Black Heart (20 page)

I study his security, too. He always has two bodyguards who follow him everywhere. They aren’t always the same two guys, but they all have broken noses and smirking smiles. There are a few articles about Patton using funds to hire ex-cons to round out his security staff, men he personally pardoned. He never goes anywhere without them.

I watch several YouTube videos of him ranting about conspiracy theories, workers, and big government. I listen to the faint traces of his accent, the way he enunciates, and
the way he pauses just before he says something he thinks is really important. I watch the way he gestures, reaching out to the audience like he’s hoping to wrap them in his arms.

I call my mother and get a few more particulars while pretending to be interested in how she edged herself into his life. I find out where he buys his suits (Bergdorf; they have his measurements so he can just call and have a suit tailored and overnighted to a speaking engagement). What languages he speaks (French and Spanish). The medicine he takes for his heart (Capoten and a single baby aspirin). The way he walks, heel to toe, so that the backs of his shoes always wear down first.

I watch and look and listen and read until I feel like Governor Patton is standing over my shoulder and whispering into my ear. It’s not a good feeling.

FRIDAY AFTERNOON, AS
I’m coming back from classes, my phone buzzes in the pocket of my uniform pants. I take it out, but the number is blocked.

“Hello?” I say into the mouthpiece.

“We’re coming to get you tomorrow night,” says Yulikova. “Clear your schedule. We want to be moving by six p.m.”

Something’s wrong. Really, really wrong. “You said everything was happening
next
Wednesday, not this Saturday.”

“I’m sorry, Cassel,” she says. “Plans change. We have to be flexible right now.”

I lower my voice. “Look, that thing with the death worker and me tailing him—I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the gun. I know you know. I just panicked. I still have it. I didn’t do anything with it. I could bring it to you.”

I shouldn’t bring it to her. I promised it to Gage.

I should bring it to her. I should have given it to her in the first place.

She doesn’t speak for a long moment. “That wasn’t your smartest move.”

“I know,” I say.

“Why don’t you turn the gun in tomorrow night and we’ll just call the whole thing a misunderstanding.”

“Right.” My feeling of disquiet grows, although I can’t say why. There’s just something not right about her tone. Something that makes me feel like she’s already distanced herself from this situation.

I’m surprised she’s letting me off so easy about the gun. Nothing about this sits right.

“I was reading about Patton,” I say, to keep her talking.

“We can talk about this when we pick you up.” She says it kindly, but I can hear the dismissal in her voice.

“He has private security with him at all times. Tough guys. I was just wondering how we were getting around that.”

“I promise you, Cassel, we’ve got good people handling this. Your part is significant but small. We’re going to take care of you.”

“Humor me,” I say, putting some of the anger I feel into my voice.

She sighs. “I’m sorry. Of course you’re concerned. We understand the risk you’re taking, and we appreciate it.”

I wait.

“We have one of them on the payroll. He’s going to stall the other guard for long enough that you can take care of things. And he’s going to watch your back.”

“Okay,” I say. “I’ll meet you at Wallingford. Call me when you get here.”

“Try not to worry,” Yulikova says. “Good-bye, Cassel.”

My heart’s racing and my stomach is in knots as I close my phone. There is nothing worse than the creeping formless sense of dread—until that moment when it becomes clear what you should have been dreading all along. When you know it’s not just all in your head. When you see the danger.

The Feds don’t need me to bring in Patton. They don’t need me at all. If they’ve really got one of his bodyguards on their payroll, they could disappear him anytime they wanted.

I sit down on the library steps and call Barron.

I can hear traffic in the background when he picks up. “You want something?” He sounds annoyed.

“Oh, come on,” I say. I’m not exactly pleased with him, either. “You can’t really be pissed off—just because you thought that I couldn’t convince her you were lying when you were
actually lying
.”

“So you called to gloat?” he asks.

“Yulikova moved up the date for the thing, and she has
an inside man already. Someone positioned to do this job a lot better than me. Does that sound fishy to you?”

“Maybe,” he says.

