Chapter 108: The Mask Comes Off

Chapter 108: The Mask Comes Off
The call lasted forty seconds. Max stepped away from the event floor, took it in the corridor near the fire exit, and said almost nothing. When he came back, he found Valerie talking to a woman from one of the Singapore delegations, laughing at something.
He waited. He stood off to the side with his hands in his pockets and watched her finish the conversation, watched her shake the woman's hand, and watched her reach for her glass of water on the table nearby.
Then he said, quietly, "I need a few minutes with you."
She looked at him. Something in his face made her set the glass down.
He walked her to a small meeting room two corridors off the main hall—the same kind of room he'd pulled her into hours earlier, though that felt like a different lifetime now.
He closed the door and didn't sit down. He stood near the window with his back half-turned to her, looking out at the city lights below, and said nothing for a moment.
"You're staring at nothing," Valerie said. "What happened?"
"Give me a second."
"Max."
He turned around. He looked at her—not reluctant exactly, but braced.
"I need to tell you something," he said. "And I need you to let me finish before you say anything."
"That's never a good start to a sentence."
"I know." He pulled a chair out from the table, not to sit in but to hold onto the back of it. "My name isn't Max. I mean, it is — it's part of my name. My full name is Maximilian. Maximilian Cardini."
Valerie didn't say anything.
"I'm not a bodyguard," he said. "That's a cover. It's been a cover since before Damon hired me. I arranged to be hired. I needed a way into your household…into Damon's world, and you were the access point."
She was still not saying anything. She was looking at him with an expression he couldn't fully read, which was unusual. He usually could.
"The Cardini," he said, and he watched to see if the name landed. It didn't register on her face. "I run it. I'm the one who runs it."
"You run it," Valerie said.
"Yes. I've spent eight years building it…."
She sat down slowly in one of the chairs. She didn't look away from him.
"Damon hired you," she said.
"Damon hired Max Sinclair. He ran background checks on Max Sinclair. I constructed specifically to pass those checks."
Valerie was quiet for a long moment. Max pulled the chair he was holding out fully and sat down across from her.
"You used me," she said.
He didn't look away. "That was the plan."
"And now you're suddenly telling me this? Because—? Why now, Max?"
"Because Lindsay is in trouble," he said it evenly, but something in the set of his jaw changed. " I just got word that her cover has been blown, and he has her. I don't have a lot of time to contain this before it gets worse, and some of the moves I need to make are going to affect you directly, Val."
Valerie gasped, still in utter disbelief. “What?”
"I didn't want to move pieces around you without you knowing at least part of what you're standing in the middle of."
"Part of it," she said.
"I can't tell you everything tonight."
"But you could tell me your actual name. And that you run a cartel. And that you got close to me on purpose."
She looked at the table in front of her for a moment. Then she looked back at him.
"Lindsay is related to you?" she said. "Damon’s fucking mistress is related to you?"
He hadn't expected her to land on that. "She's my half-sister. And I put her there."
“You damn orchestrated her to be his fucking mistress?”
He slowly shook his head. “No. I didn’t make her or ask her to cross that line, Val.”
She stood up so fast the chair scraped back against the floor.
"You lied to me," she said. "From the beginning. Every single day you were with me, you were lying to me."
"Yes."
"Don't just say yes like that. Don't just—" She stopped. "You know what the worst part is? I trusted you. I actually trusted you. I thought you were the one person in that whole setup who was exactly what he said he was."
"Valerie—"
"And then we slept together." She laughed, but it wasn't a real laugh. "And I thought—" She shook her head. "I don't even know what I thought. That it meant something, that you meant it."
"I did mean it."
"You're a liar, Max. Or Maximilian. Whatever the hell your name is. You've been lying to me since the day we met. How am I supposed to take anything you say seriously right now?"
"Because I'm telling you the truth right now."
"Oh, great. Now you're telling the truth. Very helpful." She put some distance between them, crossing to the other side of the room. "You slept with me while running a whole operation against Damon while I didn't know who you were." She turned around to look at him. "Do you understand how that feels? You had all the information. I had none. And I still—"
"You still what?" he said.
"Don't!"
"Valerie, you still what?"
She looked at him for a moment, and the anger was still there, but something was tangled up in it now.
"It doesn't matter," she said.
"It does to me."
"Because you're in love with me? Is that the next thing?" Her voice came out harder than she intended. "Is that what you tell me now, so I feel better about being used?"
Max got up from the chair. He didn't move toward her—he just stood.
"Everything that happened between us," he said, "every conversation, everything—what happened between you and me…that was all me. The real me."
"That's a very convenient thing to say."
"I know how it sounds."
"It sounds like something a person says when they've run out of other defenses."
"Maybe," he said. "But it's still true."
She looked at him from across the room. Her jaw was tight. She wasn't finished being angry — he could see that clearly — but she was listening, and she hated that she was listening, and he could see that too.
"You don't get to decide that for me," she said finally. "You don't get to tell me what was real and what wasn't. I'm the one who got lied to. I'm the one who—" She pressed her fingers to her mouth for a second, collecting herself. "I need you not to talk to me right now."
She turned back toward the window. He stayed where he was, on the other side of the room, and didn't push it.