Chapter 175 CHAPTER 175
No escape
There was a wetness in his throat. “Yes. Yes, Lila. I understand.” His voice was small. “Please…”
She let him beg a breath then said, “Good. Do it quickly.” She ended the call with the softest of clicks and looked into the mirror as the music warmed the room. Her reflection smiled back.
By the time her first guest arrived, Lila’s mood had shifted into its familiar theatricality. She had the kind of self possession that made people want to be photographed beside it. The living room filled with the murmur of voices and clinking flutes of champagne, the scent of citrus and jasmine, the soft glow of candlelight. She drifted through the room like someone arranged by a stylist, perfect shoes, the littlest shimmer of gold on her collarbone. She greeted each guest with a phrase and a laugh precisely where she chose them to land.
“No cameras tonight, please,” she told them with a near-smile that was exactly a warning wrapped in velvet. “I like my privacy.”
They obeyed as if she had offered them a favor. People wanted to be on her side. Being on her side meant priority. Priority meant access. Access meant being seen at the right time in the right frame.
Her phone vibrated once on the console; she ignored it. Then it vibrated again. She let a finger hover over it but did not answer. The call was likely the dealer confirming the transfer, Jude’s whispered promise that his life would be traded for coins. A small circle of cruelty had always hung like perfume around Lila: the ability to buy silence, to engineer outcomes with the flick of a wrist.
She stepped out into the heart of the room and lifted her glass for the toast she would make. Her voice dipped, the music softened, and a hush fell. She looked at the assembled faces, friends, suppliers, allies and allowed herself a small, private smile.
“To new beginnings,” she said, glass raised. “To the little things we must let go of to build the life we deserve.”
They chimed around her, voices sincere or simulated; she could not tell and did not need to. It was enough that someone had said yes to her toast. She watched their faces with a hunger that had nothing to do with love.
Under the shimmer of laughter and gilded talk, the room felt like the inside of a stage set: every line measured, every laugh timed. Lila loved it.
Later, when a message from an anonymous address drifted into her inbox with, YOU DESTROYED ONE FILE. NOT ALL. PAY UP OR THE WORLD SEES EVERYTHING, her first reaction was not shock but annoyance, the sort that comes when an inconvenient pebble finds its shoe’s sole. She looked at the string of text and then at her guests, then let a cool smile settle back in place. Someone was testing her. Someone saw the tiny crack line in the glass she’d tried to glue over.
She tapped an answer with a casual elegance and then looked up as if to gauge the mood of the room.
But that was later. Night padded on and the champagne drained. Outside, the police had the car. Inside, Lila had many things: friends who polished her reputation, servants who kept the house humming, and a bank account that could buy silence if you knew how to spend it. For now, the problem was manageable.
Yet even as she chatted and laughed, her phone sat heavy in the lower pocket of her clutch, the message glowing like a small, persistent eye. She destroyed one copy. She believed destruction had been absolute. She believed in the currency of bought secrets.
She did not know, yet, that secrecy was a fragile thing; it relied upon too many hands that could slip, or be forced open. She did not yet understand that the gears of her bright, controlled world were turning in places she could not see.
At the end of the evening, when her guests had left and the party drained its last, neat glass into the sink, Lila stood alone in the living room amid the echo of her own laughter. Her phone’s screen was a small, dark pool; she tapped it and then read the message again. You destroyed one file. Not all.
A smile crossed her face, sharp, thin, trained to cut and charm at once. She tapped out a reply she thought would end the conversation: payment would be made, the problem solved, the world returned to order.
Outside, the city breathed. The police had their questions. Mbanelea had filed a report. The abandoned car waited for analysis. Inside the house, Lila’s hand tightened on the stem of her empty flute and she turned toward the mirror.
She rehearsed the smile for tomorrow, the one the world loved most. She did not allow herself to imagine Jude in the back of some warehouse, hands tied, or the camera man’s breath in a small room where light forgot him. That was for professional people, people who took a darker pleasure in managing bodies when they turned against them. She had lawyers. She had money. She had influence.
But the message sat like an ember in the trash bin of the evening, unextinguished. She scrolled through contacts, fingers poised over numbers. There were options. There were men who could smooth things. There would be a payment made. There would, she told herself, be no more surprises.
Still, at the back of her mind, an image persisted from the footage Jude had once shown her, the upward tilt of a mask at the masquerade, the trembling hands of a woman removing silk to reveal a face she had not expected to see. The footage had been burned and buried; she had paid for that ritual.
Somewhere in the city, a detective knelt by a car and catalogued the details of absence. Somewhere else, a man towards whom suspicion turned was calculating ransom routes. Life moved on the axis of small choices and their unintended catastrophes.
Lila eased back into her armchair, closed her eyes for a moment, and let the façade of victory settle around her like a robe. She had won this stage. She had extinguished one light.
She did not feel the first ripple of what would come when small things refused to stay buried.
She picked the next call. “Jude is dead? Good. I wanted to distract the police from his real d
eath. Now get rid of his body.” She ended the call.