A Vault of Sins (5 page)

“This is more important than court.” I needed to get away from Casey to save his chances, but I think I need to be close to Valerie to save her life. It’s worth the risk.

She cocks her head in a mocking manner. “Does that mean you miss me? Or are you just playing into what a stranger on the Internet wants you to do?”

“A little of both.” I finish off the rest of my drink and wince as I swallow. The stranger on the Internet . . . I can’t think of anyone on the planet who’d lead me to Valerie. Maybe Rebel_W is an angel.

She thinks for a moment. “I’ll make you a deal.”

“I’m listening.”

“You get a tattoo with me in the next few days, and I’ll stay with you.”

“That’s your deal?” I cry, pushing a five across the counter for the tip.

She grins smugly and extends her arms. “Take it or leave it.”

Posted by DoubleJay:
Holy shit¸ you guys see this? I’m posting the article.

From RNC NEWS BLOG:

Neal and Kayla Glaser, the parents of Jacinda Glaser, a deceased candidate of Compass Room C, have come forward to state that they believe that Evalyn Ibarra, Casey Hargrove, and Valerie Crane told the truth during their trial against the Division of Judicial Technology.

Neal Glaser announced to the press Friday afternoon: “I believe there’s a reason as to why an anonymous source leaked to the press that my daughter died due to a Compass Room malfunction and the surviving candidates also argue this theory. My wife and I will support them, regardless of the outcome of their trial with the Division of Judicial Technology.”

Gemma Branam, creator and overseer of Room C, has yet to address Mr. Glaser’s statement.

It’s the middle of the night by the time we arrive back home. The gravel crunches beneath my tires as I pull up to my sad shack in the woods.

Valerie shudders. “Really? Some rundown creep-o house? Are you that immune to what happened to us in July?”

I think about waking up from the dream-Compass Room to the dark trees swaying back and forth. “It’s better than being followed by reporters everywhere I go.”

“You ever leave?”

I furrow my eyebrows and shut off the engine. Come to think of it, I haven’t left since I’ve moved in. Picking up Valerie was the first time. I half-avoid the question by saying. “My food’s delivered.”

“Christ, Ev.”

“Don’t
Christ
me.” I pull my coat tightly around my shoulders and step out of the car. Our doors slam at the same time. “You’re the one who lives in a shit part of the city and goes to a strip club every night to get drunk.”

“
Refurbished
strip club. It’s only a bar now.”

“My ass. They keep the poles up for nostalgia purposes?” I shove my key into the lock and open the door.

“It was the closest place to the hotel. I could stumble home drunk.” Valerie steps into my shack of a house and drops her bag on top of a red stain on the carpet (wine—got too carried away with painting and drinking at once). She turns around slowly, her eyes resting on the unmade bed, the liquor bottles lining the counter, and then finally the painting of Jace propped up on my easel. She shrugs out of her coat and lets it fall to the floor, kneeling in front of the painting, her face inches away from the canvas.

I bite my lip and turn to the kitchen when watching her becomes too awkward, like I’m somehow barging in on this intimate moment with Valerie and the real Jace—a reunion. Selecting a bottle of booze, I unscrew the cap and find a clean glass.

“Her eyes are too far apart, but you obviously have talent. You paint this from memory?” She looks over at me in the kitchen, catching me pouring too much liquid in too big a glass. Her eyes soften. “Ev . . .”

“Don’t judge me.” I knock back half the glass in one gulp.

***

I sleep for a couple of hours, woken up by a dream where I was trying to save Salem, of all people, from getting his face ripped off by animated Compass Room trees, their branches sharp fingers that kept trying to claw off his skin.

“What was it this time?” Valerie says. I must have gasped awake. She’s next to me, lying on her back on top of the covers and holding her tablet above her.

“What?”

“The dream, what was it this time?”

I tell her, and she makes a face. “That’s weird.”

“Not even the weirdest one. Earlier I had a dream about a Mad Hatter tea party where all of us CR candidates were drinking blood out of china cups.”

“Wow. Mine aren’t that imaginative. I mean they’re scary as hell, but . . .” She trails off, and I roll out of bed.

“Why are you awake anyway?” I ask from the kitchen as I pour myself a glass of water and take the eggs out of the fridge.

“Couldn’t sleep. See the news?”

“What news?”

Valerie switches the projector mode of her tablet on and points it at the wall, where Jace’s mother appears. I can tell who she is before I even see the name. She’s much paler than Jace, but has the same dimples, and same sweet eyes.

