Page 33 of Girl Anonymous

For the first time, as Dante turned toward the window, Maarja saw a crack in his mask of detachment. Grief? Fury? She didn’t know, but she wanted to go to him and hug him, tell him the sorrow would never go away, but it would fade… And he would tell her it would fade only when he won bloody justice for his mother.

At least hugging him would distract him, because her own eyes were watering, and not from sorrow. The stench was growing.

The timer dinged, and Kristoff and the assistant took Maarja under her arms, pulled her to her feet, and rushed her to the bar sink. They rinsed, shampooed, rinsed, shampooed with an urgency that made her hope she had hair left for them to style. They blotted her head, pulled her up, marched her back to the chair, and Kristoff went to work with scissors and razor.

She didn’t understand how it could take so long to trim as little hair as she had left, but forty-five long minutes later, Kristoff stepped back, his assistant blotted his forehead, and he swiveled the chair around to face Dante. “Well?”

Dante strolled over. He circled her, nodding slowly. “Maestro, you’re a genius.”

Fedelma and the assistant oohed and applauded.

This whole being-an-object thing irritated the hell out of Maarja. “CanIsee?”

The assistant actually had to search to find a handheld mirror, and while she held it for Maarja, Kristoff launched into a two-minute demonstration of what product to use, how she could change the style, what to do as the area around her face grew out, and told her when her next hair appointment would be.

Then Maarja was out of the chair, Kristoff and Ingaborg whisked themselves out of the room, and Fedelma took a cordless vacuum out of the closet, cleaned up the clipped hair, and left Maarja alone with Dante.

CHAPTER 14

“What do you think of the look?” he asked.

“It’s…like I…did this on purpose.” She knew she sounded stunned, but those glimpses of herself in the mirror inspired awe and amazement. Somehow she had gone from an invisible female in frumpy coveralls to a woman battered by an explosion and grief to a lead in next season’s fashions.

For a woman who preferred to blend into the scenery, that could not be good.

She didn’t look at Dante. She was too aware of the awkwardness of meeting the guy she’d slept with and acting like it was no big deal. So she wandered over to the overflowing bookshelves. The hardcovers included architectural history, business and relationship advice. The paperbacks, SF and cozy mysteries, were well-read. Enshrined in its own lighted case, a richly decorated edition ofA Thousand Nightsheld the place of honor. She drew near, put her nose almost to the glass.

“Would you like to hold it?” Dante stood at her side.

She briefly considered he knew a lot about seduction and seducing her in particular, and wished she had the good sense to say no. “May I?”

He opened his phone, typed in a code, and the case went dark. He lifted the glass lid and stepped back.

Her hands were clean and dry, and when she hovered her fingers over the leather, she sensed its age. Gently she carried it over to the window into the light. But not the direct sunlight; that would fade the colors, the ink. She leafed through the pages.

“Sixteenth century, leather-bound, beautifully illustrated, in Persian,” she told him. The gold work on the page edges glittered dully. The end papers were a feast of gold leaf, rich green abstract plants, and ultramarine animal eyes that peered from the page. A single carmine smear marred the page.

“It’s stained,” Dante said. “The only flaw.”

She stroked her fingers over that stain. In that touch, she smelled a curl of flavored tobacco, tasted the printer’s sweet pleasure in his completed masterpiece, felt the prick of the knife’s point on his finger and the smooth slide of the paper as he used his blood to mark the book… “It’s not a flaw. It was deliberate. His blood on his creation, forever.”

Dante viewed her with something like awe. “I was afraid you’d tell me the book was a fake.”

“No. It’s very, very real.” She returned it to its case, smoothed her fingertips across the binding one last time, and observed while Dante covered it with the glass and set the alarm.

He said, “When we marry, it will be yours.”

“No.”

He took her hand. “Come and sit on my stool.”

“Is that a euphemism?”

“So suspicious.” He led her behind his desk and to the ergonomic drafting chair he had pushed against the wall. “Up,” he said.

“Why?”

“You look so fragile a zephyr could blow you away, and we have to talk.”

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