I touched the bracelet lightly, tracing the intricate, woven threads with the pad of one finger. I’d left straight from work — my wallet contained barely enough money to purchase a coffee, let alone a handmade piece of art.
“Köszönöm,” I murmured with a regretful smile, turning from the stall and heading back toward the square. Folk dancers were moving to traditional steps as a band of string instruments, pipes, and drums played upbeat tunes. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face as I watched people of all ages dancing and singing together. Song after song, dance after dance, the merrymakers showed no signs of stopping as the afternoon waned on. Hands clapping to the beat, a huge smile fixed permanently on my face, I watched for so long I lost track of time.
I’m not sure what made me glance up, but when I did, my gaze landed on a set of unwavering, dark eyes that were staring at me from across the square.
Wes.
He winked when he caught my eye and took a few steps along the perimeter of the crowd, cutting a path toward me. His movement soon drew the attention of some of the dancers, and I laughed as I watched two bold, gawky girls of twelve or thirteen grab his hands and haul him into the center of the celebration. Their leather-booted feet tapped madly against the stones as they twirled, granting Wes no mercy as they spun him in circles, maneuvering him around the makeshift dance floor like he was their personal, life-sized Ken doll. The crowd laughed and cheered as they watched his stumbling steps. I was swaying in place and laughing at him, too — until he passed close by my side of the audience, reached out an arm, and tagged me around the waist.
“If I’m doing this, you’re damn well doing it too, Red,” he growled in my ear, hauling me into the center of the square.
We whirled around wildly, locked in each other’s arms, until the crowd went blurry and the sound of their laughter faded away. All I could see was his face. Faster and faster we spun, a hysterically uncoordinated pair, making up all our own steps. Heedless of the many people watching.
We only had eyes for each other.
* * *
I glanced warily at Wes, entirely unsure that this was a good idea.
He grinned back at me across the small round table.
“Ala okaya, ohala okaya.” The old woman’s eyes were closed as she chanted some sort of pagan incantation under her breath. A visual sweep of the small tent, constructed of red and purple swathes of fabric, revealed all manner of strange things — candles of every shape and size, countless vials filled with liquid, small bottles containing God only knew what. Eye of newt and toe of frog, most likely.
I snorted under my breath and Wes looked over at me disapprovingly. The woman chanted on, undisturbed.
“Do you think she’s casting a spell on us?” I hissed in his direction.
“Undoubtedly,” he whispered back.
After our turn on the dance floor, the same two girls who’d pulled Wes into the square had grabbed our hands and dragged us toward a vibrantly-colored tent on the edge of the festival grounds. Giggling at each other in a mischievous manner exclusive to preteen girls, they’d pulled back the draped entrance and shoved Wes and me inside without another word. And now, we were alone at the hands of a zillion-year-old gypsy woman who, apparently, doubled as a witch.
“Ala okaya, ohala okaya.”
Her chants continued as she reached sightlessly beneath the table and pulled out two stout green pillar candles. I watched as she wound a cord made from willow or some other thin-branched tree around the candles and tied them together in an intricate, ritualistic knot without ever breaking her chant or cracking open an eye to peek. Clearly, she’d done this before.
“Is she speaking Hungarian?” I asked.
Wes shook his head.
“Romanian?”
“No dialect I’ve ever heard.”
Great. There’d be no clues from that front, then.
The candles were now lit, flaming brightly and casting flickering shadows across the gypsy’s wrinkled face. Her chanting picked up pace and she held her palms up to the sky, shaking them in time with her spell. I half expected sparks to start shooting from her fingertips or, at the very least, a little bit of levitation off the floor. Maybe I’d watched one too many Harry Potter movies.
Wait, I take that back. There’s no such thing as too many Harry Potter movies.
Abruptly, the woman fell silent. I flinched involuntarily when she opened a set of bottomless gray eyes to stare across the table. Nearly a minute passed as she examined us with an unblinking stare, and I began to squirm in place.
It was safe to say she creeped me out.
Before I realized what was happening, she’d reached over and grabbed Wes’ right hand in one fist, then clasped mine in the other. She was pretty spry, for such an old lady. I didn’t fight her grip as she guided my hand over the open flame of the candle sitting on the table in front of me. Wes’ eyebrows were high on his forehead, but he allowed her to do the same. When we were both positioned palm-down over our candles — not so close that it burned, but near enough that I felt the flame’s warmth tickling my skin — the woman began to chant once more.
I locked eyes with Wes over the flames. “You think she’s enchanting us to give her all our money?”
One side of his mouth lifted. “Maybe she’s hexing us. Giving us an eternity of bad luck or an unstoppable sneezing condition.”
I giggled.
“Bah!” The woman yelled, instantly drawing my attention back to her. She was glaring at me.
“Sorry,” I whispered.
She gestured from my mouth to the flame, pantomiming for me to blow out the candle. She turned to signal at Wes, as well.
“Time to blow?” I asked quietly.
Wes chortled.