I open the carton and start cracking eggs. Then I pour a glass of orange juice for myself, and while Val isn’t looking, slip a shot of vodka into it.

“I think the media will just say that the only reason Neal and Kayla believe us is because they want their daughter to be innocent. Reporters are a bunch of assholes like that.”

She’s right. The Glaser’s are grieving parents, so their endorsement means very little. It’s good to know we have their support, I guess.

Valerie turns off the projector and plugs her headphones into her tablet, staring at it almost obsessively. I bring her a plate of eggs and she thanks me, scarfing them down in a matter of seconds. Seeing her eat only encourages me to scrounge through the cabinets to figure out what else I can make. If she’s comfortable enough here to eat, maybe I can help put meat back on her bones. I take her plate back, stalling to read the screen of her tablet. She glances over at me, annoyed, when I sit down next to her.

“You mind?”

Just as I expected. She has over ten tabs open, all of them a headline of some sort. Jace’s name appears in over half of them. When I piece together the headlines, I can tell that they’re the ones from her original crime.

I’d done something similar at the start of the trial against the division. Not just Casey, but everyone in Compass Room C. I’d never gotten the chance to sift through all their histories before they died, and my own curiosity nagged me. But the itch to research died quickly when the criminals in the stories weren’t those I met. The depictions in the news articles weren’t even close.

I place my free hand on her knee and she stiffens. “You can talk to me, you know.”

She scoffs. “Get real, Evalyn.” Grabbing her plate back, she stands and marches over to the kitchen to dump it in the sink. I gaze over at the tablet she left behind, wondering how many of those articles she’s read more than once.

“What?”
She crosses her arms beneath the sad florescent light of the kitchen. “You want to say something to me?”

I stand. “Talk to me,
please
.”

She walks forward slowly, and it isn’t until now that I realize how damn tall she is. Why hadn’t I noticed before? Her eyes bore down on me with such intensity that I want to shrink into the corner, but I hold my ground.

“I’m really,
really
trying to understand your privilege, your choices. I
get
your fortune in Casey’s survival. You didn’t have to experience him dying so you don’t know what the grief of losing him—really losing him—feels like. And that’s why I’m trying to understand how, after everything, you could leave him. You want to protect him, so you think hiding—burrowing in this shit hole in the middle of nowhere—is the only way you can fix everything you think you fucked up.” I don’t think she can be any closer to me until she takes another step. “But don’t pretend you’re on my level. Don’t pretend that I can confide in you because you’re suffering the same, because you aren’t.” She turns from me, walking to the bed and falling onto it.

End of conversation, except I can’t let it be. “It isn’t fair that I’m not suffering as much as you.”

“That’s not how it works.”

“But it should.” I have the audacity to fall next to her on my back. We lie side by side for a while. “I don’t want you to grieve alone. I don’t want you to hold that burden. I wasn’t in love with her, but I miss her too.”

I roll my head over to watch her. Her eyes are glazed with tears. They ripple, desperate to tumble across her face, but she doesn’t let them.

“Let me in,” I whisper.

Her chest rises and falls. “The dreams are the worst, but I’m so happy I have them, you know? I can see her again.” She pauses for a long time, but I can’t think up a way to respond. The dreams are sick little moments of hell, and I can’t imagine the darkness she must feel every day to need them for relief.

“You’re an idiot for letting a little law and order get in the way of the two of you. I’d kill to have a forbidden romance right now. Literally. I’d kill.”

I wince. “You know I’d rather have died instead of her.”

“Stop it. That’s the other thing. No more of this ‘oh woe is me’ bullshit. You’re alive, goddamnit. And I think it’s time you finally realized that you’re a different person too.”

I shake my head, even though I know she’s staring at the ceiling.

“He knows the truth, you know. What you did and why you did it.”

“Casey?” I sit up, my insides clenching. Suddenly I need a drink, but I left my damn screwdriver on the kitchen counter. “You’ve spoken to him?”

“Of course . . . after you left him without so much as a good-bye.”

I slowly blink, knowing how obvious the guilt on my face must look.

“Yeah, you
better
be ashamed.”

“So he’s okay, then? He understands?”

“I wouldn’t go as far as ‘understands.’ He sees the logic, I’m sure. You still tore him up, kid. After all the shit he’s already had to deal with.”

“We’ve all had shit,” I snap.

“Whatever, Evalyn. Whatever you have to say to make yourself feel better.”

