When her eyes met mine, my world stopped.
Her face read devastation. Like her best friend had died.
Then rage.
She picked up the paper, looked at again, then back at me.
Her eyes fell to the pendant. It was sitting where it had sat the past two days, on my chest, close to my heart. Only it had slipped outside my tank top.
“What is this?” she screamed at me, spit coming out of her mouth. Her face was maniacal. I looked at the newspaper and at the photo she held up. It was a picture of Louis and me, in Paris, walking along the Seine. Someone had taken a photo of us. I mean, lots of people take photos along the Seine. We hadn’t noticed. “National Champion and Mystery Girl,” or some such said the headline of the local paper. His arm was draped around my shoulder and he was kissing the top of my head. My face was dreamy.
“Messette,” hissed Marie, like she was breathing fire. “Louis Messette is your rugbyman?!”
“Uh . . .” I was flabbergasted by her rage.
I mean, I understood that she was upset I’d lied about his name. And I knew she disliked him from the elevator incident. But this reaction was beyond my worst expectations.
I didn’t even have time to answer before she came at me. She slapped my face so hard I found myself twisted over and cowering against the fridge. I grasped at my neck. She’d yanked the necklace right off, breaking the thin gold stand. Staring at me with shiny eyes, she held the pendant in her hand before me, like it was my heart, which was breaking in that moment.
“Did you plan this back in America? What does he want from me? Tell him he won’t get it, whatever it is, he won’t get it! Answer me!”
“Marie—what—no!” I managed to shout, tears streaming down my face as I held my cheek.
“I don’t . . .” I stood there shaking my head, dizzy, lost, “I don’t know what you are talking about it.” I was sobbing wholeheartedly.
Did I meet him in America? What?!
“I met him that night, here, in the bistro with Jess like I said!” I stated this not at all sure what I was accounting for. But I was desperate to explain away my lies. How could she be this mad? “He asked me not to tell anyone,” I choked back my sob, “because he likes to protect his family’s privacy.”
“His family’s privacy?!” she screeched. I backed up, thinking I needed to escape through the other side of the kitchen. She was terrifying.
“Oh my God, you don’t even realize!” she said, following me. “I will kill them. I will kill them all. What lies did he tell you?” I tried to get away but she grasped my arm with an iron grip.
I still had no idea what she was talking about. As far as I was concerned, she had flipped a lid because I’d fibbed about his name.
Staring in her dilated eyes, anger reared up in me. She knows nothing about who Louis really is. Fuck her stupid assumptions about lifestyle. I thought she needed a psychiatric evaluation.
Maybe she saw my shock, my anger, my fear. “You are scared of me?” She pulled back, devastation ripped across her face.
We stared at each other for painful, long seconds. All I wanted in that moment was for her face to turn light again. All I could see was her struggling to gain control.
“Do you know who the Messettes are?” she asked me this while barely maintaining calm. Her regard for me—contempt—sickened me.
She tried to get me to look in her eyes, which had softened but not enough.
There were tears in hers. Pity or fury?
“What did he tell you, hm? Come, Fleur, it’s okay. Ma belle, I am sorry I hit you. I thought—” She shuddered. “I thought you had betrayed me on purpose. Now I can see they used you.”
Betray her? Used me?
“Wh-what are you talking about?”
“Do you know who the Messettes are, Fleur?” she asked, exasperated. She drilled her gaze into mine. Why was she asking?
“Th-they are a wealthy shipping family?” I was no longer certain of anything.
“Mon Dieu, Fleur.” She shook her head, pain stretched across her deserted eyes. She tried to steady her breathing but she was failing. Her hands were in tight fists.
“They are a criminal organization. A gang.”
The word “gang” dangled out in the open before my brain identified it.
Gang.
The matching black tattoos.
The bodyguards.
The guns.
“No,” I shook my head. Can’t be. “The newspaper articles I read, they all said they were a wealthy shipping family—”
“Propaganda paid for and bought by that family. France’s largest crime family!” she barked. “Listen to me, Fleur. They run illegal goods through the ports. The Messettes use businesses as, how do you say, fronts. They were who I almost caught last night! I am after Georges Messette!”
