He smiled at me and raised his arms to showcase the house. “You came, Miss Eleanor Willis. What do you think of my house? Isn’t it the loveliest house you’ve ever seen?”
I pasted a smile on my lips and the next thing I said wasn’t a lie, “Yes, it’s the nicest house I’ve ever seen.”
“Good, good,” he said and clapped his hands together. “Since you are new here, let me show you around and introduce you to the guests.”
It was the most terrifying and boring hour of my life. He introduced me to literally everyone, saying my name “Miss Eleanor Willis” to every single person there. And there were a lot of people. I estimated at least eighty, milling about and looking pretty.
The whole time I kept thinking about the necklace, I kept thinking about how I was going to do it and when. How would I get his food, what if I slipped up and he caught me? How long did the poison take to work? Would I have time to give it to him and then excuse myself to the bathroom? Would anyone suspect me? Did I have to sit there and watch him eat it and die? Because for all the terrible things he’d done, for the devil that he was, I didn’t know if I could do that. My heart would take no pleasure in murdering him, in seeing him die before my eyes. I always thought I might, that I would swim in it, but now that I was here and it was a reality, poison at my neck, I knew it would haunt me. Just because someone deserved to die didn’t mean I was the person to do it.
But for tonight, for here, I had to. I was the angel of death, walking arm in arm with Lucifer.
We paused by the open doors to the veranda where many people were sitting about on brightly colored deckchairs, watching the thunder and lightning storm off in the distance. From here you had the vantage point of looking down the large grassy sweep of finely cut lawn and garden that was illuminated by various lights. In flashes of lightning I could see the lawn went beyond the lights and disappeared into jungle. It looked like acres and acres and it was all his.
Travis was beside me, talking to someone that he introduced as the senator of something. But I wasn’t listening to a word they were saying. My eyes were caught on someone across the room, a striking man in an ill-fitting suit and an arm in a sling.
Camden. He was here, somehow. Just standing by the wall, his eyes on me, sending me signals. Trying to say something. But what? He was here, he was alive. He was alive. I looked around, trying not to be too obvious about it, to see if Javier was too, if it was a trap. Or maybe a dream, maybe a nightmare. But I didn’t see him, not Gus, not anyone. Only Camden. He jerked his head toward the hallway, motioning for me to go out that way, to meet him there.
I told him I would with my eyes, and was about to tell Travis I needed to use the bathroom when a woman stepped in front of me with a tray of champagne.
“Would you like some champagne,” she asked me and I nearly burst into tears at the sound of her voice. This woman. She was looking at the men, a phony smile pasted on her lips, one that lingered on Travis a little too long. Then she looked at me and for one second I could have been another pretty girl on the arm of the man she had once loved.
Then there was a flash of recognition, recognition that messed with her features, making her look less like a thin, middle-aged woman with highlighted brown hair and tall Estonian cheekbones, and more like a woman having the fright of her life. Because this, this was absolutely as frightening as it was fucked up.
She dropped the tray, it falling in slow motion, the champagne flutes tipping and the fizzing liquid spilling everywhere.
“Ellie!” she exclaimed. And that’s when I knew it wasn’t a daydream of mine. It wasn’t something I’d imagined over and over again because what I’d imagined didn’t have my mother working for Travis Raines.
My mother.
This was my mother.
Mom.
She was here, standing in front of me. After all these years, she was here with me.
And in that moment, that cry that escaped from her red lips, she and I both knew what was happening. That Travis was looking between the two of us and putting two and two and eleven and twenty-six together.
I had, maybe, a few seconds. My eyes flitted over my mother’s shoulder to Camden in one second. He was already running toward me, a plastic bottle in his hand. He knew, he’d seen this was coming.
In the next second, I spun around and ran like hell. I ran as fast as I could, grateful, for once, that I was never able to wear high heels, and shoved people out the way, leaping onto the veranda. I don’t know what happened behind me, I could only focus on the lawn in front, the lights, the darkness behind it all. Suddenly there was a small explosion, a burst of something going off, though there was no heat and no light, but there was screaming and coughing and there was gunfire and suddenly Camden was at my side, running alongside me.
There was no time, no space in my lungs to talk, no way to figure out what had just happened and how that could have been my mother, my mom, who had left me in California all those years ago. The one who made me a freak, who left me as one. How could she be here? How could she be with that man, the one who ruined me before everyone else did? How could she do this to me?
My vision was getting blurry and the rainclouds burst open again, in time to hide my tears. I kept running, Camden at my side, limbs pumping up and down, bullets whizzing past us and I had no idea how we were going to get out of this alive.
I should have killed Travis the first chance I got. Now the necklace was still around my neck and it was useless.
A machine gun went off in the distance, the rattle of bullets. We were heading for the jungle, for the darkness and depth that promised shelter and shade. We moved just inside the first trees, where a wide but overgrown path had cut through, when we were suddenly illuminated with light. A row of them went on a few yards in front of us, lights that belonged to a Jeep or a utility vehicle. Someone appeared at the top of the vehicle, standing on the seat, gun propped up over the windshield and aimed right at us.