“Do you know how to access the tunnels?” I asked Kimble. I wanted a minute alone. I felt his eyes on me constantly. I needed a second to breathe.
“The only way down there is by elevator,” he replied.
My fingers curled by my sides. “Right, do you know if that elevator is operating?”
“I’m familiar with the elevator system.”
“That?
?s something,” I snapped. I closed my eyes. It was becoming easier to bark orders. “I’m sorry. Can you make sure we can walk the tunnels?”
He nodded, unfazed by my demeanor. “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right back after I check out the settings in the electrical room. I think I can get it running.”
“Thank you.”
I knew there was no other way to the lowest level of the hotel. Not a safe one at least. I waited while Kimble fumbled with the controls down the hall.
I glanced up at the chandelier overhead. The crystals were caked in dust. They barely glimmered. I rubbed my shoulders. The hotel felt haunted, but I knew it wasn’t a ghost that made me shiver. It was the chill of what this meant. My training. My acceptance of this life. Becoming my father’s protégé. Turning down Knight.
I trembled. It was too late to go back now. He was gone. He had become untouchable. As haunting as this damn hotel. There was no way for him to know I couldn’t sleep. I drank at Marguerite’s during the day. Huge goblets of red wine. I couldn’t tell him how big my regret was for not taking the first plane ticket he offered to Bali. I should have accepted all the tickets. Did it really matter if we ended up in Scottsdale, Arizona or Portland, Maine? We would have been together. We could have left this behind us.
I couldn’t rewrite history, but I learned there was something I could do. Something that pushed Knight into the farthest corner of my mind, only released when I felt the pearl between my fingers. I could work. I could study under the mob boss. I could take advantage of my front-row access. Soak up his knowledge. Charm his contacts. I could become the smartest, richest, and most admired woman in New Orleans.
I would be the one to make the acquisition of the Vieux Carre worth the suffering it caused Knight.
“Okay. I’ve got the lower level access ready,” Kimble announced. “We can go down to the tunnels now.” I jumped when he walked briskly from the dark hallway. I had lingered too long thinking about Knight.
“Great.” I smiled.
I brushed over the pendant once more. Maybe one day Knight would know what I had done. Maybe one day he would know it was for him. Maybe there was a way we could heal our families. Make the changes no one else could. Modernize the organizations. Right now, he had to pay his penance and I had to pay mine.
It was hard to imagine a time when I’d ever be able to tell him. I knew he had flown home for Seraphina’s wedding. His picture was posted everywhere. I stopped looking at my phone for a week, just to avoid seeing his eyes in someone else’s snap story. It didn’t keep me from waiting for him to call, but I never heard from him. Not a text. Not a DM. Nothing. Neither my father nor I received an invite to the ceremony or the reception. It was obvious that the Corbans were sending a clear signal. There was no way it could be muddled. We weren’t welcome. The damage was done.
I didn’t sleep the night of the wedding. I thought Knight would show up in a red sports car and try to convince me to leave one more time. That didn’t happen either.
It was over. He was gone.
The elevator door closed, and I descended beneath the street. Absorbed by the darkness and the cold. Shielded from the sunlight and plunged into the damp earthy scent of the tunnels. For now, I knew this was where I belonged.
2
Knight
I stared at the phone resting on the table. It was new like the other parts of my life. There weren’t many numbers saved in contacts. One in particular I had made sure not to add. It was better this way. She was better off not hearing from me. False hope was a dangerous poison. I’d done enough to her.
A month after landing in France and everything still felt as if life was happening around me. I’d hastily chosen a flat that overlooked a park. Did it matter where I lived? My baby grand was delivered last week. I hadn’t had the stomach to open the keyboard yet. Every time I looked at it, I thought of her and nothing else. How was I supposed to play the fucking thing with that kind of memory haunting it? Her legs. Her whimpers. Her lips. I’d almost torched it the first night it arrived. I sat on one side of the room with a bottle of bourbon, the piano on the other. Even if I burned the instrument into a pile of ash, I wouldn’t be able to erase the memories of what I had done to Kennedy—how I had treated her when she followed me to my apartment. Those images were seared in my mind permanently.
A woman pranced past my table in red high heels speaking impeccable French. She smiled casually as she ducked into the café. Her lipstick matched the shoes.
I lit another cigarette. I didn’t give a shit anymore that I had quit. Nothing about my decisions in New Orleans made a difference now. This was Paris. I should have enjoyed the freedom. Instead, it felt as if I was imprisoned in someone else’s life. A life I didn’t sign up for.
I checked the time on my phone. I had thirty minutes before the train left for Epernay. I paid my server and stepped away from the café. There were fifty more just like it on the way to the station. I dodged waiters straightening chairs back into long rows. I decided to walk around the block to kill time.
As soon as I turned the corner, I saw a flower cart. It happened before I could stop the onslaught in my head. I knew which ones to buy Kennedy. The ones that would make the corners of her lips turn upward. Make her eyes sparkle. She could carry them while we walked the crooked streets and ate croissants, drank red wine, and talked about where to make ten o’clock dinner reservations. I’d look for a hole in the wall. She’d want something elegant. I saw the entire scene play out in less than a second. It happened that fleetingly.
Fuck. I glowered at the flower cart worker while I snuffed out the cigarette only a few feet from the wheels. I quickly moved on, trying to forget that in an instant I had fallen off the wagon again.
When would she move out of my head? Maybe I needed to burn the piano after all. It was the only way to save myself from the constant torture.