I scowl and get up to grab my drink, even though she’s right. Liz was adamant about me leaving Casey, but I can’t help wondering whether the status of our relationship would make a difference in the long run. Sure, he’s become a somewhat loveable character in the eyes of the media, and despite his crime, people have sympathy for him, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he killed his dad and will be retried for that crime whenever the hell they decide to arrest us. It’s possible we both only have minutes of freedom left. We might as well have spent it together. And it’s a slap to Valerie’s face that we aren’t.

Morning graces my little shack in the woods, and as I work on my painting of Jace and Valerie stays glued to her tablet, I debate calling Casey and letting him know where I am. I could just tell him the honest truth, what Liz told me and why I left—that I was trying to protect him from the horrible stigma of being with me. Then he could make the decision about us.

But the longer I paint, the more delusional I feel until I can’t distinguish the right choice from the wrong choice. I’m completely incapable of predicting if Casey really has a chance at freedom.

I’m so lost in my own thoughts and the paint strokes of Jace’s skin that I hardly notice Valerie’s voice.

“New Casey/Evalyn fan-fiction is up.”

I don’t piece together her words until she chuckles and says, “Damn, Ev, I didn’t realize you were such a sadist.”

I nearly drop my paintbrush, spinning around to her lounging on top of my bed, a wicked grin gracing her face. I narrow my eyes. “I fucking hate you.”

“Not as much as you hate Casey in this story. Post-CR anger sex all the way.”

“I swear to God, Valerie . . .”

“Apparently Casey’s penis is the size of a small whale’s. Can you vouch for that?” She reads more and starts to cackle. “Oh God.” She rolls to her side and clutches her stomach. Tears spout from her eyes. Finally she calms down enough to gasp, “This is in third person, mind you.”

Evalyn had enough.

So worn out by her multiple orgasms, she was sure she was about to explode.

Suddenly, Valerie barged into the hotel room.

“Oh. My. God,” I mutter.

Valerie looked upon the situation with intrigue. Casey had his dick buried deep within Evalyn.

“Okay,” I nearly scream. “Are you adding in extraneous detail?”

“Absolutely not!” cries Valerie. “These people are obsessed enough with us to want to jerk off to our fantastical love-making. You should feel honored.”

“I feel like I need to puke is what I feel.”

“But we haven’t even gotten to the kinkiest part.”

I groan. “Get on with it.”

She holds one finger up, studying the tablet, before she states very seriously, “I would like you to think about your previous statement, Evalyn Ibarra.”

“And why’s that?”

“Because in this fan-fic I’m about to use my tongue to make you come multiple times.”

“Oh God.”

“Okay that is fucking hilarious.”

“What is?”

“My tits. I have
perfect C-cup bouncy breasts with rose-capped peaks.
I can’t make this shit up.”

I press my fingers against my temples. “We’re so done.”

“So not done, Evalyn. No one has climaxed yet.” She shakes her head, eyes still deviant. “How disappointed would these readers and writers be if another feed had been found and they saw how boring your sex really was?”

“
Boring?
Are you trying to tell me that any sex without a dominatrix and a threesome is—”

She holds her hands up defensively. “I’m just pointing out what your fans seem to like, Ev, and sweet lovemaking between you and Casey isn’t their cup of tea.”

I drop my voice. “How did you know that Casey and I—”

She cuts me off. “I know a lot of things.”

“Then what about you?”

“What about me?”

“Did you have sex in the Compass Room?”

Her face falls serious, and I don’t think it’s because she’s trying to be smart this time. “I had the best sex of my life in that hell.”

Responding at all would be trying to make light of a situation that can’t be lightened. The world of the Compass Room remains enigmatic to all but us, even after the trial, when its insides were supposed to be dissected for the entire world. The gates of hell are locked, the key swallowed, and Jace remains trapped inside forever.

I turn back to my painting. Her twisted braid falls down one shoulder, and her eyes stare up at that sky like it’s her ticket to something. A way out. We all must have looked like that when we realized our end of the world might not happen in the Compass Room.

I’ve discovered what my tattoo is going to be.

I open my mouth, stretching my jaw back and forth before quietly and carefully asking, “How did we fall in love so fast?”

“Fear makes you evaluate things and people differently, I guess.”

I turn back to her. “You really think fear forced you to love her?”

Locked in a staring contest, I watch her contemplate this question for several long, silent seconds before she says. “Fear forced me to remember how to love.”