“So!” I turn and point the gun at the man sitting next to me. “Surprise!”
A smile slides over his face like oil pooling on water and I wasn’t ready for this, because I’m back—I’m back—oh no I don’t want to remember what he makes me remember. Lips and hands and a dance floor and—
“Hello, Sofia,” Rafael says.
I lean back against the plush leather seat and sigh, still training the gun on his head. “I didn’t miss you.” (His lips on mine, the first lips on mine, my first kiss, oh I want to be sick.)
He laughs, and his teeth are white and his throat is tan and I want to cut break cut smash it. I hate him. He is as slickly beautiful as ever, and I don’t know what he’s doing here but it’s twisting my stomach and making the space behind my eyes heavy with the insistent pressure of wrong.
“How do you like New York?” he asks.
“If you brought me here for small talk, you could have used fewer guns. Just a thought.”
“I was actually hoping you could help me with something. See, I had a bit of a disappointment today. Something I’ve been working on for a while fell through.”
The would-be assassin. “Whoops.” I flash him an off-kilter grin, but inside the spinning needle whirls faster. I cannot believe I stopped her. I cannot believe it was right. I hate Rafael, hate his smell and the feel of him near me.
But maybe Rafael is the only person doing the right thing.
My stomach drops as I realize . . . oh, no.
Oh, no.
Lerner. Casey was working for Lerner.
She was working for Rafael.
Rafael is with Lerner.
Maybe not. Maybe she was so good she could think about Lerner to frame them. It’s not right, I know it’s not right, but I cling to it. She didn’t think about Rafael, she didn’t!
He smiles and everything buzzes, feels off, more off than ever before. “You win some, you lose some. And when I heard you were finally in deep with Daddy Keane, well, that changed everything. Let’s talk about how you’re going to help me.”
“Why would I help you?” I whisper.
“James was.”
“Liar,” I snarl.
“I didn’t tell him about Casey. Shame, really. You would have liked her. She was my fail-safe, put into action because James broke his promises. We were supposed to build our own army together—him on the inside, me on the outside. Take down his father. Lately, however, I think he likes being daddy’s pet more than he wants revenge. Does that feel familiar to you, Fia? Promises strung out along months, tentative ideas for a future that never seems to get here, no matter how close you keep getting?” He leans forward intently.
No. No no no. James wouldn’t back out. Rafael is a liar. I can only trust James. If James is wrong, if James is lying to me, then I am wrong and if I am wrong, nothing is ever right again. If I cannot trust myself to love the right person, what can I trust?
Rafael can see that I’m wavering. He sits back, pulls out his phone as though he can’t be bothered to pay full attention to the conversation. “We have another friend in common. Sweetest girl. She’s like a sane version of you. Goes by Annie.”
The world drops out from underneath me.
Annie.
There’s a rather insistent-bordering-on-panicked tapping; Rafael opens the window and I realize the tapping this time wasn’t in my head. I can’t always tell.
The man who escorted me here is red-faced. “You okay, sir?”
Rafael waves a hand dismissively. “Relax. Sofia and I are old friends. Isn’t that right?”
Rafael’s man has his arm through the window, trying to unlatch the door. I let him, then kick it open, slamming it into his stomach. I pull it back shut, then smash the gun against the side of Rafael’s head.
“Annie is dead,” I hiss. I hold the gun to his temple. There’s a trickle of blood running down and the barrel disrupts its path. I wonder how the blood would have fallen if I didn’t get in the way. I change things. All the time. I change them to be how I want them to be. “I killed her.”