by Barker, Kira
“Quite frankly, I might have become a little too familiar with the idea of ending it, once and for all. But as insane as that might sound, I’m not suicidal, so there’s a conflict there that I believe would have raged on past the age where it still mattered.”
“Ah, love. Such a beautiful thing,” Brigitte remarked, looking at the table between us before her gaze caught mine again. “You’re working for the CIA now?”
“Homeland Security mostly, but I think they have ties to all the other agencies. I might be wrong, but I got the feeling that all of the members of the team that dear Agent Smith managed to rally got ousted by their old agencies one way or another. Classical thriller plot, really—ragtag band of misfit agents out to redeem themselves in the eyes of their superiors.”
“Makes me wonder where the whore fits into this. Key witness maybe?” she mused.
I shrugged. “My witness statement seems not valuable enough or she wouldn’t have pressed me into helping her. I think she wants concrete evidence, like a signed confession or some shit.”
Brigitte’s eyes widened a fraction.
“Like the guy who managed to leave the entire world oblivious to the fact that he has quite a few skeletons in his closet would make a mistake like that? The fact that he’s a lawyer and would likely fight every single piece of evidence tooth and nail notwithstanding.”
“She also thought it was a good idea that, for starters, I just lurk around so he sees me, but I never approach him. You know, like I’m a ghost haunting him?”
She snorted, but I could already see cunning calculation in her eyes as she thought about that.
“And your idea is to go into full frontal attack instead?” My shrug was answer enough. “What do you aim to accomplish with that? Except getting strangled in a coat rack somewhere.”
So much for hoping that I could keep my concerns from her. Unlike before, I doubted she meant that as a figure of speech. I’d spent the entire night thinking about that, and, even now, I wasn’t sure what to answer.
“Judging from how he looked at me last night, I’d say I have a very good chance of getting under his skin, so making him make mistakes is possible. But you are right—he won’t make many of them, and I doubt that they’ll hold up in court.”
Doubt clouded her gaze for a moment before it turned shrewd.
“And the alternative?”
I waited for a moment to try to come up with a better phrasing, but there really was none.
“If I want to make sure that he can’t hurt anyone else again, I’ll have to make sure that he literally cannot hurt anyone else again, right?”
Brigitte took that a lot calmer than I’d expected.
“You think you can do that?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t want to, but I have a certain feeling that if I push him enough, he will force me to act, and my survival instinct won out once already.”
I really wasn’t sure how I felt about premeditated murder, but, as it was, revenge was the one thing that kept me going—or at least the one thing I liked to admit that was driving me out of bed at odd hours of the night. Brigitte considered my words, but she didn’t look half as scandalized as she probably should have. Alarmed, yes, but it seemed more like concern for me rather than the morally right reaction to hearing a plan like that.
“And you think I can help you,” she surmised.
“Let’s put it this way. You have the means to get me wherever he goes and give me a good reason to be there.”
“Taking over from me would be just for show?”
I hesitated for a moment, but shook my head. “Honestly, I miss being in the city. I miss my old job but I’m sure that I can’t do it anymore. Even if I manage to resolve this current mess, I now have more baggage than a whore can have and still function. But I think I would do a good job managing the girls. If that’s still an option for you.”
Brigitte was silent for a long moment, sipping her coffee as she contemplated my words.
“I can’t let you endanger any of them,” she pointed out.
“And I won’t. Believe me, I wouldn’t even be here if I thought I’d seriously endanger you.”
“Didn’t exactly sound like that before.”
I gave a dismissive grunt at that. “It took him less than half an hour after I entered the Peninsula to pay for the room and send a personally signed bouquet of flowers. If he just wanted me dead, my brains would already be splattered across that suite. I’m sure that he has both the means and connections to hire a sniper or a team of thugs. No, this between us is personal. There is a small chance that if he can’t get to me directly, he’d try to go through you, but I think he would have done so already if he thought that move was a prudent one.” I paused for a moment, forcing myself to assess the situation as objectively as possible. “It might have been a possibility if I’d gone along with Agent Smith’s plan where she’d try to sequester me in the Ivory Tower, but my game plan is to make myself accessible. So accessible that one day he will snap and come after me. Looking back, I’m not even sure he tried to come after me when I left. He knew he’d just have to dangle a lure and I’d eventually come out of hiding. Now that I’m back, he’ll take his time to make me pay for the insolence of running away. He will do that in the most blatant, direct way; he doesn’t need to go through anyone else because he knows that he already has all the tools he needs to get to me.”
She considered a little longer, but eventually inclined her head. “I’ll help you. But you know that I don’t half-ass anything. You want to pretend to take over? Fine with me. But you will put in the real work. And after this is all said and done, we’ll see if you’ll take the job for real.”
“Sounds fine with me,” I said, offering her my hand. Brigitte gave me a humorless smile as she shook it.
“When do we begin?”
I couldn’t hold back a snort. “As soon as I get this terrible hue out of my hair and manage to make my skin look like it’s not a bad approximation of peeling leather anymore.”
