Page 76 of Wicked Intentions (Wicked Games 3)
Mariana looks into my eyes. Her shock has vanished. Now she’s simply practical, all business, her tone as flat as her expression.
“Put your ego aside, cowboy. That wasn’t an attack on your manhood. It was the truth, gained from years of experience earned the hard way. If you’re even a little bit serious about getting close to him, you’re going to have to do it surgically, methodically, without an ounce of feeling to mar your perspective. And even then, you probably won’t be able to pull it off.”
Does this woman have no idea that she can crush me with her words? “Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence,” I snap.
She shakes her head, annoyed with me. “This isn’t a street thug we’re talking about. Vincent Moreno is a psychopath with hyperactive paranoia and a genius-level IQ. He’s filthy rich, vastly powerful, and extremely connected. Everyone who’s anyone in the crime world owes him favors. He’s a god among bastard kings.”
Her voice grows softer. “And he owns me.”
“Not for long!” I growl.
She shakes her head again. “You don’t understand what I’m saying.”
“Then make it fuckin’ clearer!”
After a frigid beat, she speaks. “Number one: use that tone with me again and you’ll be missing a cherished body part. I won’t make it painless. Number two: I’m Capo’s favored pet. I can go places you can’t. Whatever your plan to get to him is, it has to include me.”
This entire conversation has veered off into unexpected and extremely unwelcome territory. I stare at Mariana, my blood boiling like a cauldron of poisonous witches’ brew in my veins. Quietly, with deliberate enunciation, I say, “That is out of the fuckin’ question.”
She gathers herself, inhaling and sitting up straighter in the chair, then leans back and folds her arms over her chest. “Fine. Let’s hear your plan.”
It sounds like a challenge, like she’s already decided whatever I’m gonna say will fail big time, so of course I get more pissed off, even though she just told me to can it.
“My plan,” I shout, “is to let him know I’ve got the Hope Diamond, and if he wants it, he’s gonna have to meet with me, and when he does, the FBI’s gonna swoop in and bust his ass, and then he’s off for a nice long soak in a sensory deprivation chamber before bein’ interrogated by a bunch of agency spooks who get off on roughin’ guys up as much as he gets off on sellin’ little girls into sexual slavery!”
My fevered rant is met with a cavernous, icy silence, timed by the hollow ticking of the clock on the wall. Then, in a voice an executioner might use to call up his next victim to the gallows, Mariana says, “Repeat the part about the Hope Diamond again? The part where you said you have it?”
We stare at each other with open hostility, like pistoleros in a Mexican standoff. I wonder if the vein pulsing in my temple is in imminent danger of bursting, it’s throbbing so hard.
“Yeah,” I say gruffly. “I’ve got it. The real one.” Acidly sarcastic because I’m bent by her reaction—I was expecting gratitude and got attitude—I add, “Surprise.”
Her jaw works like she’s chewing on something that’s really, really tough to swallow. Saddle leather, maybe. And I’ve never seen a pair of brown eyes glow so fucking bright, like they’re lit from within by hellfire.
With perfect control, her voice Arctic cold, she says, “And how, may I ask, did that come about?”
If I were a smarter man, I’d probably be getting real nervous right about now, but I’m obviously not that bright a bulb, because all I’m getting is more and more pissed. “It came about,” I repeat mockingly, “when I asked the guy I know who owns it if I could borrow it to snare a snake.”
She does this thing that brings to mind a cartoon tea kettle right before it explodes. All the shaking and rattling, bolts popping off like popcorn, steam escaping, sounds like train whistles and splitting metal screeching in the air…yeah, that’s what my girl starts to do, only it’s a helluva lot more intense.
“I planned that job for a week,” she says, rising from her chair, her voice shaking, her eyes flaming incinerator hot. “I lived in a shitty, cockroach-infested motel room for seven days, working twenty hours a day on research and logistics, listening to junkies tripping and hookers howling through fake orgasms and homeless guys fighting over cigarette butts they found in the street. I sweated every detail, had nightmares about what would happen if I failed, risked my neck breaking into that museum.”
Her voice rises to a shout that could disrupt flight paths with its thundering vibrations. “And the whole time you had the diamond?”
She takes a step toward me.
I’ve stared the grim reaper down a hundred times in as many different ways, yet the look in her eyes still makes me take a step back.
“In my defense,” I say placatingly, hands held up, “we weren’t on speaking terms at the time. You’d ditched me again, remember? Sheets out the window? Vanishing act? Any of this ringing a bell?”
“Oh, I hear ringing bells all right, cowboy, and they’re tolling for you.”
I get that’s some kind of reference to death from a Hemingway novel, but can’t remember specifically which one. Not that it matters, because she’s advancing like an M1 assault tank, and I’m about to get ripped a new asshole. Among other things.
“Honey,
now stay calm—”
“Too late. That ship has sailed. Now we’re taking a nice, long cruise on the SS Cut A Bitch. Guess who’s the bitch? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not me.”
