Vanity Scare

by H. P. Mallory

  There was something in the words. Something heavy. Lead heavy, glacier heavy, buried-alive-in-the-desert heavy.

  It took me a second. “When she was working with Melchior?”

  He nodded. Silence swept through the room like a cold wind. Seconds and seconds and seconds passed, nothing happening. It looked like he wasn’t breathing.

  “I…” He trailed, but not off, just to one side. He had the look of somebody who wanted to talk exactly as much as he didn’t, but he’d started now and it was too late to turn back. The words bubbled up in his mouth. Water in a geyser, pressure rising. Steam hissing through cracks in the ground.

  He sighed. “I picked her up.” He shook his head, hard. Like, worryingly hard. “No. No, I arrested her. I handcuffed her and I put her in the car. And.” He ran a single hand over his face. Like he was trying to scrape something off. A memory, a feeling, an itch you can’t scratch because it isn’t real. Trying to shed a coat he wasn’t even wearing anymore.

  I crossed my arms. Stood up a little straighter, and I felt my face go stony. “…Yeah?”

  “I… I was so angry,” he confessed. He was staring at the carpet. His voice sounded like he was going to burst out laughing any second. But if he did, it wouldn’t be funny—it would be manic. It would be the sound of something broken, something that couldn’t figure out how to scream.

  The air in the room got colder. Like it could feel the tension building, the awkwardness mounting like sand in an hourglass.

  I said nothing.

  ELEVEN

  Quillan

  Knight was blinking a lot, and he was smiling, but in a way that suggested he didn’t know it. Like he’d totally forgotten that he even had teeth. He was smiling like his tongue was bleeding, like he couldn’t remember how to breathe.

  “I thought… at the time I’d thought that Dulcie was working for Melchior the whole time. Like, since the beginning,” he said. “I’d thought she’d been playing me all along.”

  I nodded a little. It felt like the right gesture for the moment.

  “I didn’t…” He shook his head and inhaled deeply. Dropping his eyes to the ground, he was quiet for a few seconds, his jaw tight. When he looked at me again, his eyes were heavy. “Dulcie tried to tell me the truth… but I was convinced she was lying to me…”

  And that heaviness in the air was getting heavier and heavier. Like if you know there’s a bear in your hallway and you’re trying to work up the courage to do something about it. Sneak around it, call somebody, climb out the window, anything—but there’s a bear in your house, and that knowledge and that feeling is paralyzing. And the longer you sit there trying not to think about the bear, the worse it gets.

  “I pulled over,” said Knight, and then the words just started pouring out of him. “I pulled over and I got out of the car and she got out of the car. And I was yelling and Dulcie was crying and … and I…” He squeezed his eyes closed. The words caught visibly in his throat, like fishhooks. “I couldn’t stop myself. I had to… have her at least one more time.”

  “You…” I caught up with him three seconds too late. “Oh. Oh, my God.”

  He flinched a little. Not much, just enough. He didn’t say anything else.

  So, that’s… holy shit, that was the reason why they broke up. But they’d only been apart apart for a couple of weeks, and the thing he was talking about happened upwards of two years ago. It was more than enough reason for Dulcie to break up with him, but why was this only coming up now? Why did it take so long to get between them?

  Maybe he did it again, I thought, which made my stomach do really awful twisty things.

  Hades, Knight was supposed to be the good guy—the Superman to my reformed Penguin. I wasn’t supposed to have the moral high ground here, or anywhere else, for that matter. I didn’t know what to do with it.

  “Why?” It was a colossally stupid question, but I felt compelled to ask it. Just to see what he’d say, if he even knew the answer.

  He gave his head an almost imperceptible shake. “I don’t know. I just… fuck, I was angry. I was tired. I was… scared… and I still loved her, but I believed she’d deceived me. And even though I hated myself for it, I wanted to hurt her the way she was hurting me. But, at the same time, it wasn’t just about hurting her. It was about… being close to her.” He shook his head harder. “I know this sounds totally fucking stupid.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I said, because I could understand what he was talking about. I could understand why he would have felt the way he did. “Not that it not sounding stupid makes it okay.”

