Page 62 of Hero & Villain
Of course. Setting someone up for life in prison was so different from actually taking someone’s life. She was disgusting for wanting to take her son’s happiness and buy him respectability instead, and I was disgusting for coming here to ruin his life just because he’d ruined mine. To him, it was just a business deal. He didn’t know that it had personal ramifications for me. I couldn’t be like this woman, pretending moral superiority, but could I be a villain who acknowledged her selfishness and conniving cruelty? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything other than a rising panic and fluttering in my chest that might come with humiliating tears.
I needed to get out of this limo. “I’ll take the money, of course, just don’t hurt me.” I blinked rapidly, and my wateryeyes were so convincing, almost like I really was about to burst into tears and then sob uncontrollably for an hour. Again.
She sniffed and looked out the window. “Very well. Jerome will drop you off at a bus stop, and you’ll give him the account number you want the funds transferred to. You weren’t nearly as unpleasant to deal with as I’d feared. It’s a good thing I came before you were truly attached to my son. I wondered when I saw that shocking display on the tower years ago whether I’d have to address the situation, but you didn’t get his attention until recently. Did you not realize who he was at the time?”
I had a sudden visceral memory of kissing him, his arms wrapped around me while the rest of the world vanished, the music playin gin the background, the tinny Scooby Doo theme of the nearest ride. Scooby Doo had been playing while we kissed. How had I forgotten that?
I swallowed while my cuffed hands trembled. I wanted to punch her in the throat with a sudden fury that was as out of my control as my passivity. I needed to be icy and coolheaded at all times, but my body had taken the reins without any interest in what my mind wanted.
Scooby Doo theme like the hacker used who broke through my firewalls and cut me off at the knees. Dirk Dagger had brought me here to play his game. He probably didn’t expect me to play it so badly.
Somehow I didn’t kill her. Maybe because I couldn’t. I spoke in a cold voice that didn’t show the daggers slashing through my chest, turning my heart into slush. “No, I didn’t. I thought he was just a fighter.” A very good fighter who knew how to kiss the fear out of me. He’d always been more than he appeared, a hero in a sea of villainy. No. A villain in a world of villains. He’d played me from the beginning, using my fear and vulnerability to manipulate me, to get me to trust him, waiting for the momentwhen he wanted to use me in whatever games he played with his billionaire brawler friends. And he’d done it so effortlessly.
She laughed an elegant, lilting laugh. “And now you know. Driver, stop here.”
The limo jerked to a stop, and Jerome opened the door before nudging me out ahead of him. In a few moments, we were left on a dark street watching the red taillights of the limo disappear.
“Can you please take off the cuffs?” I asked, turning around so he could reach them.
“Sure,” he said cheerfully, unsnapping them quickly, clear familiarity showing. His fingers were almost as quick as Toni’s. “Now, if you’ll give me the account number, I’ll call a cab so that you can get home before Jezebel Whiskey notices you’re missing. She is one scary lady.”
“I don’t need you to call me a cab, thank-you.” I rubbed my wrists while I gave him the numbers of Toni’s bank account. When he’d recorded it, I glanced around the dark streets. I didn’t know this neighborhood.
“We’re only three blocks from the end of the strip,” he said, pointing down a road. “You can find your way from there, right?” He looked so cheerful, so idiotic. He was very good at what he did. Someday I was going to hire him and use him to destroy Dirk’s mother, but not today.
“It’s not your problem,” I said, and started walking with my arms crossed.
“I’m sorry,” he called after me. “For what it’s worth, I think you made a cute couple.”
Cute? How dare that miserable little two-faced informer call me, Daniela Delavigne, cute? I shook my head and shivered. This was a walk of shame I’d never forget. I would have given anything to be able to climb under a blanket on Toni’s couch and sleep for a year. Instead, I was walking down a backstreetin Las Vegas in flannel pajamas with puppy slippers on my feet. I looked nothing like Boston’s finest dominatrix, and I felt like the idiot I was. It wasn’t just the puppy slippers, but everything. What kind of idiot couldn’t get out from under her grandfather’s authority in this age of enlightenment? What kind of idiot went through her whole life without experiencing basic kissing and jumped right into BDSM instead?
That was just one tiny piece of my idiocy, though. I hadn’t even considered his mother showing up and bribing me to stay away from him. I should have seen it coming, but my research had been sloppy. I’d jumped into this role thinking that it would be easier than Clint, but it wasn’t, not even a little. I should have spent a year planning carefully while I stayed with Toni and played my cello. Maybe I could have gotten a normal job, dated a normal guy, lived a normal life. Maybe I would have decided to forget about vengeance and betrayal, and focused on my own happiness instead. Normal people did that kind of thing all the time. They called it forgiveness.
It would have been much smarter to hire someone else to do the dirty work of seduction, and play the game from the shadows, but you had to hire people you could trust. I could have asked Toni, and she would have done it. Why hadn’t I asked my minion to do the dirty work that was beneath me? Maybe I didn’t want to use her like my grandfather had used me. No one should do that to another human, not even villains.
Dirk’s mom had offered me money because I wasn’t good enough for her precious baby. She had no idea how right she was.
I would burn her. I would burn them all.
I stopped and stared at a blinking neon sign over a bar that had seen much better days while icy anger grew hotter at the thought of Dirk Dagger. No, not Dirk Dagger, James, Russell, Jefferson, Dirk, Prescott. He wasn’t an idiot. He was far closer toa genius than an idiot, so why had he accepted me and my lies? Why had he let me get so close to him and seduced me with his kindness?
Why would Geotech agree to a merger with Clint’s family’s small tech subsidiary? She’d said that she thought I’d make a move all those years ago after the tower. If she was watching Dirk that closely, was there any chance my grandfather wasn’t watching me?
No.
Had all of this been some scheme of Dirk’s? Had he out-villained me? I bit my lip hard and started walking faster. Where would he be at this time of night? He was money, big money, and so was Horse if the opulence of the black card and the fact that he owned the hotel that he and Trix lived in was any indication. Excessive wealth liked to congregate, talk about its superiority and lord it over the weak and the poor. Rich boys who liked to fight would be particularly cliquish. They probably had a secret clubhouse name to go with their hobbies, accumulation of wealth mixed with violence. Billionaire adrenaline junkies.
I had a card that would get me through doors, doors that probability dictated would lead me to Dirk.
I walked through the chilly Vegas night, which got louder and louder the closer I got to the Strip. When I reached the first hotel, I hesitated when I saw a woman wearing a feather headdress and not much else. People were taking pictures of her sparkly skin while she smiled and waved as if she were having a wonderful night. A man on the edge looked around nervously, slipping his hand in his pocket a few too many times.
I trudged past her, then ‘accidentally’ bumped into a guy and fell back into feather headdress lady. The impact hit my arm where I’d been grazed, and that hurt more than I expected, but not enough to prevent me from slipping the small knife out of the guy’s pocket.
The woman shoved me off her with a harsh, “Watch it, pink-haired freak!” as she looked me and my pajamas up and down.
The surrounding men laughed and jostled me until I was through the crowd on the other side of the hotel doors. I kept walking with my head down, holding the base of the handle with the blade up my pajama’s sleeve.
How stupid had I been not to realize from the beginning that Dirk was playing me? He didn’t come from good people, who had raised him to be an unlikely hero. It wasn’t hero against villain, but villain against villain. Good. I didn’t want to destroy anyone who saved. Not anymore, not after being tricked into saving those women in the truck.