I shook my head. No. That’s not right. And yet . . . there Marie was, listing off countless charges that had been placed against members of the Messette family that had never stuck. I clasped my head, shaking it. I clutched at my chest. I stepped back.
Only when she’d quit her litany of memorized villainy was I able to open my eyes. She watched me with growing concern. “But,” I gasped, “Louis— He . . .” I couldn’t finish. All around me I fought through haze to make sense of what I’d just heard. I sat down on the sofa and put my head on my knees. The room was spinning.
Louis’s family were criminals? Images popped into my mind. That man who assaulted me at Sylvie’s. The fear in his eye when he saw the Messette symbol on my chest. Georges. Laughing at me when I expressed concern over involving him in something criminal.
Louis—asking me to keep him a secret.
I’d made assumption after assumption because . . . because I didn’t know better, because I was a naive, happy-hearted idiot.
How could Louis . . . why did he let me believe otherwise . . . when he knew my mother was a police inspector?
Oh wait, of course! Hope surged in me. I quickly snatched at the most reasonable explanation. He knew my mother wouldn’t like him by association. He probably didn’t want to deal with her judgment about his family. Louis was merely a rugby player. He wasn’t like his family.
I raised my head. “Marie, Louis isn’t like his—”
Where had she gone?
I scanned the room. Just now, what had Marie whispered in French? “He moves to my home. He thinks he can take my daughter. Non. Non!”
My heart plummeted.
No. She had the wrong impression. Louis wasn’t using me to hurt her . . . I stood up and called her name more loudly.
Where was she?
I walked down the hall.
I peered into her bedroom. She slammed her phone down. Who had she called? She grabbed her gun from her dresser drawer, and her badge. Her face was steel. She whipped past me, headed to the door.
“Marie! Non!” I shouted, realization dawning, tripping over my overnight bag, racing after her. Both of us barreled down the hall barefoot. She moved fast and with purpose. “You don’t understand! It’s not what you think!” I yelled at her, but she completely ignored me.
I told myself she wouldn’t know which floor, but as she slammed into the stairwell and began climbing, I remembered that she knew exactly where he lived. I clutched at her, but she shoved me back twice. She was an unstoppable force. She was a policewoman on a mission. A mother whose child she felt was at risk.
I am not entirely sure she was sane. She didn’t seem to recognize me whatsoever. I was near hyperventilating.
As she wrenched open the penthouse landing door, Domingo and Pierre, standing guard outside Louis’s door, snapped to attention. Shit, no! She headed straight to them, her bare feet slapping on the marble, gun concealed in her pants. I followed, shaking, terrified, whispering, “Mom, please stop. You’re making a mistake!” My heart was beating so fast it hurt my chest.
The men—how could I not realize they were criminals? how could I think they were bodyguards?
—stiffened. She didn’t slow down. She dropped them both to the ground with moves so stealth I couldn’t say where she’d struck them.
Disbelieving, I watched them crumple and darted after her. She was already in the apartment. Jesus. Of course they didn’t keep the door locked. I raced after her, around the partition, and panicked, realizing her target was right there, standing near the kitchen island. She lunged at Georges Messette, who turned around just in time to make contact with her right fist.
The rest is a blur of memories. Like a car accident. An eight-car pileup. There were six men in that room, I learned later. Georges and Louis, and four other members of the Messette enterprise.
I remember seeing Louis’s face, the split second he peered over Georges’s shoulder and saw Marie. He tried to stop his brother from turning around. But he was too late.
I remember my mom, one knee on Georges’s back, had momentarily knocked him out (and I later learned broke her hand doing so). In one hand she held her gun and in the other she managed to wave her badge.
