Page 60 of There Are No Saints

“As a reminder. You don’t want to forget. Which means you don’t want to forgive.”

Her pupils expand like a drop of oil spreading on water.

I’m speaking the thoughts right out of her brain.

“He cut your wrists. Left you for dead. No . . . worse than that. Left you as a mockery. A fucking joke. He didn’t even finish killing you, that’s how little you meant to him. He didn’t even stay to watch you die.”

The truth is that Alastor didn’t linger because he knew he couldn’t conceal himself from me.

But I’m telling Mara what she knows to be true . . . the man who attacked her sees her as less than garbage. Less than dirt. An insect, struggling and dying on the windowsill, not even worthy of his notice.

“You would hurt him, Mara. You want to hurt him. He deserves it. If no one stops him, he’llkeephurting people. It would be more than justice . . . it would begood.”

Mara faces me, eyes blazing, face flushed.

A righteous angel in the face of a demon.

“Evil men always want to justify what they do,” she says. “And it’s not by telling you all their reasons. No . . . they want to push you, and bend you, and break you until you snap. Until you do something you thought you’d never do. Until you can’t even recognize yourself. Until you’re as bad as they are. That’s how they justify themselves . . . by trying to make you the same as them.”

There’s no space between us now. My face is inches from hers, our bodies so close that her heat and mine radiates in one continuous loop, feeding the inferno between us.

“You wouldn’t kill him? If he was here, now, as helpless as you were that night?”

She meets my gaze, unflinching. “No.”

“What if hewasn’thelpless? What if it was him, or you?”

She stares into my eyes. “Then I would tell him . . . you’re not going to sneak up on me this time. We’re face-to-face now.”

She still thinks it might have been me.

She thinks I did that to her.

And yet she’s here, now, alone in this room with me, inches apart, her lips as swollen and flushed as mine . . .

She’s more twisted than I ever dared dream.

* * *

16

Mara

The night of New Voices I’m so nervous that I vomit in the gutter on the way to the show.

Cole said he’d send a car for me at 9:00.

At 8:20 I left on foot.

I’ve come to know Cole Blackwell more intimately than I would ever have imagined these last few weeks. I honestly think I might know him better than any person in this city, because it’s only around me that he lets the mask fall. And it’s not one mask—it’s dozens.

I watch him lift each to his face, one after another, each tailor-made for the person with whom he converses.

The mask for my boss Arthur is that of a fellow businessman with an emotional attachment to his young protégé—in Cole’s case, tinged with an all-too apparent romanticism.

The mask he wears around most of his employees is of a distant, autocratic artist. He has them jumping at his wild demands, all the while making just enough outlandish requests to disguise what he actually wants . . .

The mask he wears for Sonia is the most fucked up of all because itappearsthe most intimate. Around her, he shows his ruthlessness and wicked humor. He’ll even admit unflattering things to her. But then he turns to me, and I see the animation fall from his face, revealing the absolute blankness beneath. A sight Sonia has never glimpsed, not even for a fraction of a second. He’s too careful. He never slips.

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