Page 121 of Wicked Intentions (Wicked Games 3)
In every painting, the subject is a dragonfly.
“Mr. McLean? Excuse me, sir, are you Ryan McLean?”
I turn toward the voice. It’s a woman I’ve never seen before, an elegant redhead in a tailored ivory suit. She’s very beautiful, with milk-pale skin and secretive eyes, her fiery hair coiled in a low chignon. She smiles at me, waiting for a reply.
“Yes,” I say gruffly, finding my voice. “I’m Ryan McLean. Who are you?”
“Genevieve,” she replies, as if the name should mean something to me.
I swallow, fighting to maintain my composure when everything inside me is howling wolves and hurricanes. “Where is she? Where’s Mariana?”
Genevieve’s smile deepens. “I’m sorry, I don’t know anyone by that name. But I was instructed to give you this.”
She holds out a folded piece of stationery. I take it, my hand shaking like a leaf.
“Good luck to you both, Mr. McLean,” Genevieve says warmly. “She was always a favorite of management.”
Without another word, the redhead turns and melts into the crowd.
I stand with the note in my hand until I become aware I’m garnering a lot of curious glances. Then I unfold the paper and read the words written in precise, slanting black ink.
I can picture you there, among the date palms and veiled women.
I can picture you stealing into a locked room at dawn
with the morning call to prayer echoing over the empty medina,
the sun on red-tiled rooftops already hot.
I recognize the words instantly, because they’re my own. And now I know exactly where I’m going.
I drop my head back, close my eyes, and inhale my first real breath in months.
Thirty-Seven
Mariana
Morocco
Once upon a time in another life, I was a little girl.
I had a little girl’s dreams of fairy tales and handsome princes. I had parents and a sister and a scruffy yellow dog named Dog. I went to school in a ramshackle schoolhouse with a dirt floor and woven banana leaves for a roof, and picked avocadoes on my parents’ farm. I didn’t know I was poor, or powerless, or cursed.
Once upon a time, I was happy.
Then…I grew up.
I grew up and learned that happiness is like heaven, a thing everyone yearns for but few ever find. I learned about death and betrayal and sex and longing, about hunger and sadness and fear.
I learned that dreams are only for dreamers.
I learned to survive.
Then one day many, many years later, I learned about love.
I discovered love was nothing like a fairy tale. It was more like a bad poem written in indecipherable meter by a drunken poet who couldn’t keep a job, so he lived with his mother his whole life while writing the most outrageous roadblocks and outcomes, based on nothing but the whims of his own inebriated brain. It had an awkward beginning, a wildly improbable middle, and an awful, painful end. And nothing rhymed.
Love was the worst.
