Masquerade

by Lisa Marie Rice

  He gave a sigh that came from deep in his chest. He was drowning in student debt.

  This was like a dream come true. Cal smiled, opened his eyes — and froze.

  Anya’s lovely face was utterly blank. Not warm and welcoming, not happy for him, not anything. Just blank and … cold?

  What the fuck?

  “Anya, honey, I —” But he didn’t know what to say. Because all of a sudden, he wasn’t touching her anymore and he hadn’t moved. She had. She’d moved … away from him.

  And, oh fuck, she was out of bed, bending to pick up her clothes on the floor.

  What had he said? Had he thought he’d told her about Stanford but instead something else had come out of his mouth? Had he had a stroke or been struck by one of those weird syndromes where only profanities came out of his mouth?

  Fuck, no.

  He remembered precisely what he’d said. I got it. Which was supposed to be her cue to cry out with joy and hug him and maybe he’d get another round of sex before asking her to marry him.

  That was the way it was supposed to go. So what was happening right now? Something bad was happening, that was what. And he was powerless to stop it.

  His muscles were paralyzed as he watched her pick up her dainty, lacy underwear from the floor. She always dressed simply. Bra, underpants, sweater, yoga pants, socks, boots and finally parka.

  Cal was too dumbfounded to stop her, ask what she was doing. That was pointless anyway because it wasn’t hard to figure out what she was doing. She was leaving. Instead of spending the night the way he’d hoped, she was going home.

  He had just enough money left on his card to order pizzas in and the plan was to snuggle up with her and watch some pirated movie on his ancient laptop. It hadn’t even occurred to him that that was not the way he was going to be spending his evening, the way he’d spent so many evenings. With her.

  But she wasn’t staying.

  As she laced her boots he shook off the frozen spell he was under.

  “What are you doing?” His voice croaked, cracked.

  “Seems clear what I’m doing.” Her own voice was cool, controlled.

  “You’re leaving?” The idea was still so strange he had to hear it from her mouth.

  “That’s right, ace. I’m leaving.” She zipped up her parka, flipped up the hood and turned to face him. She was like ice. It was warm in his room but a chill emanated from her.

  It was so unfair that she was still so beautiful, even somehow angry at him. The hood of the parka was lined with dark fake fur that looked like the real thing. It framed her face like that of a princess in a fairy tale, the kind where the princess wandered into the dark forest and made the big bad wolf fall in love with her.

  Her beautiful face was closed to him, eyes like shards of ice.

  What the fuck? What was happening?

  He was getting screwed, is what was happening to him. And not in a good way. A spurt of anger flashed and he repressed it immediately. He’d never gotten angry at Anya, ever. And he wasn’t going to start now. He didn’t want to start now.

  But … what the fuck?

  After staring at him coldly for a long moment, Anya turned on her heel and walked to the door. Opened it. Walked out.

  Hell.

  Cal stared at the door stupidly. His muscles felt slow, his brain felt mired in mud. He couldn’t react. He could barely breathe.

  What just happened? Was there a pod in the lavish wine cellars of her father’s mansion, eating the real Anya after extruding a fake alien? No, that had been the real Anya he’d made love to. Her skin, the sounds she made, the way she clutched at him … those were all real.

  Loving Anya was the best thing that ever happened to him. She loved him right back, he was sure of it. They were young but neither of them were dummies. They’d lucked into true love at a young age but they both realized what they had. It was rare and precious and needed protecting.

  He loved her and she loved him. Or, up until five minutes ago, she’d loved him. Then something … changed.

  Misery was setting in, a dark cloud of it rising like some dank fog from the nether regions of the earth. From caves and crevices where dark creatures dwelled. His head ached. His bones ached.

  Too late, he realized he should be chasing her. Cal moved forward, but slowly and painfully, like he’d just taken a bad beating at the dojo. He was good in the dojo, it had been years since anyone had been able to hurt him. But this felt like he’d been beaten to within an inch of his life.

  He’d opened his door and was walking out before he realized that he was buck naked. Much as he wanted to, he couldn’t chase her like this. They’d arrest him. So he went back in, pulled up his jeans over his hips, jerked on his shirt without buttoning it and jammed his sockless feet into his ancient running shoes.

  He limped down the stairs as if both legs had been broken. Something in him was broken. He threw open the front door of his apartment building and stared out in dismay. As usual, the light over the door and every other street light was out. He never let Anya walk alone after dark in his area. The fact that she had … he couldn’t go there. The idea that she’d rather court danger than stay with him was so painful he batted the thought away instantly.

  It was snowing hard. Not pretty snowflakes gently settling on the cracked ground, but frozen rain flooding from the sky. He could see her boot prints but they disappeared two feet from the door. Right was a long slog to the subway, left was a bus stop. But she’d have to change three buses to get home. She usually took the subway. But never alone after dark, ever.

  Her boot prints went to the right. She’d opted for the subway, which — damn it! — was not safe. Neither the streets to get there nor the station itself.

  He took off running. He was a martial artist, not a track star. Cal was powerful, but not a runner. Still, he made good time, following her footsteps until he couldn’t any more, the thick falling snow smudging them out.