  “I know it’s not okay,” he told me quickly.

  I nodded. Is that how you’re supposed to cope with your fear of losing her, dude? Was that plan A? Was having a conversation with her before he started making firecracker choices on the side of the road totally out of the question?

  I mean, I got it, sort of. The fear part, the need to be close to her part, not any of the rest of it though. That kind of betrayal hits like an asteroid up the ass.

  Except, I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to fix that by one-upping the betrayer. And that’s what he did. She hurt him, so he decided to hurt her back.

  There was a popping sound in the walls, then a dull hum as the vents kicked on. I exhaled with the noise. I felt frozen in amber, in ice, in a photograph taken at exactly the wrong moment.

  Knight turned all the way around until our bodies were parallel, and he just stared at me. His hands clenched and unclenched, and his knuckles were white.

  What the hell was I supposed to say? Everybody makes mistakes works for bad arguments and car wrecks, but not here. Not for this. Everything I could say either felt like too little or too much.

  I might have walked out then. Just turned, left, slammed the door, and let him stew for however long it took him to get his ass back in gear. I probably would have turned out the lights just to be an ass, because honestly, I didn’t know what else I could do, or should do. But there was more to this story that I wanted to understand.

  “That was over two years ago,” I started, my voice sounding strangely foreign. “But you guys just… broke up recently?”

  He nodded. “Believe it or not, we got past it. I don’t know how the fuck we did, but we did. Or, we both pretended we did. I could never get past it, though, and I’m pretty sure Dulcie didn’t, either. We just never talked about it.”

  “So… what happened?”

  He shrugged. “Meg is what ultimately got between us.”

  “Meg?”

  He nodded. “She glamoured me and, while I was under her influence, I did things with her that I shouldn’t have. And Dulcie was forced to watch.”

  “But you were glamoured?” I argued the obvious.

  “You know as well as I do that glamour only truly works if the victim is open to the glamour in the first place.”

  “Then you wanted Meg?”

  “No,” he insisted. “But I guess I didn’t not want her enough.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, that about sums it up,” he answered and frowned. “After that, Dulcie and I both knew there was no coming back. You don’t just witness something like that and say, ‘It’s cool, we’re cool.’ Plus, there was everything that happened two years ago that was still haunting us.”

  “Going back to what happened two years ago,” I replied, because that was the sticking point for me. Whatever happened with Meg was… whatever. But what he’d done to Dulcie when she was in his custody… that was more.

  Knight took a breath. “It sucks, I know it sucks, I know. It wasn’t a choice I made, it just happened! I couldn’t stop myself.”

  My eye twitched. “You… couldn’t…”

  “Couldn’t.” Not “wouldn’t,” not even “didn’t want to,” just couldn’t. As if he’d been possessed, or hexed, or blackmailed.

  “What do you mean, you ‘couldn’t’ stop yourself?”

  “I mean it… I don’t know, it was like I
was watching somebody else using my body and I couldn’t get back in control of myself.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  He looked away, which meant no, he didn’t believe it. Not even a little. It was just a lie he’d been feeding himself to rationalize his fucked-up actions.

  “It didn’t. Just. Happen. Knight. Nothing you do just happens. These are choices you make, man.”

  “I couldn’t stop—”

  “So, what, you were glamoured into raping her?”

  I don’t know why that was what sobered him. Maybe finally hearing the word out loud. But he looked at me as if he was in shock, his eyes wide.

  “The people we know,” I said, because calling them ‘our friends’ created a connection between us that I just couldn’t stomach, “are way, way more forgiving than either us of deserve. They have given us chance after chance to redeem ourselves, and I always thought with you and Dulcie, you and your girlfriend… I thought you were a better man than me and, dammit, she deserved that. She deserved someone noble, someone good.”