“And that death worker I chased down. Her people picked him up after to see if I lied about anything.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah. I took something from him and I . . . I kind of let him go. She knew that and never said anything.”

“That does seem weird. I guess you’re screwed. Sucks to be you, Cassel. Looks like the Feds aren’t your friends after all.”

He hangs up, leaving me with silence.

I don’t know why I expected anything else.

I sit on the steps for a long time. I don’t go to track practice. I don’t go to dinner. I just turn the phone over and over in my hands until I realize I have to get up and go somewhere eventually.

I dial Lila’s number. I don’t expect her to answer, but she does.

“I need your help,” I say.

Her voice is low. “We’ve helped each other enough, don’t you think?”

“I just need to talk through some things with someone.”

“It shouldn’t be me.”

I take a deep breath. “I’m working with the Feds, Lila. And I’m in trouble. A lot of trouble.”

“I’m getting my coat,” she says. “Tell me where you are.”

We arrange to meet at the old house. I get my keys and head to my car.

I’m sitting in the kitchen in the dark when she opens the door. I’m thinking about the smell of my father’s cigarillos and what it was like when we were very young and nothing really mattered.

She flips on the lights, and I blink up at her.

“Are you okay?” She comes over to the table and puts one gloved hand on my shoulder. She’s wearing tight black jeans and a scarred leather jacket. Her blond hair is as bright as a gold coin.

I shake my head.

Then I tell her everything—about Patton, about Maura, about wanting to be good and falling short, about following her that day when I chased down Gage without knowing why, about Yulikova and the gun. Everything.

By the time I’m done, she’s sitting backward in one of the chairs, resting her chin on her arms. She has shouldered off the jacket.

“How mad at me are you?” I ask. “I mean, exactly how mad—like on a scale of one to ten, where one is kicking my ass and ten is a shark tank?”

She shakes her head at my scale. “You mean because you watched me put out a contract on someone and then watched Gage kill him? That you’re cooperating with the law, maybe even working for them? That you never told me any of this? I’m not
happy
. Does it bother you—what you saw me do?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“You think I have ice in my blood?” She asks it lightly, but I know the answer matters.

I wonder what it would be like, being raised to be a crime lord. “You are what you always were going to be.”

“Remember when we were kids?” she says. There’s a slight smile on her mouth, but the way she’s looking at me doesn’t quite match up. “You thought I would be the one making deals and enemies, backstabbing and lying. You said you were going to get out, travel the world. Not get swept up in the life.”

“Shows what I know.”

“That’s one long game you’ve been playing, Cassel. One long, dangerous game.”

“I didn’t mean for everything to get so crazy. It was one thing after another. I had to fix things.
Someone
had to fix things for Maura, and I was the only one who knew, so there just wasn’t anyone else. And I had to keep Barron from going to the Brennans. And I had to stop myself—” I do stop myself there, because I can’t say the rest. I can’t explain how I needed to stop myself from being with her. I can’t explain how I nearly didn’t manage it.

“Okay, well, quit.” She makes a wild gesture with her hands, as though stating something so obvious that it shouldn’t have to be said. “You did what you thought you had to do, but you still have a way out, so take it. Get away from the Feds. And if they don’t want to let you off easy, then go into hiding. I’ll help. I’ll talk to my dad. I’ll try to see if he can take some of the pressure off the thing with your mother, at least until you can solve this. Don’t let them play you.”

“I can’t quit.” I look away, at the peeling wallpaper above the sink. “I can’t. It’s too important.”

“What makes you so eager to throw away your life on whatever cause comes along?”

“That’s not true. That’s not what I was doing—”

“None of it is your fault.
What is it that you feel so damn guilty about that makes you act like
you
don’t matter?” Her voice rises, and she rises with it, coming around the table to push against my shoulder. “What makes you think that you’ve got to solve everyone’s problems, even mine?”

“Nothing.” I shake my head, turning away from her.

“Is it Jimmy Greco and Antanas Kalvis and the rest? Because I knew them, and they were really bad men. The world’s a better place without them in it.”

“Stop trying to make me feel better,” I say. “You know I don’t deserve it.”

