Money Shot (26 page)

She laughed but she wasn’t amused. She didn’t sound amused either, judging from the wince in Rush’s eyes. “So when he asked me out, of course I went. Because I wanted him. Wanted him in the worst way. It was like a physical hunger, this want. This love. I craved him, you know? It was like I’d die if I couldn’t have him. Which made it relatively easy to overlook a few troubling facts.”

“Like?”

“Oh, like his insistence on keeping our love a secret. We wouldn’t want to hurt Marisol’s feelings, would we? Like the fact that, when we talked, it was all about Marisol. But hey, he had to heal, didn’t he? He needed closure, and my hard-hearted sister wouldn’t even speak to him. So I talked to him instead. About her. Her schedule, her friends. Her dates. Was she seeing anybody? Was it serious? I told him everything he wanted to know, right down to the minute. And when he turned up in the school parking lot the morning before our prom with his service revolver and an ultimatum for Marisol, I told myself I was as stunned as anybody.”

Nausea quivered in her stomach as that day came back to her in the vivid Technicolor of her dreams. “Was I really stunned? I don’t remember anymore. You want to know what I do remember, though? I remember the way the heat radiated up off the parking lot. I remember the way Marisol rolled her eyes and told him to get lost. I remember the way she looked at me, with pity and compassion and understanding.
Understanding
, Rush. Can you imagine? She should have been angry at me. Furious. Here she’d given an unbalanced stalker the old heave-ho and I, in my infinite selfishness, had brought him right back into our lives. But she wasn’t pissed. No, she
understood
. She understood that I was just that desperate, just that pitiful, that I’d not only want my sister’s leftovers, but I’d yearn for them. I’d crave them. Sell my soul for them.”

She huffed out a disgusted laugh. “I was in love. In deep. Beyond reason, for sure. But it was pretty obvious by then that the feeling wasn’t mutual. Marisol was the Garden of Eden, and Ridge wasn’t about to let himself get kicked out. He swore up and down he just wanted to talk, but Marisol, she was a smart cookie. She didn’t chat with angry, armed men. So of course Ridge handed over the gun.”

“To Marisol?”

“To me.” She stretched her lips in a grotesque parody of a smile. “The neutral third party.”

“Shit.”

“Tell me about it. Because then it was in my hands, his service revolver. I’d never held a gun before. It was heavier than I’d imagined.”

“They always are.” Rush brushed a lock of hair away from her sticky cheek.

“After that it was the usual.” She waved an airy hand. “It was all ‘I love you, Marisol. You’re mine. I won’t let you leave me. We belong together. Forever. And if this is the only way, then fine.’”

“He had a clutch piece,” Rush said. “Ankle holster?”

“It’s a classic for a reason.” She shook her head. “But I had a gun, too. I should have shot him. It should have been automatic. And I tried to, Rush. I really tried. At least I think I did.” Nausea crawled up her throat, thick and suffocating as memory. “But the gun was so heavy, and I didn’t know how the safety worked, and he was so fast. He’d shot her before I could even point it at him.”

“Maria,” he said, his voice rich with pain and pity. “God, you can’t—”

She cut him off. She didn’t want his pain or his pity. She just wanted him to know.

“Then he asked me to shoot him.”

Rush didn’t say anything, only held her cold hands in his warm ones, his eyes steady and patient as he waited for the rest. So she gave it to him.

“HE CRIED and asked me to kill him. And I’m standing there,” she said, “with my ears ringing and my vision doing that broken filmstrip thing. My sister’s crumpled on the pavement like an old doll and I was trying—Christ, I was trying to pull the trigger. But I was too slow.”

“He shot himself.” It wasn’t a question.

“That’s what they tell me. I didn’t see that part myself because I’d passed out. That’s what I do when I try to pull the trigger on another living being.” She laughed, a jagged, bloody noise. “Even, apparently, a living being who’s just murdered my own twin sister. My mother’s never forgiven me for not blowing his ass to kingdom come when he asked me to. It was the least I could do, in her opinion.”

“She would have put that on your conscience?” he asked quietly. “Taking a human life?”

“People do a lot of horrible stuff in the grip of passion.” Maria shrugged. “My passion just happens to be aroused by exactly the wrong things.”

