Page 114

“I see.” There's a roaring in my ears, and my heart is pounding way too fast as dread washes over me. I thought I’d never have to have this conversation, but the Devil wants his due. “About the leverage I mentioned⁠—”

"I found all of it," she interrupts. "The boxes filled to the brim with information about me. God, you even had the badge I’d lost. And so many, many, many photos. You printed them all. You put some of them in scrapbooks with cute little handwritten notes. I knew you’d been watching me but I’ve never seen such dedication, such organization. Impressive." Her voice is so level, and that’s the scary part. It’s the disappointment under each word that kills me. I can't fucking stand it. “That's not why I'm here though."

She puts one finger on the photograph.

"This photo disturbed me the most, for obvious reasons. Her name's on the back, Laszlo. My mother’s, in case there was any doubt. And that’s your father." She looks up. "I want to know what is going on. You need to explain it all, and don't you fucking dare leave anything out. After all these years you’ve been fucking with me, I deserve that much."

Her tone leaves no doubt either. The message is loud and clear: this is the end of our lives together, as a couple who’s maybe building something good. The end of us, the end of her looking at me the way she does, the end of this beautiful creature understanding me the way no one else ever has. I've talked my way out of everything my whole life, but there's nothing to say here that would make this smaller or kinder. There's only the truth I and everyone involved have kept from her.

"They were engaged." My voice doesn't sound like mine. "Your mother and my father. Before the way things became."

Manon lets go of a small laugh, then shakes her head. She doesn't believe me, so I carry on talking.

“Our families came over a year apart. My grandfather and yours arrived in New York with nothing to their names. Both ended up working the docks. By the time they’d made any real money, they were fighting over the same piers. That’s where it started. Before your father, before mine. Before either of us was even born.” I run a finger along the rim of my glass. “Eventually, the old men got tired of fighting and divided up the territory. Mine took the East River docks. Our fathers inherited the truce, along with the grudge. Kazik and Henri were the same age, learning the same business on the same waterfront. They drank in the same bars. For a few years, they were almost friends.”

“And then my father fell in love with your mother. Kazik and Elise were supposed to get married.” A pause. “Your father put a stop to that. He wanted her, and he wanted the East River docks, and he figured out how to get both. He paid someone to doctor photographs of my father with another woman. Made them convincing enough that no one would question them. Henri knew Elise through my father, so when those pictures showed up anonymously, she turned to him. He made himself indispensable. Gave her a shoulder to cry on. The man she could trust. She stopped answering Kazik’s letters, and eleven months later, she married Henri instead. Elise came from a poor family. Henri promised her the world…” I swallow and take a quick sip of water. “And she became a Valmont.”

“My father fell apart. Barely left the house for the better part of a year. He drank, neglected the business, and while he was busy drowning his sorrows, your father made his move on the East River docks. By the time Kazik sobered up, the Valmonts controlled every pier my grandfather had fought for. That was Henri’s wedding present to himself.”

"That's not possible," she says. "Someone would have told me. I suppose my mother let me go through with this wedding because my father asked her to be okay with it. But he knew… and he did not object."

"He didn't object because doing so would have cost him Julien, and your father has always been very clear about which of his children he can afford to lose. You chose your path in life, away from the family. He had to protect the family at all costs." I make myself hold her eyes. "But your mother had no idea. She knew her own past, her own story, not that it had anything to do with the man across the aisle. As far as Elise understood, you were marrying a Novak to keep your brother breathing. An ugly bargain, but a clean one, and your father let her believe that cruel coincidence. So she had nothing to warn you about. She never knew the truth, that this was never chance, that I'd been coming for you for years and simply used your brother as the door. Nobody told her that. They only told me."

She looks down at her mother laughing in the photo and goes quiet for a long moment. Letting it sink in. There’s no way to make this less painful, for both of us. I fucked this up. I should have told her when we got married. I loved her then, but I was a coward.