“Oh, come on. That one was too easy, even for your dirty mind.”
He grinned at me. “On three?”
We counted down together and blew out our candles simultaneously. Smoke began to drift up from the smoldering wicks. Grabbing our hands once more, the gypsy swirled them through the smoke, until the separate trails from each candle combined into a single ashy cloud. She muttered under her breath as she guided our hands, moving so rhythmically, I soon found myself mesmerized. There was something bewitching about watching our fingers move lazily through the dim light.
As the smoke dissipated, the woman positioned my hand above Wes’, palm to palm over the now-dark candles. It was utterly still in the tent as she reached down, unwound the willow cords, and began to wrap them around our lofted wrists, tethering us together.
I didn’t dare speak — she’d only scold me again.
“A szerelem vak,” the woman recited.
That sounded more familiar — less pagan, more Hungarian.
“A szerelem igazi,” she continued, wrapping the cords so tightly they began to dig into the flesh of my wrist.
I glanced at Wes and saw, for the first time, his brow was wrinkled in what looked like comprehension — and the beginnings of distress.
“A szerelem örök.”
He glanced over at me and opened his mouth to say something, but the old woman’s voice boomed out once more.
“Előbbi egyedül. Ezentúl együtt.”
I looked at him with wide eyes, wondering why he suddenly looked worried. He’d been remarkably calm about this entire thing, up until she’d started speaking Hungarian.
“Örökké.”
Her hands dropped to her sides and her eyes closed. She’d reached the end of her spell — the finality ringing in her tone made that much obvious. I stared at Wes, whose face was a mask of stunned disbelief, and then at our hands, which were now bound together in a beautiful knot. Only when the curtain behind us flew open and the two girls rushed in, giggling and smiling ear to ear, did I begin to realize something wasn’t right here.
This had been no normal spell or chant.
“Wes…” I whispered, looking up at him with alarm. “What just happened?”
He couldn’
t even look at me. I saw him swallow several times, watched his eyes open and close rapidly as though they might somehow blink away whatever had just occurred. The girls were clapping and circling the table, each bearing small loops of sturdy white rope. When they grabbed my left hand and slid the tiny circular cord onto a very specific finger, I almost fell over in shock.
“Did they… did she…” I gulped for air. “Wes?” My voice was squeaky.
“I think…” He cleared his throat, hard, then looked over at me steadily. “Uh…”
I stared at him for a long, frozen moment, waiting for him to finish. Waiting for him to confirm that my suspicions, crazy as they might’ve seemed, were correct.
“Well, Red…” Something changed in his eyes. They went sort of soft as they moved over my face and the hint of a grin touched his lips. He took a deep breath before he spoke.
“I think we’re married.”
Chapter 27
Weston
IN OTHER WORDS
* * *
There weren’t a lot of rules.
Lie.
Cheat.
Steal.
All perfectly fine with the agency.
Threaten.
Torture.
Kill.
Just another part of the job description.
Boundaries.
Ethics.
Morals.
They were blurred lines I was never forced to define and frequently found myself crossing.
My world didn’t distinguish right from wrong. Black and white were nothing more than lofty ideals. I lived in the gray area.
There weren’t a lot of limits, in the gray.
But there was one. A single, icon-clad, unbendable margin you did not cross.
Don’t get attached.
Don’t leave loose ends.
Don’t forget that it’s all temporary.
If there was one protocol you didn’t disregard, it was that one.
I looked down at my left hand. I would’ve laughed at the sight of the pure white cord wrapped just below my cracked red knuckle, but I couldn’t seem to find any humor in this situation. I wasn’t allowed to care about Faith. Wasn’t supposed to make any permanent connections or long-term bonds.
She wasn’t mine. She never would be.
Except, now… she kind of was.
And she was more than just a loose end.
She was my fucking wife.
I’d crossed the line of demarcation. I’d broken the one rule I lived my life by. I’d disregarded my most important order.
In other words, I was fucked.
Chapter 28
Faith
RUN WILD
* * *
I was curled into a ball on the window seat in my bedroom with a large glass of wine in hand, listening to the mournful strains of Christina Perri’s Distance when I heard the front door open.
“Faith?” Margot called.
I took a large swallow of wine, listening to the sound of her approaching footsteps.
“You home?”
My bedroom door creaked ajar and Margot’s head popped through.
“Hey! There you are,” she said, walking into the room and settling in on the cushion beside me. “Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
“Sorry,” I murmured, staring at my toes. I really needed to repaint them — the deep blue Margot had applied before my date last week was already chipping.
She was silent for a moment. “Why are you sitting in the dark?” she asked finally.
I sighed. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
I took another sip of wine. “I don’t even want to say it out loud.”
“Is this about Wes?”
I nodded miserably.
“What’d he do this time? Bring you to practically the brink of orgasm and then bail with a lame excuse about having to work again?”
I narrowed my eyes at her.