  But he knew the way to the subway and he ran as fast as he could.

  She wasn’t there. Cal frantically searched the filthy, graffiti-painted station. There were a couple of drug addicts, an ancient alcoholic preaching the end of the world and some tired workers.

  Cal stared at the dirty station through eyes that stung, one hand braced against the wall as if he would fall down any second as he anxiously screened every passenger. Even when the train clanked in and came to a screeching stop, he studied everyone who boarded and stalked up and down the platform, peering into every car. On the crazy chance that she’d … what? Run two miles to the previous station and gotten on there?

  Well clearly she hadn’t headed for the subway. Maybe she’d doubled back. Probably she’d called a cab. He hadn’t even thought of that, because cabs never entered into his calculations. He could probably build a rocket to fly him to the moon before he could cab it everywhere.

  Finally, he trudged up the stairs and out into the freezing cold. Fishing his cell out of his jeans, he thumbed her number. It was the first on his contacts list. The call went to voice mail.

  The call went to voice mail all night. He must have called a hundred times but he never left a message, not trusting his voice.

  The next day he called, then went to her apartment. Her father had bought her a pretty little studio apartment in a nice part of town. He stood at the front door ringing her bell for an hour until the super came out and chased him away.

  The super’s name was Mac, or that was what Cal called him. He was Polish and his name had enough consonants to sound like a sneeze. Cal and Mac were friends. Cal had helped him with building repairs a lot of times. But Mac wouldn’t look him in the eye and pretended that his English had deserted him.

  Cal called the mansion, though the idea of accidentally catching Mr. Voronov scared him. No danger of that, though. The housekeeper always answered, assuring him in icy tones that Miss Anya was not there, no she didn’t know where Miss Anya was or when Miss Anya was coming back and by the way do
n’t bother calling again.

  He sent emails, pouring out his heart. She couldn’t hear the tears in his voice in an email. But the emails remained unopened and never answered. Three days later, when he called her cell he got an announcement that the number was no longer in use.

  He lost ten pounds that first week and missed all his classes. When he almost missed the deadline for accepting the job with Benson Labs, Cal knew that his future was on the line.

  He could obsess over Anya and mourn her or he could get his act together and move forward.

  He faxed his acceptance and bought the ticket to San Francisco with the last of the money in his bank account

  Ten days after Anya walked out on him, on a bitterly cold, sleety day, Cal packed his few belongings and flew out West, toward his future.

  Without Anya.

  Venice, Italy

  Palazzo Maltese

  Mardi Gras

  Ten years later

  There was a woman dressed like that weird Star Wars queen, whatshername? Anakin Skywalker’s wife. Amygdala? No that was a part of the brain. Amidala, that was it.

  Though maybe Amygdala wasn’t off the mark, since it was the part of the brain that governed lust and the lady at the masked ball was definitely making eyes at him. She had this enormous headdress, kabuki white makeup and a huge, red velvet cape that was open just enough to show her in a near transparent lace body stocking. She was holding a flute of champagne like everyone else and sipped from it without taking her eyes from his.

  Then she blew him a kiss from overblown lips. Those lips were amazing, didn’t even pretend to be natural, but promised a pretty decent blow job.

  Nope, not interested.

  Cal turned his back and looked out over the ballroom of Palazzo Maltese, where a thousand revelers were getting drunk and partying hard. A deluxe masked ball to celebrate the successful negotiation of the Mediterranean Accords, a multilateral agreement years in the making to establish peace and trade in the Middle East. After war had been tried, again and again, someone thought maybe peace might be worth a shot.

  There was giddy jubilation in the air. It appeared that it had suddenly occurred to a lot of people that a brand new market of previously poor but now maybe future well-to-do people was opening up. Not only would there be peace, but there’d be money to be made. A lot of it.

  Everyone who wasn’t already drunk was doing his or her best to get there. Cal should be joining them. After years working in the Middle East with no alcohol at all, toiling at establishing desalination plants in desert environments, he deserved to get drunk.

  Aside from other considerations, part of the Technical Dossier of the Accords was a contract with his company, Phoenix Enterprises, to provide safe drinking water for everyone, a dream in the desert that was thousands of years old.

  And, not incidentally, he was about to become a billionaire. Officially. Not bad for a kid from the South Side. Mega-rich before he was forty. Doing good work, yet. Most billion-dollar fortunes were made trafficking in something or cheating people. Instead, his was going to be made saving lives.

  Didn’t get much better than that.

  Now someone dressed as a super-sexy shepherdess was making eyes at him. This one dipped her finger in her champagne and ran it across breasts too good to be true. Those breasts were not made by God but by a skilled plastic surgeon .

  Nuh uh. Not interested.

  The fuck was wrong with him?

  He’d worked practically his whole life to get to this point. He was richer than he’d ever dared dream, single after a brief marriage long ago to the she-devil from hell, in the most beautiful city in the world, at a party celebrating the breaking-out of peace, and he was turning down surefire sex? With champagne?

  The hell?

  Cal suppressed a sigh.

  If only Anya — he stopped himself right there. If only Anya had been a constant thought in his life these past ten years. He’d married a banshee demon from hell because she’d looked a little like Anya. He’d turned down perfectly nice women because they didn’t look like Anya.