“I know just the guy,” Brigitte remarked, fishing for her phone book—the bona fide paper book that could easily be burned and was foolproof in this electronic day and age. “And very soon, you’ll know him, too.”
With that, she pushed the book toward me. I felt a light flutter in my chest as I opened it, starting to peruse the many, many contacts. While I’d never seriously considered taking over for her until she’d mentioned it last summer, I had dreamed of getting a glimpse of what was written on these pages—and now she was handing me the keys to the kingdom. Part of me wished that it would have come at a better stage in my life, but one thing I’d always been good at—to make the best of what life dealt me. And that was exactly what I was going to do now.
Chapter 4
Monday morning saw me, bright and early, back at Brigitte’s doorstep, ready to start my apprenticeship of sorts. Over the course of the last years she’d let me catch a glimpse or two behind the scenes, but until she pulled out the three ledgers—honest-to-God bound appointment books filled with detailed schedules of her girls—I hadn’t realized just how much work coordinating actually was. And that didn’t even factor in client preferences and satisfaction yet, but was just the time table crunching part of business.
I wasn’t sure if I’d actually convinced her of my sincerity to take over for good after a certain transitional period, but really, words would get me only so far—putting in the hours seemed like a much better strategy. And as I still didn’t really sleep, I had my nights to mull over the different things we discussed every day, and her extensive client files to pore over. I was surprised how detailed they turned out to be when I got to a few of my old favorites. That, in turn, made it obvious why her business was still thriving even when people had less money to spend overall—if satisfaction was as close to fulfillment as it could get, people were much more hesitant to cut their losses and ready to give up something else.
Although the constant,
latent stress was soon showing some wear and tear, I couldn’t help but feel that with this new purpose in life, my spirit picked up a little. I was both looking forward to and terribly apprehensive of meeting Darren again, but in the meantime, I had something to keep myself busy with.
For a few days, I didn’t hear anything from Agent Smith, to the point where I was wondering if she was mad enough at me for cutting myself free to let me on a looser leash for a longer time. That idea was crushed when I opened my shiny new laptop late one night and found a note from Adam in the spread sheet I had been working on, making it abundantly clear that they kept close tabs on me. After my experience with Darren, the knowledge that someone was—again—reading every single line I typed, listening to every conversation I had, following every step I took—unnerved me, but there was no way around this. It made me doubly glad that Brigitte hadn’t transitioned from paper to electronic record keeping yet, and seemed to have no ambitions to change that any time in the near future.
I also got to see the real power of her black contact book in those early days of my return. Getting appointments at the most talented, exclusive coiffeur in town was one thing; waking up to a detailed list of updated information on a myriad of clients—past, present, and possibly future—each morning, compiled by her trusty team of PIs and hackers, was quite another. I’d known that she had someone reliable to do background checks for her, but I hadn’t anticipated how big that team was, and the abundance of new information they provided each day. Within hours, I had a sketchy possible itinerary of social gatherings where I might run into Darren over and over again, and that didn’t even include his little girl toy’s work schedule yet—which landed in my inbox the following day. Adam would have felt right at home with these guys, I was sure.
I absolutely hated reading everything about her, but couldn’t help but admit that it made my work so much easier.
On Sunday, exactly one week after my timely return to the city, Brigitte told the girls about her plans to hand the business over to me. There was some resistance—particularly Pam didn’t feel like I was qualified—but like with so many other things, Brigitte didn’t tolerate anyone putting on airs, and the topic was off the table in under five minutes. She graciously told the girls to now go through me if they had any personal concerns about their clients or work environment, adding a good extra twenty hours to my already increasingly busy schedule.
All that extra information suddenly falling into my lap made me wonder if it wasn't plain old blackmail that kept Brigitte out of jail rather than the legal loopholes that she had alluded to.
Her suggestion was for me to wait another week before kicking my plans into action, but come Wednesday, I realized that I couldn’t go on treading water rather than hunting for my big white whale. It was early morning when I came back from doing laps in the hotel swimming pool, when I found that the bouquet of flowers had been replaced. Over the course of the past days they had started to wilt, a heady scent of decay perfuming the foyer. Now, there was a bouquet of deep red roses waiting for me in their stead, with a new card leaning against the vase. I picked it up, the crooked finger of my right hand shaking slightly.
It read, My, my, haven’t you been a busy bee?
It was that moment when I realized that the time for remaining idle was up.
It was also that moment when it occurred to me that the flare of feeling alive that seeing Darren again had brought with it had almost died to low-burning embers—and in more ways than just one I suddenly needed to kick myself out of passivity.
Picking up the notebook where I’d filed away the information that Brigitte’s snooping team had dredged up, I quickly scanned this week’s schedule, finding the perfect opportunity was waiting for me—tonight. Then again, the blood red roses—the color so very like the evening gown my personal shopper had brought over just the day before—hadn’t appeared this very day out of coincidence.
Brigitte picked up her phone on the second ring even though it was still early.
“What do you think about Tosca tonight?”
