I stay out of the open, running behind buildings in the cover of darkness, as much as my high-heeled shoes allow me. When I feel far enough away for time to stop, I hide behind another dumpster and step out of the shoes. I take off my blonde wig, chucking it inside the dumpster.
I can’t breathe. I feel sick.
Oh God, I feel sick…
I fall against the brick wall behind me, arching my back and planting my hands against my knees. I vomit violently onto the pavement, my body rigid, my esophagus burning.
Snatching my shoes from the ground, I take off running again toward the hotel, trying to hide the fact that my hands and dress are stained with blood, but I realize that’s not so easy to do. I get a few suspicious stares as I walk briskly through the front lobby, but I try to ignore them and hope no one calls the police.
Instead of further risking being seen by someone else, I take the stairs up to the eighth floor. By the time I get there and after all of the running I’ve done, I feel like my legs are going to collapse beneath me. I lean against the wall and catch my breath, both legs trembling uncontrollably. My chest hurts, as if every breath I take I’m sucking in dust and smoke and microscopic pieces of glass deep into my lungs.
The room I share with Eric is locked and I don’t have my room key. In fact…
“Oh shit….”
I throw my head back, shut my eyes and sigh miserably.
I no longer have my purse. I lost it sometime during the struggle in Hamburg’s room. My room keys. My cell phone. My gun. My knife. It’s all gone.
I pound on the door but Eric’s not inside. I didn’t expect him to be really since it’s barely eleven o’clock. But just in case I’m wrong, I try Dahlia’s door next.
“Dahl! Are you in there?” I rap on the door quickly, trying not to disturb any of the nearby rooms.
No answer.
Ready to give up, I drop my shoes on the floor and brace both hands against the wall, my head falling forward between my shoulders. But then I hear a faint clicking noise and the door to Dahlia’s room opens slowly. I look up to see her standing there.
Not stopping long enough to question the strange look on her face, I push my way inside the room just to get out of the open. Eric is sitting in the chair by the window. I notice his hair is slightly disheveled. So is Dahlia’s.
My instincts are kicking me in the back of the head, but I don’t really care about what they’re trying to tell me. I just stabbed a man in the throat and tried to kill another. I was almost raped. I just ran for my life through the back streets of Los Angeles from men with guns chasing after me. Nothing they could ever do could top that.
“Oh my God, Sarai,” Dahlia says stepping up in front of me, “is that blood?”
The strange, quiet demeanor she was displaying when I first walked in disappears in an instant when she takes stock of me in the full light of the room. Her eyes are wide and filled with concern.
Eric gets up quickly from the chair.
“You’re bleeding.” He looks me over, too. “What the hell happened?”
Dahlia’s eyes scan my clothes and my oddly pinned hair and wig cap.
“Why—ummm, why are you dressed like that?”
I look down at myself. I don’t know what to tell them, so I say nothing. I feel like a deer in headlights, but my expression remains solid and unemotional, maybe a little confused.
“You saw Matt,” Dahlia accuses and her voice begins to rise. “Fucking A, Sarai, you did, didn’t you?”
I feel her fingers curl around my upper arm.
I pull away from her and go to take my hair down from the wig cap, making my way into the bathroom. As I’m taking the bobby pins out of my hair, I notice a condom floating in the toilet.
Eric steps into the bathroom behind me. He knows I saw it.
“Sarai, I-I…I’m so sorry,” I hear him say.
“Don’t worry about it,” I answer and take the last bobby pin out, setting it on the cream-colored countertop.
I push my way past Eric and walk back into the room. Dahlia is looking right at me, shame and regret consuming her features.
“I’m—”
I put up my hand and look back and forth between them both.
“No, I’m serious,” I say, “I’m not mad.”
“What do you mean?” Dahlia asks.
Eric looks flustered. He raises a hand to the back of his head and runs his fingers through his hair.
“Look, no offense,” I say to Eric, “but I’ve been faking it with you since we got together.”
