Chapter 78: Chapter Seventy Eight

Two days later, Antoinette Montalvo — Annie to the people she allowed close enough to use the name — walked out of the coffee shop into the grey morning air feeling like a woman carrying a splinter she couldn't quite locate. Cesar was still alive.

She'd received confirmation three days ago and had spent the time since in a state of controlled fury, maintaining the performance of her ordinary life with the discipline of long practice while rage moved beneath the surface of it like a current under ice.

She slid into the back of her waiting car and dialed Solange before the door had fully closed.

"I told you to call Isidro instead, didn't I?" Solange said, by way of greeting.

There was no warmth in it — Solange did not traffic in warmth — but there was something almost satisfying about talking to someone who understood the situation without needing it explained.

"Lorenzo has lost his touch." She added.

"He's a lucky bastard, Sol." Annie exhaled through her nose, watching the city slide past the window. Lucky. She turned the word over with contempt.

Cesar had always been lucky. It was his most infuriating quality. He moved through the world as though it had quietly agreed, somewhere in its machinery, to keep him in it just a little while longer than everyone else.

He should be dead, she thought, with a precision that frightened her slightly if she examined it too closely. He should be dead and I should be free.

She had loved him, she thought. Or something that functioned like love — something with its heat and its weight and its particular, consuming insistence on being the most important thing in the room.

But love did not survive the accumulation of slights, of condescensions, of the way he had looked at Ellie with a softness he had never once turned in Annie's direction. Love curdled. It became something else, something with edges, and you learned to use it.

She was still thinking this when she noticed the route. Her eyes sharpened. She looked at the back of Lance's head. "Lance...where are you taking me? This is not the way to my house."

He said nothing.

The silence was wrong. Lance was not a quiet man. Lance was a man who made unnecessary observations about traffic and offered opinions about radio stations. This silence was deliberate, and it pressed against her chest like a thumb.

"Lance." Her voice came out even, controlled, almost impressive given the fear beginning to unspool beneath her ribs. "Stop this car at once."

The car accelerated instead.

She was thrown back against the seat as the vehicle surged forward with a violence that dissolved the city outside into a smear of grey and steel, and she heard herself scream.

She did not often scream, she considered it undignified, but the body had its own responses to terror — and then, just as suddenly, everything stopped.

The silence afterward was very loud.

"Lance," she said carefully, the word wrapped in tissue.

The man in the driver's seat turned to look at her. His eyes were wrong. Not Lance's eyes. Not Lance's face, she realized with a lurch — or rather, it was Lance's face but wearing an expression Lance had never worn in all the time she'd employed him. Something settled and purposeful and almost sorry.

"The name's Canaan, ma'am," he said. He raised the weapon with a steadiness that told her he had done this before, many times, without losing sleep after. He pointed it at her.

Annie Montalvo, who had ordered the deaths of others with less emotion than she ordered dinner, felt the world tilt. Cesar, she thought — not with guilt exactly, but with a sudden, vivid, involuntary recognition of how thoroughly she had miscalculated.

She had thought she was the one pulling strings. She had not considered, not seriously enough, that she might herself be a string. She hoped, with all of her being, that she was wrong.

"Oh my God," she breathed. "Please don't shoot me—"

"No can do, princess."

He smiled. It was a professional smile — not cruel, not warm, simply the expression of a man completing a task — and then he pulled the trigger.

\~~~~~~

When the blindfold came loose and the world swam back into focus, the first thing Antoinette Montalvo saw was his face.

And he was smiling.

"Hello, Annie." The smile was slow and deliberate and utterly without warmth — the kind that lived at the precise intersection of charm and threat, the kind she had once found devastatingly attractive. "Surprised to see me?"

The word surprised was almost funny. Annie felt her mouth open and close around sounds that hadn't yet decided what they wanted to be. Her mind was moving too fast and not fast enough simultaneously, skidding across the facts and refusing to arrange them into anything coherent.

"What — how —" She heard herself sputtering and hated it. She had never sputtered in her life. She was Antoinette Montalvo. She did not sputter. "What is going on here, Cesar? Is this some kind of joke? What is this?"

Cesar moved around her chair with the unhurried ease of a man on an evening stroll. He reached behind her head, worked the knot loose, and pulled the blindfold away. "It's not a joke, sweetheart," he said pleasantly. "There's no camera filming this." He let the cloth fall. "This is real life."

Real life. He had always had a gift for understatement.

Annie pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes and waited for the blur to resolve itself. When it did, the room offered her nothing reassuring. No windows. Walls that had the institutional blankness of somewhere that had never been meant for living.

An iron door that looked like it had been designed specifically to discourage the notion of leaving, and in front of it a man whose dimensions seemed only loosely governed by the laws of ordinary human proportion.

The fear was there — she was not going to pretend otherwise, at least not to herself — but she had spent enough years in rooms full of powerful men to know that fear, if you pressed it down hard enough and long enough, could be made to look like something else. Composure. Disdain. She pressed.

"Where am I?" she demanded. "What day is it?"

"June tenth." Cesar replied.

June tenth. Annie ran the number against her internal calendar and felt a spike of something almost absurd pierce through the larger terror.

"What? I have a photoshoot today!" She heard her own voice go sharp and indignant and somewhere beneath the fear she was aware of how grotesque that was — a photoshoot, she was thinking about a photoshoot — but the mind reached for what it knew, and what Annie knew was her career, her schedule, the architecture of a life she had constructed with extraordinary care. "Let me go!"

Cesar looked at her with an expression that might, in someone with a more generous nature, have been described as patient. "Forget about that, sweetheart." He paused, as though giving her a moment to locate the implication. "Your career is over. Remember?"

The word landed exactly the way he'd intended it to. She could see that in his eyes.

"All because of you," she spat.

He shook his head slowly, almost reproachfully. "Unh unh. I didn't get undressed in front of me, Annie. You did. And my wife caught you." He spread his hands with a kind of reasonable, infuriating calm. "So technically — it's all your fault."

"I hate you."

"Ah." Something shifted in his expression — not hurt, not quite, but a sharpening, a settling into something more serious. "The feeling's about to become mutual."

He let that sit for a moment. "So," he said. "Lorenzo's dead.”