I remember a moment when a man—possessed—lunged at my mom. Of course it was Louis, but he seemed a complete stranger. I tried to yell. I don’t know if any noise came out. He froze, mid-reach, and, with my mom’s back to me, I thought, she’s shot him. But, I inhaled, no, the gun was pointed at Georges’s head. She’d done the only thing that would have stopped Louis from killing her, of that I am certain.
Marie screamed at the men in the room to put their weapons on the ground and to get on their knees, hands up in the air. After a second or two, when she informed them backup was on the way, they complied. Only Louis remained standing.
I think that’s when he finally realized I was there.
I can’t imagine what he saw in that moment as I straddled the fast-spreading divide between the person I knew I could trust and the other who I still thought was my future. There was the man I loved, trapped, defending his family, from mine.
“Mom!” I yelled full volume this time, stepping up close. She finally quit ordering him to get on his knees.
“Louis is innocent!” I exclaimed. “He didn’t do anything!”
And that’s when the tiny glass bottle that held my fabricated life in Toulon finally broke. It shattered under the crushing truth as for one brief moment, as his eyes opened wide, I saw into Louis Messette’s soul and it poured into me. I don’t know. Maybe my undying faith in him, or my sheer stupidity, rattled him so deeply he couldn’t hide it. But there it was: pity. He pitied me.
I staggered back and stared in confusion, and he knew I’d seen it. He swore. Marie yelled at him again in French, this time that she would shoot him in his balls if he did not get down on the ground.
His eyes fell back on her. I knew what they were saying. “You will pay.” He was threatening my mother. It nearly broke me in two.
There was more shouting and bodies brushing past me. Cops stormed in. Someone pushed me to the side. Men were being cuffed. Georges, having regained consciousness, was being escorted out. Mom was barking orders. Two more cops pointed guns at Louis before he finally dropped to his knees and raised his hands slowly, never taking his eye off of my mother. I wanted to scream at him to leave her alone. I wanted to scream at her to leave him alone. But nothing came out.
When Georges had been secured, and my mom popped up, I stepped forward, helpless to stop what was happening.
Marie stepped behind Louis, grabbed one of his hands and tried to twist it down behind his back to handcuff him. But she couldn’t make it budge. It took more men, and a baton in his shoulders, which hurt me physically, for him to comply. When his hands were cuffed, she leaned down and hissed something in his ear. I don’t know what she said, only that Louis was staring at me, smiling. He didn’t even blink.
Marie started to arrest him verbally when I heard a familiar voice say in French, “Marie! Sur quels motifs?” (On what charges?)
Wait, that’s Bastien. My eyes followed the protestation, and found Bastien, armed. He stepped right into Marie’s space and grabbed her arm. He added, “Marie, tu n’as rien pour les inculper.” (You’ve got nothing to charge them with.)
She shook off his hand. I could see her searching for a solution. I couldn’t look at Louis. My hands were over my mouth. I had no idea what his smile had meant as Marie hissed terrible threats in his ear. I only knew that if she arrested him, his career might be ruined. And it would be my fault.
It is still amazing to me how badly I wanted to preserve my fantasy world. “Mom,” I whispered, shaking my head. “He didn’t do anything. He plays rugby. He’s not like the others.” I wiped my face because there were tears.
That’s right, screamed my heart. I had never seen guns on Louis or in his apartment. He’d gone to business school, for God’s sake. I knew that. I had seen the degree on his yacht.
My mom’s face drew up in a tortured expression. “Ah, Fleur!” she exclaimed, and in the same breath hardened again. She kneed Louis in the back and shouted at him in French, “Tell her. Tell her the truth, you coward!”
I searched Louis’s face. He wasn’t smiling at me anymore. His brows were a flat line. My mom was shaking all over. She glared down at him.
Boom. Boom. Boom. My heart was in my fucking ears.
Her eyes lighted on something. She used all her body strength to force Louis to standing and two cops helped her turn him around. “What do you think this means?” she shouted. She was referring to the black tattoo on Louis’s inside forearm. Louis yanked out of her grip, and turned back to face me.
This time he shook his head.
Wide-eyed, I stared at my mother. I didn’t want to know.
