Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
Amanda
The champagne the waiter handed me has grown warm, but I keep sipping it anyway because my hands need something to do besides fidget in my lap.
Aldo Basile has been talking for a while. I gave up trying to follow several minutes ago. Partly because he keeps circling the same points, and partly because the room is starting to blur in a way I'm blaming on the heat, the wine, and the exhaustion of the week.
"I'll be honest with you," he says, leaning in like he's letting me in on a secret. "I have never really cared for fashion. Not the way people in this room pretend to. It always seemed like a great deal of noise about fabric."
I laugh because it's polite, not because it's funny.
"My mother, though." He spreads one hand, and the gold ring on his finger catches the lamplight. "She lives for it. The shows, the houses, the names. She is the one who pushed me to put money into the industry. I do it for her. That's what sons do, no?"
"That's sweet," I say.
I want him to understand that I never asked about his mother or his money or his opinion on fashion in the first place, but the part of me still capable of forming complete sentences isn't in charge right now. He’s decided I’m his audience. So I smile and nod. All the cue he needs to keep.
He’s handsome, objectively speaking. The kind of face that probably never heard the word no from anyone with a pulse.
Dark eyes, easy symmetry, a jaw made for cologne ads.
Six months ago, maybe a different version of me would have leaned into this, twirled a piece of hair, let the night unfold however it wanted
"You’re very kind to entertain me," Aldo says. His knee shifts closer to mine. "Most beautiful women have perfected the bored look. You haven’t. You actually listen."
"I'm a professional listener," I say. "It's in my contract."
The corner of his mouth lifts. He likes that, a little too much, in the way some men take one harmless sentence as an invitation you never actually gave.
I glance toward the rest of the room. Francesca is gone.
I don't remember her leaving. The bright crowd from the main hall has thinned to almost nothing. The music is muffled, blurred and distant, like it’s fighting its way through water to reach me.
Something cool slides down the back of my neck that has nothing to do with the open window.
I set the flute on the small table beside me. My fingers miss their mark, the glass wobbling before it steadies. The champagne inside sloshes and then settles a beat late, as if my eyes are a half-second behind my hands.
I press my palms flat against the cool leather of the chair arms and push.
“It was lovely to meet you,” I say, the sentence smooth and steady, unsettlingly steady. My voice, still obedient even as the rest of me betrays itself.
I stand, and the room tilts-not all at once, but gradually, the floor lifting on one side like the deck of a boat, the lamps smearing into long gold ribbons.
The woman in green stretches sideways and then snaps back into place.
My knees buckle, suddenly useless beneath me.
I reach for the chair I just left and miss it by a full hand.
A small, embarrassed sound slips out of me.
The kind you make when you trip on a flat sidewalk and hope no one noticed.
I’m going down. I feel the slow give in every muscle that’s supposed to keep me upright, and what hits me first isn’t fear. It’s embarrassment. Francesca, the buyers. All of them watching me sink to the floor on the biggest night of my career and deciding I can’t handle my champagne.
A hand closes around my arm, catching me under the elbow and at the waist, hauling me back onto my feet before I've finished falling.
"Easy," a voice says low near my ear.
For half a heartbeat I think it's him. I think it's Valentino, that he found me, and relief floods my foggy mind so hard, I nearly cry.
Then I turn my head slowly, fighting the weight of it, and the face above me isn't his.
It's Aldo.
He's smiling down at me with all that easy, practiced warmth, and his eyes are doing something beneath the smile that I can't decipher because the room won't hold still long enough for me to read it.
"Too much champagne, I think. Let me help you. You need air," he murmurs.
"No," I say. Or I try to. My tongue is heavy, and it comes out more like a breath than a word.
"Come," Aldo says gently. "There's a balcony just down the hall. It’s quiet there. You'll feel better."
His hand settles against my spine, and my feet fall into step under its pressure, moving without my permission.
Valentino
“Was there a woman in here?” It’s a ridiculous question considering this is the ladies’ room, but I don't care about looking ridiculous right now. The woman at the vanity doesn't even look up from her phone.
"A blonde in a pink dress," I say again, slower this time. "Tall. She came in here a few minutes ago."
"She left." The woman lifts a tube of lipstick, twists it open, and leans toward the mirror. "Maybe five minutes."
"Grazie," I say, and I'm already turning, already moving back out into the noise.
I pull my phone out and call her.
It rings once, twice, three times, buzzing against my ear while my eyes sweep the room in a slow, methodical pass. No pink. No platinum hair.
Voicemail.
I hang up and call again. My jaw is tight enough to crack a tooth.
This was supposed to be simple. Stay to the side. Scan for the faces we flagged. Track who they speak to and where they move. Observe only. Nothing else.
I came here to blend in, stay out of the way, watch the room, keep my hands to myself. The only complication had been driving Amanda here in that dress with no back.
Her spine. That was the problem. At the end of the night I’d take her back to her hotel and try not to think about it again.
Now she isn't picking up her phone.
I’m trying to convince myself it means nothing. Not everything means disaster. Until it does.
She’s doing it on purpose. That's possible. She's annoyed with me, and maybe she ducked out for ten minutes to make me sweat. Maybe she's standing on a terrace somewhere with a glass of prosecco, smiling at her phone, watching it ring, letting me suffer. She was furious when I told her six minutes.