I’d been to the Lyric Opera of Chicago more often than I could count. That Brigitte had a standing reservation—shared with three other madams—didn’t come as a surprise. That it only took her five minutes to get us two seats for a show that had been completely booked in advance for months kind of did. I’d always enjoyed both the building and the performances, but I’d never been quite so nervous as I disembarked from the limousine and ascended the stairs behind Brigitte, snuggled into my heavy, black wool-and-fur coat.
We’d arrived early, both to make sure that we’d get here before my intended target, and to set that other plan in motion. When I’d explained to Brigitte why I wanted to come here, she’d pointed out that the impact would be much greater if I had an actual reason to be there besides baiting Darren—and introducing me as her official successor was just the thing.
Even with the heat turned up inside the foyer, I hated giving up my coat; it left me feeling bare in a way that had nothing whatsoever to do with the cut of my dress—which was, of course, rather revealing, paying homage to the fact that I was a woman comfortable with not hiding an ounce of who she was, also in the most physical sense. My breasts were modestly covered but there was a lot of squishing and lifting going on that had nothing to do with my actual curves and left little to the imagination. Brigitte’s black dress with silver accents was much more understated than mine, making her look almost the matron next to my “stare at me” vibrancy—almost.
Yet as we stepped out of the foyer and into the adjacent room where early revelers were already in attendance, and heads turned and eyes followed me, I felt strangely empowered. The looks we both drew weren’t all favorable—in some cases they were downright hostile—but while before they had made me cringe, like on that ill-fated day in the country club, now they left me feeling set apart in a positive way. Yes, I was the whore who’d set out to become queen of all whores, but that still made me royalty. It gave me power, and it gave me freedom, the two things Darren had so expertly torn from me long before he’d tied me up in his basement.
Brigitte let me drink in that heady feeling for a little while, but before long she started steering me from one group of people to the next, smiling sweetly here, giving a knowing look there, or even a nod of acknowledgement to the odd woman who looked back at her with familiarity in her gaze. Few words were exchanged, but people seemed to get the message nevertheless. When we’d come up with the plan, I’d been somewhat concerned that I might be conceived as just one of her girls, like meat on a plate, but while I drew the odd interested gaze, it came without the casual sense that I’d become so used to over the years. Oh, they wanted me and might pay a hefty sum for my time, but it was clear that I wasn’t just a common piece of ass anymore.
Then I turned around and saw a familiar full head of hair peeking over the masses, and my heart seized up. Brigitte noticed a moment later, her hand on my arm making me focus on her instead. Fine worry lines had appeared around her eyes and mouth but she gave me the barest of head shakes, a clear note for me to get myself together. Deliberately turning my back on where I actually yearned to run to, I followed her as she continued working the room, tireless in her effort to show me around.
With more people streaming into the building now as it got closer to the beginning of the opera, it was easy to get lost in the masses while I smiled and wished good evenings, handing out a card or two from my stash, all the while feeling the skin of my back burning with what I knew must be his gaze. It cost me so much not to turn around, not to check, not to catch and hold his gaze, not to—
The call to take our seats saved me the hassle of determining just how far my heart was screaming to go while my mind was tugging in the opposite direction. Yet my respite was a brief one; Brigitte had seats on the left side portion of the box level, which gave me a great view of the stage—but also at where Darren and his little plaything sat down in the floor seats.
Ju
st peachy.
Tosca had always been one of my favorites, and it would have been nice to just enjoy the performance without having to spend a moment concentrating on anything else. I’d been to the opera many times with clients, but that had usually included a certain kind of attention required. Now, work clearly happened before and after the show, with quick dashes outside during the breaks, but nothing should have taken away from letting the music grip me—if my mind would just have let me.
I didn’t even pretend that I wasn’t watching what was going on downstairs through my little opera glass. I knew that our seating could only be coincidence, but it left me with a clear line of sight directly at where my attention was flitting to every couple of seconds. And as things on stage ramped up in the third act, so they did in the seats. Until then, Darren had mostly kept to himself with the odd comment whispered, but now his hand was firmly on Daliah’s knee, then started climbing up her thigh and underneath the skirt of her short black dress. With Ray on her other side—sneaking the occasional eyeful—there didn’t seem to be anything prudent making her stop him. And if a whore could recognize something, it was the body language of someone getting off.
It shouldn’t have affected me. It certainly didn’t make me horny, although I normally could appreciate a good performance, including stealthy ones. But as I sat there, watching her shoulders tense, then sag, I just couldn’t control how my right hand in particular clenched, the hard band around my ring finger digging deep into my scarred flesh. And then I just couldn’t take it anymore and had to get up, excusing myself as I pushed through the three rows of chairs behind mine.
Thirty-four quick steps later—I counted—I was outside in the hallway, cooler air rushing in my face after the suddenly stifling heat inside. Taking a few quick breaths, I surged on, heading toward the main entrance. Not that I intended to flee the building, but putting more distance between me and what had made me lose my cool sounded like a damn good idea. I stopped at the balustrade above the foyer, looking out over the now deserted lavish carpets below.