“Okay, no.” She ran one hand through her pixie cut, mussing it instantly. “Did he force you to scale another tall building or monument and then kiss you at the top?”
I cracked a smile. “No.”
“Just tell me,” she whined. “I hate guessing.”
“Fine.” I straightened my shoulders out of the hunch they’d sunk into and braced myself for her reaction. “He…”
“Yeah?” Margot prompted.
“He kind of…”
She made an impatient hand gesture.
“…married me.” I winced, anticipating her response.
When she didn’t say anything, I glanced over and saw that her jaw had dropped open and her round eyes had zeroed in on my left hand like a laser beam. I let her absorb the news for almost a full minute in silence until, finally, her gaze refocused on my face and she reached out a hand toward my wine.
“I’m gonna need a sip of that before this conversation goes any further.”
I smiled and passed her the goblet, watching as she took a large swig.
“Now,” she said, turning to face me fully. “Start at the beginning and tell me everything. If you leave out a single detail I’ll eat all the Nutella in our pantry and play Justin Bieber songs on full volume for the next six months.”
My face contorted into a horrified expression at the thought of such torture. I quickly reclaimed my wine and launched into the story, making sure not to scrimp on the finer points — because, obviously, I wasn’t about to jeopardize my Nutella. I told her everything: the Anna altercation, the ride to Gyula, the festival, the gypsy’s tent. When I finished, she stared at me for nearly a minute with a bizarre look on her face.
“So...” I asked in a tentative voice. “What do you think? Because, honestly, any insight would be helpful right about now.”
Margot looked deeply into my eyes. “Let me get this straight…” Her voice was more serious than I’d ever heard it. “You married a guy without even sleeping with him first? What are you, Amish?!”
I snorted into my wine glass.
* * *
Late that night, I lay in bed thinking about Wes and staring down at the thin white cord wrapped firmly around my left ring finger.
Obviously, the marriage wasn’t legally binding. It wouldn’t hold up in the eyes of the courts. Neither the U.S. nor the Hungarian government would regard the union as a valid contract. They’d laugh it off, much in the way Wes and I had done earlier that afternoon, after we realized what had happened.
He’d teased me about not even bothering to wear white to our ceremony.
I’d joked back that he could’ve at least carried me over the threshold of the tent.
We’d made light of the entire thing. On the surface I’d been full of smiles, rolling my eyes at the ridiculousness of the situation. Giggling as we’d climbed onto his bike and headed back to the city.
Inside, though… I was a mess.
I’d always believed that marriage was more than words on a piece of paper. Tying your life to someone else’s wasn’t a consequence of legal jargon or an agreement of terms between partners and a justice of the peace.
It was an alignment of souls.
A fusion of spirits.
So, no — lawfully I wasn’t Wes Adams wife.
But spiritually? I wasn’t so sure.
I spun the white cord in a circle around my finger. A handful of old words muttered by a witch-woman shouldn’t have meant anything. So why couldn’t I shake the sensation that I was now somehow bound to Wes in an unbreakable, indisputable way?
It was as if my entire stratosphere had snapped into focus as soon as I’d stepped from the smoky darkness of that tent and met Wes’ eyes in the full light of day. I looked at him and everything seemed to shift, as though I’d been walking around my whole life looking at the ground beneath my feet, and someone had finally tilted my head back and introduced my eyes to the sky.
Nothing was different; and yet, everything had changed. Whether we wanted to admit it or not, something ancie
nt, something sacred, had transpired today. We could cover it up with teasing words, downplay it with jokes and jabs, belittle it with laughter — but, really, I think we both knew that the carefree no-labels, no-commitment attitude we’d both embraced up until this point was no longer relevant.
Maybe that’s why, when he’d dropped me off, Wes had made his excuses and disappeared without so much as a kiss goodnight. I’d tried not to be too disappointed as I watched him ride away. Tried not to let it bother me that we’d turned something special into nothing more than a punchline. Assured myself that he’d come around, that he’d come back to me when he’d sorted out his head.
I knew he was freaked out.
So was I.
But I did notice, in spite of all our teasing, neither of us had removed our rings.
* * *
The sound woke me from a deep sleep.
Tap, tap, tap.
My heart began to pound and my disbelieving eyes flew to the window, my barely-conscious mind consumed by thoughts of the axe-wielding murderer who was likely climbing through the portal into my bedroom. To my great relief, the dark pane was still firmly closed. My apartment was on the first floor, elevated by a ground-level basement — it would be damn near impossible to climb through the window without standing on a dumpster or somehow scaling the ten-foot wall barehanded. No one was coming inside. I’d probably heard a gust of wind or a distant crack of lightning. Maybe I’d simply imagined the noise.
Tap, tap.
Nope, definitely not a figment of my imagination. I pushed back the covers and scurried out of bed, edging toward the window with my back against the wall like a secret-agent-spy-extraordinaire. When I reached the sill, I fell to my knees with my chin propped on the cushion of the window seat and craned my neck to peer through the pane.
Love & Lies Page 62