I begin to leave, giving Giovanni his knife back, and flee the room entirely. I take the slow walk to my room staring at my hands. No one followed, no one even moved when I was done with Tony. I stabbed that man until the life left the eyes that were staring at me. My brutality had now been presented to them, and all I received was a round of applause from my father and Giovanni and total silence from those who love me most.
My shakes become violent the closer I make it to my room and by the time I’m closing the door and using bloodied hands to lock it, I’m slowly feeling pieces waiting to fall away. I go into the bathroom, approach the sink, and put the water on as hot as it will go, and leaving blood on the taps. As steam starts to billow out, I place hands under the heated water and watch the blood begin to bleed itself away from the lines in my hands. I hold them under the stream of water, rubbing them together to rid the disgusting color from them both and don’t care how the new redness is from the burning water.
I don’t remain standing for long. I find myself slipping away from the sink until I’m lying curled up on the floor, water still thundering from the taps, me completely motionless against the cold tiles. It’s here that I start to evaluate how life has possessed more horrors in a few months than I have witnessed in all my years, and I find that I’m at a loss to label myself. Am I still Manhattan’s Femme Fatale? Am I a monster? Am I a bloodthirsty beast cast straight up from hell? Or am I just a demented product of my upbringing? I don’t even know and as I curl up even more in the corner of my bathroom, I just cry as the final question courses upon me: What have I really become?
All I know I’m good for is heartbreak and blood red hands.
Just as destiny had written it.
CHAPTER EIGHT
“This is fucking great,” I mutter as I put an elbow against the car door and lean my head into the palm of my hand. “I get stuck in traffic with you and all because my father wants some precious Cuban cigars.”
“You think this is fun for me?” Zane asks, sarcasm weaving its way through his tone. “I’m stuck in a car with a woman I’ve killed every possible chance with and she’s been nothing but cold fury for days.”
“Yeah, well, I’m sorry, but you did get warned I wasn’t the girl you fell in love with months ago!” I tell him, unable to keep my tone from raising a few octaves. “You even saw the change in me days ago.” I stop myself and sit back, shaking my head as I find myself laughing. “I can’t believe it’s only been days.”
“If you want to be pedantic about it, it’s been a week,” Zane states, flexing his fingers around the steering wheel. It doesn’t even matter that we’ve been in gridlocked traffic for almost thirty-five minutes; he’s still ready to cruise away and get this job done. He looks at me from the corner of eyes and smirks. “Sorry, did that just piss you off a little more, sweetheart?”
“All of this is pissing me off,” I grunt, now folding my arms across my chest like some petulantly sulky child. I find it hard enough to look at Zane across the table at breakfast as it is, but to now be confined to a small vehicle doesn’t make for a sanity saver. It’s made even harder by the navy suit he’s wearing with the crisp white shirt, casually buttoned up bar the top two buttons. It does nothing to empower my resistance to him, so I keep having to remind myself this is a job. “My father wants nothing to happen between us yet sends us on this stupid little task together.”
“You pretty much stonewalled that anyway, so why worry?” he asks promptly. He shrugs and finally releases the steering wheel to look at me. “You and I both know how this was meant to end, but we pretty much fucked that up because we did what we used to always do – we skipped out on proper communication.” His words are dryly executed and his face is hard as to not show much emotion. “Remember our first fight was over something like that. You were playing wing woman to Brett from down at the station but didn’t think to tell me first. Instead, you went straight in for the kill there, got him to save you from me, who was apparently the sleazebag hitting on you. Sure, you got him a girl, but I also got hugely embarrassed and we ended up fighting. Much like the other night!”
I feel my face soften a little, but I know there is no going back. “I could apologize until I’m blue in the face for that, but what good will that do? You and I are just too headstrong and we think too passionately and look where it ends, Zane. It always ends in tears and words we can’t take back. Why forgive when we’re always on a vicious circle.”
“Maybe that’s our thing,” he tries to compensate for our actions, finding our niche in discovering a relationship with one another. “But maybe if we made it more of a partnership against your father, we’d find a lot more common ground.”
Never going to work like that, buster! I think wryly.