CONTAINS CONTENT
Simulated SA, violence, degradation, minor sexual content.
Marielle had no idea how long she’d been biting the pencil eraser and staring at the chart in her hand, but eventually Jamie’s voice broke into her disjointed, Vincent-filled thoughts.
“You’re distracted,” he said casually.
She looked up at him as if jerking out of a nightmare and took him in as he stood at one of her bookshelves. He smiled softly at her and turned back to the book he was paging through.
“What’d he tell you?”
She opened the fingers on her right hand but continued to clutch the pencil with her thumb. “Vincent?” He nodded, glancing over the book pages. “Not much—yet.”
“So… what have you discerned, love?” He closed the book, put it on the shelf, and returned to the chair in front of her desk where he’d been sitting before she had drifted. She couldn’t remember the last thing he had said to her before he’d gone to peruse the books.
She stared thoughtfully at her desk for a moment. Every time they had a meeting, Jamie talked about anything other than himself. “Let’s get back to you.”
He held his hands slack between his knees and leaned back against the chair. Marielle wrote something on his chart.
“What?” Jamie asked, narrowing his eyes at her.
She chuckled knowingly. “You know what I’m doing.”
“You know all of this”—he gestured up and down at himself, then pointed at her—“could be fixed if you’d just go out with me,” he teased.
Marielle shook her head abashedly; she loved his accent. They both snickered silently. “It’s not me, it’s you.”
Silence passed between them. Her face grew serious, her eyebrows drawing together. She made another note.
“Ah, we’re back to that, are we?” He crossed his ankle over his left knee and put his left arm up.
She tilted her head, eyeing him. Left knee, left arm… She jotted down something else.
“What are you scribbling down about me there?”
She cleared her throat. “Actually, what I just wrote was, ‘I’m writing this down to see what Jamie will do. Jamie doesn’t like to be perceived in any way whatsoever, so if I write, he might get uncomfortable and I can observe his reactions.’” She tossed the chart onto the desk.
Jamie narrowed his golden eyes at her. “Is that really what you wrote?”
“Mm-hmm.” She showed him for a second, then drew the chart back again.
“So… what about you?” He looked down his nose at her. “What about you and Vincent?”
“Oh, please,” she said dismissively. “I just met him today.”
“Do you think he’s interested in you? He’s only spoken to you,” he reminded her.
She narrowed her eyes thoughtfully for a moment. “Difficult to tell right now. Initial conversation says yes, but I couldn’t tell you why. It might have been an act.”
“A guy gives you attention and you think it’s an act? And I’m the one who needs therapy?” Jamie made a low whistle.
Marielle smiled at him. “You’re deflecting again.”
He sighed and relaxed his back. “You’ve had several failed relationships, haven’t you? Don’t really have any friends either?”
She laced her fingers together on her lap. Sometimes if she let Jamie control the conversation, he’d reveal something about himself because she was open with him. “Okay, so we’re talking about me today. Yeah, I’ve dated a lot. Relationships? Eh, I’ve had like four or five that were really strong.” She bit a hangnail. “It’s hard for me because making a genuine connection with someone is difficult when you can do what I do.”
“The profiling thing?”
“Yeah. It’s hard to trust when you know someone is lying. It’s exhausting always looking for something, so most of the time I choose not to. I tend to let people be who they are and ignore certain things on purpose. I’ve never been married, never had a relationship last longer than a year.”
“Why do you think that is?” He rubbed his hands together again, something he usually did when he was getting closer to opening up.
Marielle pursed her lips, shrugging her left shoulder. “In truth… No one wants to stay very long with a woman who can read them inside-out,” she explained. “I have the capacity to know whenever someone is lying to me, or…” Her voice trailed off. “It is what it is.”
“You sort of stopped speaking there. What is what it is?”
She quirked her mouth to one side, biting the inside of her cheek. “I don’t know. I need someone who matches me romantically, you know? Someone with whom I can feel comfortable enough that I don’t have to constantly read them to know whether or not they’re being deceptive.”
“Lying?”
“Well, it’s more than that. Some people wear their hearts on their sleeves, so you pretty much know who they are instantly, you know? Others? There’s layers… And when people look at me, I think they perceive someone who automatically knows everything, even though I can’t because I choose not to in most situations. It ruins trust. It ruins love.”
“That sounds hard.” Jamie’s tone took on a deep sense of compassion.
