I slap her. The sound of it is very loud in the tiled room.
Alana's head falls to the side and she stands there for a moment with her hand coming up slowly to her face and she turns back to me with an expression I have never seen on her before.
"How dare you?—"
I slap her again.
"Fuck you!" she screams at me, hands first. I grab her by the hair, a fistful of it, and I walk her backward to the sink, I push her head down and I turn the tap on. I hold her there while she yells and struggles and the water runs over the back of her head and down her neck and she is shrieking something that I don't particularly listen to.
I let her up and she comes up gasping and coughing. Her hair is plastered to her face and her dress is wet across the shoulders and she raises her hand and I kick her before it gets anywhere. She falls to a sitting position on the bathroom floor and looks up at me with water running down her face.
The shock is gone and there is now hatred and I find I don't mind it at all.
I crouch down in front of her.
I open my phone and I find the video and I press play and I hold it out so she can see herself in it, so she can see exactly what it caught them doing, and I watch her watch it.
"I could have this everywhere in New York by tomorrow morning," I tell her.
Her eyes come up to mine. They are fierce and furious. "You wouldn't dare," she says.
I lean in. "Try me."
Her hand shoots out and closes around my wrist, both hands gripping hard. "Nat." Her voice has completely changed, the performance stripped out of it. Now it was genuinely frightened. "Nat, please. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have— I got carried away, he was flirting and I just—" She swallows.
"Please. My father will kill me. You know he will. Please."
I look at her hands on my wrist.
"Don't touch me," I tell her. "I don't know where you've been."
Her hands drop and I laugh.
She stares at me and I stand up and I look down at her on the wet bathroom floor in her expensive dress and I say , "Don't look so serious. I would never show the world that my cousin is a conniving woman who tried to sleep with her cousin's fiancé." I pause. "Why would I do something like that?"
She stares at me.
I crouch back down and I get very close to her face and I say, very quietly, "I'll keep it safe though. Just in case." I smile. "You never know when these things become useful."
I stand up and smooth my dress.
"Don't stay in here too long," I tell her, at the door. "People will notice."
I walk out and behind me I hear her scream, a short frustrated sound that she cuts off almost immediately because we are at a party and someone might hear. It's the kind of calculation Alana has been making her whole life and will keep making regardless of what happens to her dignity. I walk back into the party and I take a fresh glass of champagne from a passing tray and I drink it and I feel, for the first time in a week, something other than numb.
It isn't happiness exactly. But it is something. And something, right now, is enough.
Chapter Seventeen
Luca
"Five," Renzo says, dropping into the chair across from me and opening the folder on his knee. "Five women who were in the vicinity of that garage the night you were attacked. We have pulled identity records, address histories, cross referenced with the pharmacy on Fourth."
He turns a page. "None of them fit."
I draw on the cigarette and look at the window.
"The pharmacy records show a cash purchase at the right time. No name, obviously. The garage had no functioning cameras on that end of the structure." Renzo closes the folder. "Whoever she was, she left almost nothing to find."