  My fingers curled and clenched, the kind of slow-closing fist that happens when your whole body is shaking with the kind of ungodly rage that bursts arteries.

  I thought of Dulcie discovering me in that house years ago, finding out that I’d been working against the ANC since before we’d ever met. She’d looked so defeated, like I’d pulled the rug out from under her whole fucking world. If I’d been honest before that—if I’d told her I was under duress, that it wasn’t my choice, before she found out the hard way, the awful way—she might have understood. She might have helped me to help myself. I don’t know how she could have, but it was stupid of me to believe that nobody could have saved me.

  Especially Dulcie.

  She’d been in love with me then. I’d known, and I knew now. And I’d loved her just as much. We’d had so much potential, but I’d pounded that potential into the mud because I was afraid. Fear made you do stupid things.

  Not that I regretted my life now. I was happier than I believed I had a right to be. And even though I had loved Dulcie in another life, that life was over. I was in love with Christina and I was happy with her, happy with us. It was just sometimes difficult to think back on my decisions and realize where I’d gone so terribly wrong.

  “Someone,” I continued at last, “that she could trust.”

  Knight flinched. A whole-body, lightning-rod flinch, a sobbing flinch, an I-swallowed-a-needle-and-now-it’s-sticking-out-of-my-stomach flinch.

  “Meg was one thing,” I said, forcing myself to sound calm, to be calm. “That was as much a violation for you as it was for Dulcie. That was something neither of you were ready to control, and it sure as hell isn’t something any of us would have had the will to resist—not from someone that powerful and that… determined.”

  He didn’t move, he didn’t look at me. He was breathing very slowly.

  “But this?” I went on. “This is a choice you made. Nobody glamoured you. Nobody tricked you.”

  “I thought—”

  “That Dulcie was working for Melchior?” I interrupted, a mad, murderous, Joker-on-the-brink laugh clawing its way out of my throat. “Dude, even if she was, you can’t possibly believe that would make what you did any better. You raped your girlfriend while she was in your professional custody,” I hissed, the words whistling sharply out of my mouth like hot steam. “After she sacrificed her morality to save your life.”

  Melchior hadn’t thought it was a sacrifice; he’d thought his daughter had finally come around. He’d thought Dulcie would be happy to help him. He was so proud of her when she agreed, so deliriously, stupidly happy when she came to that first meeting.

  I didn’t know why I was suddenly thinking about this. Maybe I was trying to escape the truth that was facing me.

  Knight wouldn’t look at me. He wasn’t really looking at anything; his eyes were everywhere and his breathing had picked up. This close, I could hear his heartbeat, ramped up like a jackhammer on a mission.

  “She should have told me the position her father had forced her into,” he said quietly.

  “What, so you could do something stupid and heroic that would have gotten you killed?”

  He said nothing. I stepped away and just… looked at him.

  And Hades, he was so pathetic.

  “You were supposed to keep her safe,” I pointed out. From Melchior, from Jack. From me. I clenched my teeth until my jaw started to throb. “How she still loves you is beyond me.”

  That pulled him up short. I wondered if it really hadn’t occurred to him that Dulcie just wasn’t capable of hating him.

  “She doesn’t still love me.”

  “Are you stupid?” I demanded angrily.

  “She doesn’t even want to look at me.”

  “And do you blame her?” I shook my head. “The crazy part is that after all of this, she does still love you. It’s obvious.”

  He made this quiet, wordless growling noise and didn’t look up.

  I ran out of things to say. A minute or so passed, and I was going to just leave. Say something like, “I’m just gonna walk away now,” and jump ship, but I didn’t have to—my phone rang.

  “Hello?” I answered.

  “Quill?” Christina. Sweet, sweet angel of the office. She always called, never texted unless she had to. Something about it being more personable. “Report is on your desk when you want to look at it.”

  “Great,” I said. “On my way.”