“It is.” She sighed and looked away. “I would rather get to know someone organically than continually try and work them out. Even though I can work them out, when you use a skill like that, you always discover things you don’t like. Always.” Her eyes teared up a little as she recalled how she had known that the breakup was coming each time she’d had a relationship end.
Jamie rubbed his bottom lip. “I’ve had maybe one strong romantic relationship in my life.” He shrugged and leaned back against the chair. Then something flickered in his eyes, as if he realized he’d just given something of himself away, and he quickly reverted to being secretive. “How do you handle that? The difficulty?”
“I do my best not to carry it around with me,” she said succinctly. “It’s not a superpower, it’s training. I don’t have to be on all the time. When I am, it’s exhausting, and when I’m not, everyone blames me for missing things.” Her eyes flicked down.
“Do you have any close friends?”
“Not too many anymore. You know about me and Han.”
Jamie nodded. She and Han were close, but the lovely Korean agent with the white hair, knife skills, and flight abilities had been away for a while now. Her agent name was Jett. “I heard you were really close with Sabine once. What happened there?”
“It’s a long story,” Marielle replied. “We both loved the same man, but he chose her in the end.”
“And you were jealous?” Jamie stroked a hand over the bottom of his chin as he tipped his head back to look at her.
Marielle smiled wistfully. “No, I was happy for them.”
“So what was the problem?”
She smiled with the left side of her mouth, a soft, sad smile. “You want to talk about the fire?” She always dropped this on him when she felt he would least expect it. “The fire” referred to an incident that had occurred at his old arts academy in England. The school had burned to the ground. Had Jamie started it? Probably, but whether or not he had done it on purpose remained a mystery.
He pulled his chin back against his chest, then jutted it out again. “Nope,” he replied with a hard emphasis on the P.
She smirked. “You sure?”
He forced a smile, folding his hands over his stomach. “Nah.”
She wrote something down.
***
When Marielle dragged herself through her front door that night, already spent from the long day she’d endured, she knew she was not in for a relaxing evening with a good book and a bottle of wine.
She looked around her living room. Well, she thought, in a way, I am… However, there was far more to what she was about to do, and she needed to psych herself up for the mental and emotional toll it was going to take on her. Any time she was required to read a new person, she had to go through the same long, tedious process. She wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight, but that was fine because she didn’t have any appointments at headquarters tomorrow.
She jumped when something brushed against her legs and looked down. Felix looked up at her with hungry eyes and meowed. He must have snuck in the door behind her.
“Oh, Felix, I’m so sorry!” She picked him up and cradled him to her chest. “I rushed out this morning and forgot to leave you food.” She shut the door and locked it, taking the kitty into the kitchen, where she set food and fresh water down next to the fridge, out of the way. He ate ravenously.
Felix was another side to the story that Marielle didn’t often think about. She took care of him and loved him distantly, but he had once belonged to Sabine, and when Sabine couldn’t care for him anymore after the incident five years ago…
Marielle’s thoughts trailed off. Sighing, she opened her refrigerator and cabinets, scanning for something she imagined Vincent might eat. He had been in holding for over a week now, eating things like cold sandwiches, fruit cups, apples, glasses of milk, the occasional poorly made chocolate chip cookie, and bowls of cereal. That was basically the Valorant cellblock menu, but Vincent was sophisticated and refined. His voice was deep and velvety, and it crept down her spine in a pleasant way when he spoke. For dinner, he’d want something he had to spend a lot of money on, somewhere quiet and dimly lit that would impress someone like her.
She narrowed her eyes at the food sitting in the refrigerator, then nodded once. She’d make pasta from scratch with garlic, butter, and cream, then top it with tomatoes and basil, accompanied by a medium rare steak. She knew this would be his preference for meat doneness based on several things she’d noted while speaking to him earlier. For a side, she’d make bruschetta.
After she checked off all of the ingredients, she went to her bedroom and shut herself in. She riffled through her closet until she found a long, lavender gown with a hint of sparkle and laid it out on her bed before going to the bathroom, winding her long hair up into a bun, and taking a candlelit bubble bath. She needed to relax before the grueling process that lay ahead.
As she lay in the tub, she closed her eyes and took several long, deep breaths, holding each of them in. “Trust me,” she whispered in his voice, repeating one of his statements that had caught her attention the most. “It’s not threatening… just sad.” Then she said it again in a slightly different tone, then again and again, until it sounded perfect in her head.
“What’s sad, Vincent?” she breathed, wiping a wisp of sweat-soaked hair back from her face. “What’s sad…?” She sank down into the bubbles and hot water a little more. “I’m going to figure out who you are, Vincent.”