Except she's never done that. Not once.
I think about it as I cross the floor, weaving past a waiter with a tray.
I've known this girl since she was fifteen years old. A loud, bright thing, following Vittoria around the compound like a shadow that talked too much.
And she listens. She never says no and never interrupts.
She says yes to everyone and everything.
Francesca Renaud stands near the bar across the room with a flute of champagne in her hand and a man on either side of her, both of them laughing at something she's said. She looks up when I approach, and her mouth curves into a smile that's all teeth and welcome.
"There's our handsome stranger," she says. "I don't believe we've met."
"I'm with Amanda White," I say. "Have you seen her?"
The two men drift off, the way people do when they know they’ve been reduced to background. Francesca takes a slow sip of her champagne and tilts her head, studying me over the rim of the glass.
"Amanda." She pauses on the name. "Such a lovely girl. So eager." She lowers the flute and lets her gaze move over me—head, chest, hands—the same appraisal a buyer gives merchandise she's considering. "No, I don’t think I’ve seen her in a while. Why? Has she misplaced you?"
"When did you last see her?"
"You know, you don't look like a man who works in fashion." She steps closer, her perfume heavy in the air. One manicured finger touches the lapel of my jacket. "You look like a man who works in something far more interesting. Tell me, what does Amanda need with someone like you?"
I look at her hand on my lapel until she takes it back.
"Excuse me," I say.
I turn and walk away before she can answer. I move along the edge of the floor until I’m near the bar, where Elio stands with the three businessmen. I stop a few feet behind him and face the room, just another man watching the crowd, not speaking.
"Don't turn around," I say, low, under the music. "Keep your eyes on them."
To his credit, he doesn't turn. He lifts his glass and nods at something one of the men says, and only the slightest stillness in his shoulders tells me he's heard me.
"Amanda's not picking up her phone," I say.
"She went to the bathroom. That was ten minutes ago.
Maybe more. Go pretend you're looking for the bathroom.
Walk every corridor on the left side of this floor.
Every door that isn't locked, you open it.
You find her, you don't make noise. You call me. Understand?"
Elio sets his glass down on the bar and nods.
Amanda
The cold floor meets my cheek, but I don’t remember falling. People don’t fall in slow motion, do they? But that’s how it felt. Like the world eased me down instead of letting me drop.
Hands are on me, turning me over.
I try to lift my arm. It rises an inch, then drops like dead weight, no longer mine to command. My mouth opens. I can find the word stop in my throat but I can't push it out, can't make my tongue shape it, while the ceiling spins above me in blurred circles of lamplight
A face leans into the light. Aldo.
"Hello there," he says, like I've kept him waiting.
A hand grips my jaw, fingers digging into the soft place under my cheekbone, turning my head one way, then the other, checking me like merchandise.
I can't fight it. My neck goes slack and follows where the hand pulls, and some part of me is screaming that my body has been taken from me, handed over to someone else while I watch from a distance.
Then comes a slap, sharp and clean across my cheek, cutting through the fog. My eyes water. A sound escapes me that isn't quite a word.
Someone speaks in Italian. I don't understand the words, only the tone, the laugh underneath. Another voice answers. A flash of white light, harsh and sudden. They're holding a phone above me, angling the camera, murmuring to each other about how to frame the shot.
I try to turn my face away. The hand on my jaw won't let me, holding me still while they record.
Spit hits my cheek and slides toward my ear and I can't wipe it away.
A mouth covers mine, wet with cigarettes and wine, and I gag against it, my stomach heaving, but nothing comes.
My body too slow even to purge itself. His tongue pushes in, and I make a noise but it dies in his mouth.
He pulls back. Wipes his lip with his thumb like I'm the one who left something on him.
I want my mother. The thought comes from nowhere and it's so pathetic and so true as hot tears run sideways into my hair. I want someone who knows my name to walk through that door. I'd settle for anyone, even for a stranger.
Aldo crouches close and tucks a piece of my hair back from my face. Gentle. That's the worst part-that he can touch me like this, like he cares, after what he just witnesses.
"Listen to me, bella," he says softly, like he's sharing a secret.
"This is nothing. A reminder. Do you understand?
" I don't, but I can't make a sound. "When you are asked to do a job," he says, "you do the job.
You don't ask about the girls. You don't ask about bruises.
You don't look at things that are not yours to look at.
" He smiles-the same warm smile from the party, the one that made me feel seen, chosen.
"You do the job they pay you to do. You go home. Easy."
His thumb strokes my cheekbone, right over the place the slap landed.
"You're a smart girl. I knew it the second I saw you across the room.
So smart." He leans in, and his breath is hot against the side of my face.
"But you got loud. And loud girls—" he pauses, his head tilting as he studies me, "—loud girls wake up remembering why they should have stayed quiet.
" He drags his tongue up the shell of my ear slowly.
My whole body wants to revolt. The nausea rolls up from my gut, acid in my throat—good, let it come, let it cover them—but the drug keeps even that from me, keeps everything locked down, and leaves me trapped in a body that won't obey.
Tears keep coming. I'm still here, aware, screaming, and my body won't obey.