  “You don’t have to right now.”

  “Oh, believe me, I do,” I assured her.

  When I hung up, I looked at Knight, but he didn’t look at me.

  “I’ll understand if you try to take action against me for… what happened,” he said in a deep voice.

  I was surprised. Surprised he’d admitted any of it, all the while knowing that the department might press charges against him. Shit, maybe that’s what he wanted to happen—the only way he was going to come to terms with himself.

  Maybe getting stripped of his position and possibly doing jail time was the only way Knight could wipe his slate clean? The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. I hadn’t had to push him much at all and yet he’d opened up to me—someone he barely even considered an acquaintance. The truth of it was that I’d played into his plan perfectly.

  “That’s entirely up to Dulcie, as you know,” I replied.

  He just nodded and didn’t say anything more.

  “Later, dude,” I said, and walked out.

  I never said I was good at this.

  TWELVE

  Quillan

  Five minutes later, I was sitting in the break room, staring at the table. It smelled like coffee, which smelled like gasoline, which meant nobody was in here for any longer than they had to be. People walked in and out, looking through folders, talking on their phones. Just totally absorbed in their own work. Which was nice, because it meant no one was bothering me.

  I was brooding. I could see myself from the outside, tapping my fingers against my leg and scowling at nothing, looking like I’d just lost an arm-wrestling match with a ghost. I felt numb.

  Christina sat down next to me, holding an open Tupperware container full of fruit and a criminal amount of sugar.

  “Hey, Quill,” she chirped, and kissed my cheek. I barely felt it.

  “Hey,” I said quietly.

  She got out of the car, Knight said. But she was handcuffed. Which meant she didn’t get out; he dragged her out.

  “Did you get a chance to look at the case file?” Christina asked, all smiles and rosy cheeks and glittering eyes.

  Couldn’t stop himself…

  It was the kind of sentence that made you want to break someone’s fingers, but damn me… it seemed like he was scared of himself when he said it. Had Dulcie been scared? Hurt? Emotionally, no doubt, but what about physically?

  “Quill?”

  “Hmm?”

  Christina put her fork down
and turned in her chair to face me. She laid her hand on my arm, and suddenly, I had feeling again. But only right where she was touching me. “Babe, what’s eating you?”

  She was in his custody, for fuck’s sake—that’s a felony. That’s a badge-revoking, career-burning, you’re-fucked felony.

  “Quillan?” She put her hand on my forehead. “Are you feeling alright? Do you need to go home?”

  I shook myself out of whatever funk had settled over me and tried to smile at her. I couldn’t manage it. “No, sorry. I’m fine. Really.”

  “Okay, then, what’s up?”

  “…I talked to Knight.”

  Her smile dropped. “Oh? What did he say?”

  This must have been what Bram was talking about. And Christina was hoping I’d tell her Bram was a liar and we needed to set his pants on fire. Because she, like every other rational person, assumed that Knightley fucking Vander could never, ever do something so horrible.

  I tried to answer. But I hesitated. My mouth popped open and closed like a bass on a wall.

  And she knew.

  “Oh, God,” she breathed. “Something did happen? Bram wasn’t full of shit?”

  I nodded. There weren’t words. I mean, there were plenty of them, but they weren’t words I could use. They didn’t fit right in my mouth. They didn’t feel like lies—they felt like delusions, bad dreams, acid trips.

  But strip away all the anger, the confusion, the pain, and what was left was the truth. So I just said that, instead.

  “Knight took her against her will,” I explained, and the words stuck to my tongue like a needle. It was the nicest way I could say it, and then I wasn’t even sure why I was being nice about it, anyway.

  Christina was suddenly very pale. “He what?”

  “He raped her,” I clarified, the words catching in my throat.

  Christina didn’t change her posture. She didn’t change expressions, but there was a shift, something soft, like the click of a television turning on. Like a wire sparking and starting a fire in another room. The sound of something dormant waking up.