Marielle got out of the tub, dried, and slipped the dress on. She redid her hair so that the bun was tight against her scalp, leaving tendrils down around her temples and cheekbones. Then she put on light makeup with red lipstick and adorned herself with the most expensive accessories in her jewelry box, diamonds and gold.
Then she went to the kitchen to prepare the meal. She stopped halfway through to dip a pinky finger into the sauce and taste it. It was nearly perfect. If there was one thing Marielle knew she could do, it was cook. Her parents had owned a French café when she was little, and she had grown up cooking from scratch with butter, cream, and all of the things not so good for your hips but divine for your spirit.
At the end, she freshened up with a wipe down, some perfume, and powder. She’d forgotten what a workout it was to cook. Next time, she’d get dressed afterward. She plated it all on two separate dishes, setting his to the left of her, put out a full set of silverware, and uncorked a bottle of merlot she’d been saving for no particular reason. She poured it, gave it legs, and went to her small table, lighting a single candle in the middle.
Placing her hands on both sides of the plate, she took a deep breath, counting slowly to three as she cleared her mind and straightened her back before opening her eyes again. Falling into the first of several forced fantasies, she lifted her wine glass and turned to Vincent. “To you,” she said.
Vincent appeared at the table with her, finely dressed and properly groomed, sipping elegantly from his own wine glass. He set the glass down and looked her over, taking in her dress, body, and hair.
CONTENT BELOW- SKIP TO NEXT LINE IF YOU WANT TO AVOID. A SUMMARY OF EVENTS IS IN THE TRIVA SECTION
He smirked at her. Then all at once, he got up, came slowly around behind her as if to rub her shoulders, slipped a gloved hand around her neck, and began to squeeze as he cupped the back of her head against his chest to hold her still.
Her eyes widened in terror and she reached up, reflexively grabbing at him. When this didn’t work, she tried to stand. He jerked her around, slamming her back into the table. Food tumbled to the floor and plates smashed as he held her down. She tried to gasp. He was so strong!
He kept her down, a depraved smile beaming directly into her eyes. She struggled to breathe, listening to her own squelches and rasps—nothing was getting through. Her lungs burned. Thrashing, she tore at him, but couldn’t free herself. She started to see spots… Then a wave of peace came over her, and finally blackness… She was dead.
Marielle jerked straight, drew a deep breath, and lifted the glass again, turning to Vincent, who was seated once again to her left.
“To you,” she whispered.
His fingers were folded over his plate. He looked down at the steak, picked up the knife, whirled it blade downwards, and slammed it between the knuckles of her left hand. She heard the sickening crunch of bone breaking, saw the blood pouring from the wound. An agonizing wail pierced the room. She was nailed to the table, but he was already up and stabbing her in the side of the neck with his fork over and over and…
She jerked back, then sat up again and raised the wine once more. This time she took a long swallow and let out a shaky breath before beginning. She knew Vincent was a killer, but what kind of killer?
“To you,” she said with a soft smile.
He stood and swiftly removed his belt. In one quick movement, he wrapped it around his right hand with the brass across his knuckles and stalked toward her, both fists raised.
She stood, backing away and holding a hand up between them. “No, Vincent… Please!”
Slam! Straight into the side of her cheek.
“Dumb bitch!” he roared over her as she fell. She tried to back up under the table. No use. He grabbed her ankles and dragged her back out, her fingers scratching the floor. He punched her face over and over again until she was mangled beyond recognition.
“Connasse!” he shrieked. He unwound the belt and began whipping her with it, straddling her torso. The metal buckle banged against her skin, breaking cheekbone and teeth. Soon, she couldn’t see, and her heartbeat slowed to nothing.
Taking a moment to breathe, she sucked in air and opened her eyes. Although this was emotionally exhausting, she’d be running scenarios like this all night.
She glanced down at her wine instead of looking at him. “To you,” she murmured demurely.
He was on her in half a breath, pinning her to the table and tearing her clothing.
“No, please!” She fought him, fingers scratching and scraping. All that seemed to come loose was some of his hair, which fell into his eyes.
He’d already ripped her dress down the middle, and now he was using his steak knife to cut the rest away, keeping her down with his right hand around her neck. She clawed at him to no avail as he unfastened his belt.
“Please stop! Please!”
He snaked a hand up between her legs.