“It means he’s murdered someone, Fleur,” she said, just louder than a whisper. My heart slowed right down. Pain spread out inside of me everywhere, nauseating pain.
She stepped around Louis, blocking my view. “It’s a rite of the Messette family,” she whispered, walking toward me. “He’s just like the rest of them. He’s a murderer, and an extortionist, a thief and a con man.” With each word she hammered daggers into me. “Better you know it now before it is too late.” Her voice cracked.
“Arrest him,” she ordered with more vigor, pulling me to her, protectively. I didn’t fight her, I was numb. Shell-shocked. I just stood there in her loose embrace, and watched as Bastien escorted Louis out.
Those fierce, familiar eyes held mine as long as physically possibly.
Mom kept trying to turn me away. I wouldn’t let her. I begged him silently to tell me it wasn’t true.
I wouldn’t give up on him in that moment.
But he never said one word.
Long after he was gone I could still hear his wordless will. It was like white noise, leaving me deaf to everything else.
Chapter 20
No matter how hard I tried, and I spent a few days, curled up, searching deep in my heart, I just couldn’t find the revulsion I knew I should feel for Louis after what I’d learned.
Extortionist. Thief. Con man. Mur—
No.
Marie saw the world in black and white. She put people in two camps. Lawful. Unlawful. I wasn’t sure after so many years of policing the difference she was capable of understanding or seeing the world any other way.
But the woman who had raised me, and spent ten years reporting on society’s stricken, had shown me we are all victims of circumstance. Short of the most deliberate wicked crimes committed by the mentally unbalanced, people make bad decisions because they are trapped in very narrow, strong-flowing currents.
Being born into a criminal family, albeit a well-off one, had reduced Louis’s choices, too, or so I wanted to believe. The idea of him being amoral . . . I couldn’t go there even knowing how he hid the truth of his family from me.
Plus, Louis had been released within hours of his arrest. Why? Because Marie did not have any charges to pin on him. He was the clean Messette family member, she complained. She insisted he would no doubt run things while she had Georges
in custody.
There are other brothers, I thought, but didn’t say.
She told me a few times, madness in her eyes, how Georges was going down, this time with damning evidence.
I couldn’t account for Georges, or Henri or Philippe. But in my heart, I just couldn’t believe Louis had done the things Marie insisted he had. Killed someone? He wasn’t in that world. He played rugby. He’d gone to business school.
I thought back over events in proper context, and the night Louis had scared me with his coldness, when he tried to show me what was at stake . . . I think what he really wanted was to show me who he was, and how he was going to hurt me.
So why didn’t he just tell me?
I pictured his raging face—when Marie hissed in his ear, his hands cuffed behind him. He was not ashamed of who he was. He was not sorry for who he was. So, again, why not tell me?
Maybe, I thought, generously, he believed I would not accept him.
But that would mean he cared, and that this had not all been a lie—a way to get at Marie.
I stared at the blank computer screen.
After day two of calling in sick to work, Marie told me that if I wasn’t leaving the apartment because I was scared to run into Louis, he no longer lived in the building.
So that, too, had been vacated, I thought.
I stared at her, open-mouthed. “I asked him to leave. For your sake.” I wondered if she’d asked for her sake.
Our apartment, everything we owned, had been swept for bugs the same day the arrests took place. They found nothing, of course. Four years ago, when Marie discovered who had moved into the penthouse suite of her building, she was instantly suspicious—despite the fact she had been living there for over eight years (and chasing after the Messettes for far longer than that). She even told me she thought Louis had moved there to toy with her. Of course, it was impossible to defend him: for example, to mention that the Toulon stadium where he trained every day was indeed just around the corner; that he made the team four years ago so the move corresponded with his career; that the penthouse was barely even furnished because he spent such little time in it; that it was unlikely he even knew she was in the building before he bought it because guess what, Marie? A super-wealthy, busy, professional rugby player has better things to do than stalk a police inspector.
The Frenchman (Crime Royalty Romance Book 1) Page 20