“Why don’t you deserve it?”
she yells, her voice sounding like the words are being ripped out of her gut. Her hand is on my upper arm; she’s trying to get me to look at her.

I won’t.

“You,” I say, standing. “Because of
you
.”

For a moment neither of us speaks.

“What I did—,” I start, but I can’t make that sentence go anywhere good. I start over. “I can’t forgive myself—I don’t
want
to forgive myself.”

I sink down to the linoleum tiles and say what I have never said before. “I killed you. I remember killing you. I killed you.” The words, over and over and over, rolling out of me. My voice is catching. My voice is breaking.

“I’m alive,” Lila says, sliding to her knees so that I have to look at her, have to see her. “I’m right here.”

I take a deep, shuddering breath.

“We’re alive,” she says. “We made it.”

I feel like I’m about to shake apart. “I’ve screwed up everything, haven’t I?”

Now it’s her turn not to meet my gaze. “I wouldn’t let Daneca work me,” she says, slowly and carefully, putting every word together as if having one out of place will make everything fall apart. “But I didn’t stop loving you. Because I always have, Cassel. Since we were kids. You have to remember: I paraded around in my underwear at my own birthday party.”

That startles a laugh out of me. I touch the ear she pierced that night, the hole closed now, and try to imagine a world where I wasn’t the only one who felt something. “I didn’t think that meant—”

“Because you’re an idiot,” she says. “An
idiot
. When the curse wore off, I couldn’t let you see that I still had feelings. I thought I was the only one who’d ever had them.”

She has woven her fingers together and is clenching them tight, the leather taut over her knuckles. “You were kind. You’re always kind. I figured you pretended to love me until you couldn’t pretend anymore. And I couldn’t let you think you still had to. So I’d jab myself in the hand with scissors, or pens—with anything sharp in reach—whenever I thought of you. Until when I saw you I could concentrate on that moment of pain. . . . And despite that, I still wanted to see you.”

“I haven’t been pretending, Lila,” I say. “I never was. I know how it looked, me asking Daneca to make you not feel
anything. But I kissed you before I knew what my mother had done, remember? I kissed you because I had wanted to for a very long time.”

She shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

“That night, in your dorm room—Lila,
you were cursed
,” I say. “And I almost didn’t care. It was awful, because you acted like you really felt all these things, and I had to constantly remind myself that it wasn’t real—and sometimes I was overwhelmed by the awfulness. I wanted to blot out how bad I felt. I knew it wasn’t right and I still didn’t stop myself.”

“Okay,” she says. “It’s okay.”

“But I would never want—”

“I know that, Cassel,” she says. “You could have explained.”

“And said what? That I did want to be with you?” I demand. “That I just couldn’t trust myself enough? That I—”

She leans forward and brings her mouth to mine. I have never been so profoundly glad to be forced to shut up.

I close my eyes, because even seeing her is too much right now.

I feel like a man who’s been living on bread and water and is now overwhelmed by a feast. I feel like someone chained in the dark for so long that the light has become terrifying. My heart wants to beat its way out of my chest.

Her lips are soft, sliding against mine. I am lost in kiss after drowning kiss. My gloved fingers trace the skin of her cheek and the hollow of her throat until she moans into my mouth. My blood is boiling, pooling low in my gut.

She unknots my tie with quick fingers. When I pull back
to look at her, she grins and tugs the cloth free from my collar in a single motion.

I raise both eyebrows.

With a laugh Lila pushes herself off the floor and reaches out her gloved hand to haul me to my feet. “Come on,” she says.

I stand up. Somehow my shirt has gotten untucked. Then we’re kissing again, staggering up the stairs. She stops to kick off her boots, bracing herself against me and the wall. I shrug out of my jacket.

“Lila,” I say, but that’s all I can manage as she begins to unbutton my white dress shirt.

It falls to the floor of the hallway.

We lurch into my bedroom, where I imagined her a thousand times, where I thought I had lost her forever. Those memories seem blurred now, hard to count as important beside the vividness of her cool leather-clad hand brushing over the hard planes of my stomach and the corded muscles of my arms. I suck in my breath.