  Anya had left him ten fucking years ago. And she’d left him brutally, too.

  He had to stop this, had to shake himself out of this melancholy mood. He was Cal Fucking Burns and he didn’t do melancholy. He ran a hugely successful company with people hand-picked to be extremely competent and good to work with. His company was going to be instrumental in one of the greatest accomplishments in a hundred years, comparable to the signing of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I. An amazing achievement, one for the history books.

  He was still young, physically strong, healthy and rich — and soon he was going to be much richer. So rich he wouldn’t be able to spend all his money in a hundred lifetimes.

  Shame on him. There was no room for sadness in a life like that.

  He was highly sexed and he hadn’t had sex in — he tried to calculate it but couldn’t remember. That had to stop, too. He was in a room full of beautiful women, and most of them looked pretty willing. There had to be someone here he wanted to fuck. Someone who didn’t look like —

  No. Not going there.

  Huh. There was that redhead dressed in some outlandish rendering of what some might consider Marie Antoinette if Marie Antoinette had a gown cut down to the tops of her nipples.

  Well, nothing ventured nothing gained. Cal started off toward the redhead, wondering if she spoke English. Maybe she didn’t. Maybe that would make it better. Just find a place to fuck without talking. Maybe not even take their masks off.

  Something grabbed at his sleeve and, annoyed, Cal looked down. A long, slim, pale hand. He followed that hand up to the face and grew even more annoyed.

  “Enjoying yourself?” a light, affected voice asked.

  Shit, just perfect. To add to his mild depression, he had been caught by the biggest asshole-bore in the world. Tall, slender, blonde hair combed straight back, dressed as a 17th-century swordsman. A musketeer. Which was rich considering he was a total wimp. Calvin had saved his ass in Cairo and Damascus.

  Ashley Morris, in the flesh, come to pester Cal. What was he doing here anyway? Ash worked for the CIA, which just showed how low their standards had fallen. Ash and the CIA had done their best to assist the negotiation of the Accords by fucking things up more than once.

  “How are you doing? I heard Phoenix cleaned up, landed a huge contract. How does it feel to be mega-rich?” Ash asked.

  So — they were playing catch-up?

  “Pretty good,” Cal said mildly. He was technically already a billionaire now if you counted his stock in Phoenix and he would be a bi-billionaire very soon. Ash wouldn’t care. He was a trustafarian from old money and had joined the CIA because he thought it made him look dashing. It didn’t. He just looked like a moron, playing out of his weight class. He still looked like a kid. “And you? What are you doing here?”

  “Well.” Ash drew himself up, putting a hand on the hilt of his sword. He gave a smug smile. “I played a small part in the accords,” he said, shrugging his shoulders, humblebragging. His tone suggested that the multilateral negotiations, a major historical breakthrough in diplomacy, wouldn’t have happened without him.

  “Good for you.” Cal snagged another glass of champagne from a passing waiter in livery, drank it in three long gulps. He needed fortification if he had to talk to Ash.

  “Yes.” Ash pursed his lips. “We … facilitated backdoor talks. Enormous geopolitical considerations. It wasn’t all as straightforward and simple as landing an engineering contract.”

  Cal placed the empty flute on another passing waiter’s tray and turned his head to look at Ash who was still babbling.

  What Cal and his company had done was the private sector equivalent to the moonshot on an accelerated schedule. He and his team had worked tirelessly under conditions of extreme privation, solving one thorny, impossible technical problem after another. They’d built a demo desalination plant in Yemen on time and under budget
before the ceasefire, under mortar attack and with constant attempts at sabotage. Though Cal had arranged tight security, he’d lost two engineers to an IED.

  But every engineer in the company insisted on seeing the project through to the end, and they’d landed the big contract to provide safe and clean drinking water throughout the Middle East.

  They’d created a fucking miracle that was going to save hundreds of thousands of lives, maybe millions of lives, and it hadn’t been straightforward and it hadn’t been simple. Cal and his team had worked like dogs, in 120° heat, eating goat meat when they were lucky, dodging bullets when they weren’t.

  And Ash probably sat the whole thing out in some air-conditioned office playing with his tiny dick.

  Something in Cal’s face made Ash flinch. “Yeah. So.” He huffed out a breath, looked around casually over Cal’s shoulder. Great. Ash was one of those cocktail party people who looked over your shoulder for someone more interesting to talk to while talking to you.

  Cal could solve that problem for him, easy.

  “Well.” He plastered a smile on his face. “Great catching up with you, Ash. I think I’ll —”

  His arm was caught in a weak grip. Cal looked at the hand and at Ash’s face. Ash dropped his hand but stepped closer, right into what Cal considered his personal space. He didn’t like it when the wrong people stepped into his personal space.

  Ash definitely qualified.

  It took a lot of self control not to deck the fuckhead. The fact that it would be all too easy to flatten him kept him still but, man, was he tempted.

  “Anya.” Ash had been talking and Cal hadn’t been paying any attention to him, but that word made him stiffen. Had he heard right?

  “What? What did you say?”