"My father tried to reach her," I say. "He wrote to her, more than once. Every letter came back unopened. Probably Henri had her do that, or intercepted them somehow before she even saw them. After that, he never said her name again—not until he was in danger of dying, seven years ago." Might as well answer the question that’s probably on her lips right now: “He told me a lot then about his first love, unburdened himself, believing he’d go meet his Maker soon. He wanted to come clean and let me know he’d come to love my mother over the years… Of course he didn’t know about Henri’s trickery. That was something I found out, on my own.”

A wave of loathing fills me for the one man who started it all. The only thing keeping it from consuming me is the presence of the woman in front of me.

“My father has always wanted to see me married, happy with a good wife,” I continue. “Not everyone in this life is always ruthless, I suppose. At the core, we want the same things as everybody else… Then he didn’t die.”

"Because I saved him."

I want to gather her in my arms and hug her, but I don’t have the right now. She can probably put two and two together already because she’s the smartest person I know.

"Yes, you did. The irony. This brilliant resident fought for another human being and got her way." My throat goes dry as I speak. "I told you, my obsession began when I found out who you were. It was true, but it wasn't the whole truth. In part, I wanted to get back at Henri Valmont. Your family, your fucking father, needed to be taught a lesson." My throat constricts, and I swallow hard. “Your mother had no way of knowing I'd engineered the whole thing, or that it went all the way back to her. I wanted Henri to suffer for stealing what wasn’t his. The fact I couldn’t let go of you was another thing … I couldn’t help it. I wanted you, always you."

"Laszlo." She's frowning now, her eyes narrowed. "Tell me that Julien being in that club that night, doing what he did, wasn’t because of you. Please tell me you didn't set it up for your cousin to be beat up like that."

Her eyes are filled with tears and I want her to take the biggest knife in this kitchen and slice my chest open. She needs to let me bleed. Fuck, I need to suffer. I could lie to her. God, I could create a perfect lie that will allow her to sleep peacefully at night, but I can't. I laid my own fucking bed and I have to lie in it.

"I’m not saying Julien isn’t a shithead,” she flinches at my words, “and that he didn’t commit his own gruesome sins, but that time I paid Nicko a handsome sum to goad your brother until he snapped. Then I told him to never tell anyone, and I’d make sure he’d never want for anything." Each word costs me something I won't ever get back, and my vision goes lightly blurry. I need to squeeze her one last time. "I knew he'd snap. Julien has a bad temper. I planned this—a Valmont beating the shit out of a Novak on our turf, in front of witnesses. That's a death sentence in our world. That was all I needed… Julien forced to leave his precious family and you in my hands.”

I can’t hold the bitterness in my voice, not just because I loathe the Valmont patriarch, but because I fucked up the best thing that ever happened to me. My beautiful Manon. “Henri Valmont was done for."

Her hand comes up to her mouth and more tears spill down her face.

"I didn't bank on the fact that Julien would play dirty and use his knife. Yes, I knew he wasn’t that honorable but I figured he wouldn’t be that damn thickheaded. Nicko was in more trouble than I bargained for. He’s lucky to be alive. I sat in that hospital and felt numb. I know I have to take care of him for a long time.”

I need water, so I take a long gulp of it. I crave more, but the glass is empty and I can’t stop talking now, sealing the coffin of this marriage. “So it did go downhill but my plan was set in motion that night. Everything you saw when you came in was for show, all planned. Your brother, the most pathetic one of all, made things easy. You believed you had minutes to save your brother, and so did he. My men let you through the gate because I told them to. Then I boldly asked you to marry me in exchange for his life. I waited seven long years for that opportunity, Manon, and it happened exactly as I thought it would."

She wipes her face and gets up. The chair makes a scraping sound. She starts pacing around the kitchen, and I wish she would scream at me or attack me with a scalpel again. This whole thing would be less painful.

"Why?" she asks.

Because I wanted you. Because you give me life in a world filled with death.

I drag my hand through my hair, then release a breath. It's true. I wanted her. I was drawn to her the first moment I saw her on those hospital stairs, even though I had no clue who she was then.