Understanding flooded those cool gray eyes. “A flaw you’ve spent your life trying to erase.”

She spread her hands. “It’s a goal.”

“You were a child, Maria. A teenage girl. You made a mistake, a horrible one, but—”

“But nothing. Marisol’s dead.”

“Yeah, she is. And that’s a shame. I’m so sorry for your loss.” His quiet words thudded into her, both painful and beautiful. Her loss. Nobody ever talked about
her
loss. Her guilt, sure. That had been covered, ad nauseam. But her loss? No. It had always been her mother’s loss, her family’s loss, the world’s loss. But suddenly it was her loss, too. Her tremendous, profound, world-altering loss, and she ached for her twin the way she’d ache for her right arm if it suddenly went missing.

“But, Maria?” Rush leaned forward, pinned her with those sharp, uncompromising eyes. “It’s not—”

“—my fault?” She squeezed his hands, so strong and warm around hers, and smiled, though it was a little shaky. “Please don’t forgive me, Rush. This isn’t confession, and I’m not telling you any of this in the hopes that you’ll grant me absolution. I’m telling you this so you’ll understand why I can’t love you.” She shook her head hard. “No. Honesty. This has to be honest.” She forced herself to meet his eyes. “I could totally love you. I want to love you. God, in the worst way. But I won’t do it.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’m dangerous when I love, Rush.” She said it softly, which didn’t do a damn thing to diminish the slicing pain of having to say it. “Don’t you see? I don’t have any checks, any controls. I love too much, too hard and too unwisely. It already cost me my twin. I can’t let it cost me anything—anybody—else. Particularly not you.”

“I wasn’t going to say it wasn’t your fault.”

She blinked at him. “What?”

“Earlier. When I said ‘it wasn’t’
—
and you cut me off to refuse my forgiveness? I wasn’t going to offer it. I wasn’t going to let you off the hook.”

He still had her hand between his, and she left it there while she stared at him, dumbfounded.

“After last night, after what I told you about myself, did you really think I wouldn’t understand? Of course you didn’t
actually
kill your sister, but there’s fault and there’s fault. It’s not what you did but what you found inside yourself. There’s some deep, scary, uncontrollable passion in there. And you’re right to be wary of that. Believe me, I know what it is to live with some dangerous shit inside you. Taking responsibility for that isn’t easy and you had to learn way too young about the consequences of being thoughtless and impulsive. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about that. But you have to
live
with those consequences, Maria. There’s no undoing the mistake.”

It took a few tries to find her voice. “I’m not trying to undo—”

“Of course you are. You’re not mourning Marisol; you’re trying to
be
her. As if straightening your hair, dressing to the nines and earning that badge she wanted so bad is going to ease your mother’s pain or your guilt.” He smoothed his hand over the smooth fall of her hair. “This is pretty, Maria, but it doesn’t help. You’re not looking at your problem. You’re trying to pretend it doesn’t exist. And you’re not going to solve it if you won’t look at it.”

She gaped at him, her ears ringing from the brutal truth of his words. Finally she cleared her throat. “You seriously weren’t going to forgive me?”

“Nope. I’m the honesty police.” He gave her a crooked smile. “Forgiveness is your department.”

 

RUSH STOOD against Einar’s counter the next morning and watched as Maria searched, with meticulous care, every drawer and cupboard in his cousin’s kitchen. She applied the same professional thoroughness to the tiny bedrooms, then the minuscule bathroom and finally the sitting room. She even inspected the chicken coop—what was left of it—and the slaughter shed. Then she came back to the kitchen, her lips tight, her brows pinched.

“No luck?”

“No.” She squinted out the window toward a patch of frigid blue sky. “I was hoping to stay low profile on this, but I’m going to need a warrant to search the plane. I’ll make some calls this afternoon.” Her eyes snapped back to his, dark and troubled. “But first I want to go back to the Stone Altar.”

“Why?”

“I’m thinking about installing motion-sensitive surveillance equipment.”

“You have that kind of stuff handy?”

“Of course not. But I could have some sent up.”

“I commend the outside-the-box thinking, Maria, but I’m not sure it’d be worth the effort. Even if you managed to drill a hole in the frozen wall big enough to stash a camera, this kind of cold is hell on batteries. They wouldn’t last six hours.”