Marielle pulled out of that one quickly and found herself shaking. It was too much. It wasn’t him at all. She dragged a trembling hand down her face, finding tears. “Daring… is the way I make love,” she whispered, letting herself break and sob.
She was trained to do this, to allow emotions to flood her so that it all felt real, then turn them off in an instant if necessary. Trembling, she wrapped her arms around her chest and gave herself a warm hug as she squeezed out the last few tears, then shut all emotion off, steeling herself again as she brought her heart rate down with controlled breathing and intense focus.
“Focus now. Eyes off me…”
A long breath through rounded lips signaled her readiness for the next fantasy.
She lifted her glass. “To you.”
Vincent was leaning on his knuckles and staring at her, bored. “How many times am I going to kill you?” he asked.
“As many as it takes for me to feel you in a different way,” she replied, taking a small sip from the side of the glass.
“Okay,” he replied dismissively, then grabbed the bottle of wine and smashed it against the side of the table. “Je vais te montrer une autre façon!” he growled before everything went black.
Marielle did this five, ten, fifteen more times until finally she stopped on a fantasy in which he got up, stepped back from the table after wiping his chin and setting the napkin neatly in its place, and said, “What makes you think I want to kill you?”
She tensed her jaw and stared him down. “One more,” she said.
He nodded and paced for a moment. Then he pulled a pistol from under the table and shot her cleanly through the middle of her forehead. Blood splattered across the room. In her mind’s eye, she could see a perfect hole through her own skull.
She sat up straight, eyes wide. “That’s it. You’re an assassin.”
Both the room and Vincent melted around her like crayons left in the sun. The entire space fell away, transporting them to a grand, golden hall filled with banquet tables. A quartet of men in tuxedos played the violin.
She stood. “Do you dance, Vincent?”
“I am a gentleman,” he replied, then he came to her and pulled her close to his body possessively. He wrapped his right arm around her waist and lifted her hand in his. “Of course I dance.”
He led her in a slow waltz. She was quiet for a moment, searching his almond-colored eyes behind his glasses. Then, as he spun her gently under his arm, she noticed the ring again.
“What’s the wedding ring about?” she asked as he pulled her close.
“I’m married,” he replied with a small flick of the brow, as though suggesting that he was cheating on his wife and it was exhilarating.
Marielle shook her head, and the violins, along with the rest of the room, paused.
She ran the scenario again. The music started, and he extended his hand to her, long, gloved fingers unfurling until she took them and he pulled her to him. They swayed, their bodies tantalizingly close.
“What’s the wedding ring about?”
“I’m single, but I like to discourage women I am not interested in.”
She made a face and let out a breath she’d been holding in. That wasn’t right either. Everything froze once more: the quartet, the music, Vincent. She scratched her head and went back to the beginning.
“What’s the wedding ring about?”
He grinned. “I just like jewelry.”
Marielle let out a long, frustrated sigh. The music stopped. This statement was true, but that wasn’t the reason for the ring.
Again, the violins sounded, and again, he gathered her to him, and they began their well-matched dance. He twirled her gracefully under his arm, then drew her to his chest again.
“What’s the wedding ring about?”
“It was my mother’s…”
Even more exasperated, she stopped everything with another heavy sigh. Each time she did this and backed away, Vincent stood like a statue waiting for her to start again. This answer wasn’t even close to the truth, and she felt—as she normally did right about now—that it was time to give up the fantasies, and maybe this entire profession.
Marielle balled her fists. That was silly talk. “Again,” she whispered.
She lost herself a little this time, allowing herself to truly feel being in his strong arms, breathing in the heady scent of his cologne, now fresh against clean, shaven skin. Slowly, she reached up and removed his glasses so there were no barriers between their gaze and allowed his eyes to mesmerize her. She also mentally removed the music; the band stood at attention, waiting. They simply rocked in silence for several long moments, creating their own time loop, their own space. All she could hear as they stared at one another were the deep breaths they took in tandem and his hard swallow, which might indicate that he was nervous, although nothing in his body language said so.
She parted her lips to speak more sensuously. “What’s the wedding ring about?”
He hadn’t broken gaze with her, or even blinked. It was unnerving. He swallowed again; she could see his Adam’s apple move. “She’s dead.”
That was it. She stopped the fantasy and sat down at the table once more. “Your wife is dead.” She wrote this down on a piece of paper and stared at it. “Vincent is a widower.”
She clumsily wrote the word “assassin” under “widower.” Then she set the pen down and closed her eyes again, once more entering the dream world.
