me, and you have a place at my table.” She taps the top of the table so gently, it doesn’t make a sound.
“Prove it, and you have a home. And my protection.”
Something clicks over behind my eyes, quiet as a lock.
Protection?
Salisbrie is a woman who ordered the deaths of six SEALs and slept fine.
Salisbrie is being handed the Department of Defense.
And there is exactly one person I know she’s afraid of.
The threat that makes Bridget Salisbrie’s voice change pitch.
It’s why she doesn’t go after Callen herself.
It’s why she’s jumping through so many hoops to get her way.
She doesn’t want Vesper to find out who ordered her friend’s death. She doesn’t want Vesper to hunt her.
Suddenly I have more clarity than I’ve ever had before. My way out of this whole mess with Salisbrie, my path toward a real chance with Callen, is the woman sitting across from me, judging the shit out of me.
Vesper could keep Callen breathing.
Vesper could keep me breathing.
It’s so fucking obvious. Why didn’t I think of this before? If I’m with PALADIN, Salisbrie can’t touch me. If I’m with PALADIN, I can keep Callen safe.
I let a beat go by so I don’t look as desperately eager as I am.
“Okay. Whatever it takes.”
“Good, I—”
Her phone buzzes against the tablecloth.
She looks at it, and something in her face closes like a door in a draft. She answers with her eyes on me.
“Vesper.”
She listens. She listens for a long time, without interrupting, but I watch her jaw clench tighter and tighter.
“I understand,” she says. “I do.” A pause.
“It’s unfortunate. But there’s nothing we can do.
” Another pause, longer, and whatever’s said on the other end makes her close her eyes. “Let the judicial system work.”
She hangs up.
She sets the phone face down, adjusts it a quarter inch, and purses her lips. It’s the closest thing to a tantrum I think Vesper has in her.
“What’s wrong?”
At first I think she won’t tell me, but I’ve obviously caught her at a vulnerable moment.
“There was a girl,” Vesper says. “Barely seventeen.”
The fire pops. Across the room, someone orders more champagne. But I’m locked into Vesper’s story, a frenzy of curiosity overcoming me, wondering what could possibly be troubling the Queen B.
“You might have seen it. It’s been on every network for a month.
” Her voice goes very level, and I am realizing that this is what her fury sounds like.
“She was bullied online. For a year. Anonymous account. It wasn’t ordinary cruelty.
It was surgical. It knew things. It knew what she was afraid of, what she’d told her friends in confidence, what her body was doing before she’d worked it out herself.
The bullying took her apart with a scalpel and it did it in public. ”
Oh fuck. I know where this is going. “She killed herself.”
Vesper nods, then adds, “Very unfortunately, she did.”
“Who was the—”
“Her English teacher who was also her guidance counselor.” Vesper’s hands are perfectly still on the tablecloth. “The woman wrote her college recommendation. She stood at the memorial and read a poem.”
I suddenly notice the lilies in the centerpieces. That’s the flower they chose for the vases. Funeral flowers, in a restaurant, and I bet nobody in here has noticed but me.
“The trial ended Thursday. She was acquitted.”
“On what?”
“Free speech.”
I laugh, or cackle. Whatever the sharp sound is, turns two heads at the next table. Free speech always costs something.
“That was the prosecutor. Calling to ask whether PALADIN would take it into our own hands.”
“And you said no.”
“I said no.”
“It’s an injustice.” I lean forward and my elbows go right back on that table. “You can still murder someone with words.”
“Not according to the First Amendment.”
“Fuck the First Amendment.”
The heads turn again. I don’t care. Go clutch your goddamn pearls.
“What are you afraid of?” I ask. “I’ve never once seen you in action, Vesper, but I have a feeling you could handle a high school English teacher.”
Vesper taps one finger against her temple. Twice. “Think. What did I just tell you?”
“You told me—”
“There is a very fine line between victim and aggressor, and it is not always where you’d like it to be.
” She isn’t raising her voice. She’s lowering it, which is worse.
“We do not put people in the ground for revenge. We do not infiltrate civilian affairs and install our own judicial system on top of the one people voted for. We do not fight policy.” Her eyes hold mine.
“Our job is to make certain the right policymakers and world powers keep their seats, and that the corrupt ones meet their graves. Do you understand me?”