“I know.” She sighed. “But I need to search the mine more thoroughly anyway. I might as well check out surveillance possibilities while I’m there.”

“What are you searching for?”

“Cash. If there’s a stash there, I want to take it into custody before Einar’s back on-island.”

“How will you connect supernotes in the mine to Einar, though? They could belong to anybody.”

“Yarrow, for example?” She blew out a frustrated breath and the curls on her forehead danced. Rush grinned at them in spite of himself. Maybe Einar was in some deep shit, but Maria had kept her promise. She was flying her curly-headed freak flag this morning, and he loved it.

“I stand by my logic,” he said now. “Yarrow’s the one with the connections to move supernotes. And you yourself explained how exactly she’s motivated to hurt Lila by screwing around with black magic. So why aren’t you looking at her?”

“I am,” Maria said. “As a victim, though, not a criminal.”

“A victim?” Rush stared. Yarrow was a tough kid, all hard eyes and scathing words. He couldn’t imagine her being taken at any game she chose to play. “A victim of what?”

She hesitated. “Of who.”

“What?”

“A victim of
who
, not what.”

Rush’s brain did a few confused circles, then his mouth dropped open. Oh God. First smuggling counterfeits, then black magic, now she wanted to accuse Einar of—He broke off, unwilling to follow the logic through even inside his own head. That would make it too ugly. Too real.

“Sexual abuse.” Maria supplied the conclusion grimly but without hesitation. “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking.”

“
Why?
Why on earth would you think that?”

“I can’t explain it. I just know it when I see it.”

“See what? Okay, Yarrow has a crush on him, but so do half the girls on the ski team. So what?”

“A crush? You think she has a crush? Jesus, Rush, she’s in love. Completely, irrationally, worshipfully in love. And I think Einar is taking advantage of that. Of her.” Her eyes were dark, direct and full of pained regret. “I don’t take any joy in pursuing this,” she said quietly. “But Yarrow’s an innocent, if troubled, child. We protect her safety before we protect Einar’s feelings.”

Rush shook his head, though not in denial as much as to impose order on the crazy, disjointed thoughts tumbling around in there. “Maria, come on. I know Einar. I’ve known him his whole life. He couldn’t—”

“Of course he could,” she said. “Even if he’s not sleeping with her, he could be using her feelings to manipulate her into any number of illegal acts, up to and including moving supernotes. It happens all the time.” He opened his mouth to refute this blanket condemnation of humanity, but she cut him off. “
All the time
, Rush.”

He shut his mouth and looked at her. At the pain in her face, the fierce determination to protect an innocent, a keening drive to punish the guilty. And suddenly he understood.

“Maria,” he said, his stomach churning with echoes of her experience with misguided love. “It doesn’t happen to everybody just because it happened to you.”

Hurt moved through her eyes, then they went shuttered and blank. “I’m not talking about me.”

“I am.” He wanted to move toward her, take her into his arms and ease away the stiff unhappiness in those long, pretty limbs, but he knew she wouldn’t allow him that pleasure. Wouldn’t allow herself the comfort. “Calloway was a weak, cowardly bastard who did the world a favor when he blew his own head off. I can’t even tell you how sorry I am that he was able to damage you and your family so much.” He did reach out then, took one of her wooden hands. “But you have to admit that an experience like the one you had is formative.”

“Formative?”

“It’s the lens through which you see the world.” He spoke reluctantly but honesty compelled him, the way instinct compelled her. “I’m not saying you’re necessarily wrong about Einar and Yarrow, but I do think you need to be aware of your bias before you take action here.”

“My bias.” A vast ocean of pain uncurled in her eyes, pulling him into the cold, swirling depths. “You think I don’t recognize my
bias
?” She shook her head, but slowly. As if it were unthinkably heavy and caused her unbearable pain. “My bias is my gift, Rush. I earned it; I may as well use it. Isn’t that what you said yesterday?”

“I—” He snapped his mouth shut. “Did I?”

“I only recognize the trouble Yarrow’s in because I survived it myself. And what she feels, what radiates off her whenever she’s anywhere near Einar? It’s no crush. It may have started that way, but the innocence has been perverted into something dark and greedy and ugly. And that doesn’t happen by itself. That kind of twisting takes guidance. Encouragement. Help.”