A small coffee shop, somewhere in France. Across from her at a charming table covered in white linens sat Vincent, folding a menu after ordering a coffee.
“What was your wife like?” she asked him with a smile. They were best friends now, catching up over espresso.
He cleared his throat. “Younger than me, blonde. Taylor Swift.” He chuckled. “Magique.”
She laughed. The scene froze, and the other patrons stopped buttering their croissants. No. That wasn’t right.
“What was your wife like?”
He stirred his cup with a small silver spoon, tapped it, and set it down. “We met in high school.” He sipped his coffee and took a bite from a large croissant. “She was from a small town near my own.”
Marielle sighed. Also not right. She poured cream into her own coffee. “What was your wife like?” she asked sweetly.
He licked his lips and set his cup down. “We married to get her green card.”
She pulled out of the fantasy, thinking for a moment. “No.” She rewound a bit.
“We married to get my green card.”
She pulled out again, drumming her bottom lip. “Maybe…”
She had to be closer to this situation—and to him. She pulled her chair closer and poured him more of the steaming dark liquid with a smile. He smiled back. She waited a beat.
“What was your wife like?” Her tone dripped with genuine curiosity.
He paused as if she’d just asked him to explain the meaning of life itself. His tone came out clear and warm. “She was the perfect catch, one that I fought hard for, that I struggled to keep. And in the end… I lost.”
She blinked back into reality. Catch… “The book…” She had forgotten all about it.
Marielle abandoned the fantasies and went looking for it, unsure of where she’d left it. She found it next to her bed on the nightstand, where it sat in front of a clock that told her it was already one in the morning. She hadn’t eaten yet, so she stroked Felix, who was grooming at the end of the bed, and went back to the kitchen, giving herself a mental high five for how good the meal was, even cold.
She opened the book and began to search each page again. She found this particular puzzle extraordinarily curious. Vincent clearly meant for her to find something in this book since it would have been a complete waste of verbal coding to lead her to a puzzle that revealed nothing in the end. Yet despite her careful examination, she found no pages ripped, out of place, bent, or marked.
She took the final bite of steak and leaned back in the chair, sipping the last of the wine in her glass before she let out a particularly wide and noisy yawn. It wasn’t the cold food that was making her tired, but that damned book. She rinsed the plates and put the rest of the divine meal in the fridge, then took the book to the living room couch to look at it more thoroughly.
For a few moments, all she did was flip the book over and over in her hands, feeling its texture, its weight, its thickness. It was a faded aqua, textured; there was an inner rectangle about half an inch from the outside of the book, and within it were small embossed shapes that looked like diamonds, or maybe fish. The spine read, “The Old Man and the Sea, Earnest Hemmingway,” in shiny gold, like Vincent’s tattoos. Was that the connection? Something to do with his tattoos? That didn’t seem right. She closed her eyes and held the book up to her nostrils, breathing in its smell. It was old, full of rich history.
“I guess I’ll just have to read it,” she said with a frustrated growl as she went back to the kitchen to retrieve the bottle of merlot and her glass.
Once she was back on the couch, Felix joined her, rubbing his little head against her thigh. She cracked the book open and began to read, but didn’t find much worth noting. It wasn’t really her kind of story, and she caught herself yawning before she reached the last page. A glance at the clock told her it was 2:17.
“Really?” she asked in annoyance, feeling the weight of night bearing down on her. She’d fall asleep soon for sure.
Stumbling back into the kitchen, Marielle made a pot of coffee, hoping that walking away from the book for a few minutes would help things click into place. When she picked it back up after downing half a cup of coffee, she noticed something odd on one of the pages. It was a letter, namely the first letter in a sentence, the letter A. It was just a shade darker than the other letters surrounding it.
At first, she thought nothing of it, but the next time she saw a similar irregularity, she tilted her head at it, wondering. While this was not uncommon in books, it was usually caused by a printing press when one letter was more absorbent or misaligned with the others, which often resulted in the same letter being consistently darker than the others. But this was not the letter A… it was an S.
Skimming the next page, she found an I. Her eyes widened, and she flipped back to the front of the book, scribbling down the letters as she found them.
When she was done, she found herself frozen, her heart thudding wildly in her chest, her stomach churning. Her eyes scanned the letters again and again as she tried to tell herself she wasn’t dreaming. She even pinched Felix to test this theory, and he yelped and batted at her.
“M A R I E L L E J E A N N E M A S I N C H A E N E S.”
That’s what it said…. And after that, there were no more darkened letters.