His eyes widen, though he’s trying not to let the shock and sting of my admission show too obviously. A huge part of me feels good about the truth, not for vengeance sake, but because I needed to get it off my chest. But I admit, after finding out that the two of them have been fucking each other behind my back, a small part of me is happy to offend him just the same. I guess vengeance always finds a way, even if only in the smallest of gestures.
“Faking it?”
“I don’t have time for this.” I go toward the door. “You two can have each other. No objections here. I’m not mad. I just really don’t care. I have to go.”
“Wait…Sarai.”
I turn to look at Dahlia. She’s so shocked and can hardly pull her thoughts together. After a few seconds of silence I get impatient and give her that yeah-out-with-it look.
“You’re really OK with…this?”
Wow, I really am unfit for their lifestyle. The normal lifestyle. I don’t even understand it, all this dating and best friend stuff and the cheating and competition and the head-games. That look on their faces, so blank yet so full of disbelief and question, all over a situation that, to me, really isn’t all that important. I have more serious things to worry about than this.
I sigh heavily, annoyed with their confused half-questions.
“Yes, I’m fine with it,” I say and then I turn to Eric. “I need our room key.”
I hold out my hand.
Reluctantly, he reaches into his back pocket and pulls it out. I take it from his hand and walk right out the door and head to the room next door. Eric follows behind me and tries to talk to me while I’m shoving my belongings into my suitcase.
“Sarai, I never meant—”
I turn around quickly and look him dead in the eyes. “All right, I’m going to say this once, and after that, either change the subject or go back over there with Dahlia. I couldn’t care less what the two of you do, but please don’t pull that cliché television line about how you never meant for it to happen, because…it’s just stupid.” I laugh lightly. Because really it is stupid to me. “Next thing you’ll be saying is that it wasn’t me, it was you. Geez, do you have any idea how that sounds? Is it really so unbelievable that I say I don’t care and I actually mean it? No head-games. I’m dead serious.” I shake my head and put my hands out in front of me and say, “I. Don’t. Care.”
I turn back to my suitcase and zip it up, then reach deep inside the side zipper for the key to my secret room, glad I had one extra.
“I have to go,” I say making my way back through the room and past him again.
“Where are you going?”
“I can’t say, but please listen to me, Eric. If anyone comes here looking for me, act like you don’t know who I am. Tell Dahlia the same. Pretend you’ve never seen me before. In fact, I want you both to go out for the night. Go anywhere, just…don’t hang around here.”
“Are you going to tell me what happened, why you have blood all over you? Sarai, you’re scaring the shit out of me.”
“I’ll be fine,” I say and soften my features. “Just promise me that you and Dahlia will do exactly as I said.”
“Are you ever going to tell me?”
“I can’t.”
The silence thickens between us.
Finally, I open the door and step out into the hallway.
“I guess I should be the one apologizing,” I say.
“For what
?”
Eric stands in the doorway, his arms hanging loosely at his sides.
“For being with someone else in my head the whole time I was with you.” I glance down at the floor momentarily.
We look at each other for a short moment and nothing else is said between us. We know we’re both at fault. And I think we’re both relieved that everything is out in the open.
There’s nothing more to say.
I walk away down the long stretch of hallway in the opposite direction of my private room and double around the back so he doesn’t know where I’m going. When I close myself off inside the room, the only thing I can manage to do is fall over onto the bed. The exhaustion and pain and shock of everything that has happened tonight catches up to me as soon as that door closes, rushing over and through me like a wave. I fall hard against the mattress on my back. My calves hurt so bad I doubt I’ll be able to walk in the morning without limping.
I stare up at the dark ceiling until it blinks out and I drift quickly off to sleep.
CHAPTER SIX
Sarai
A hard thud! jolts me awake sometime later in the night. I rise up from the bed like a catapult.
I see two men in my room: one I’ve never seen before lying dead on the floor, and Victor Faust standing over his body.
“Get up.”
“Victor?”
I can’t believe he’s here. I must still be dreaming.
“Get up, Sarai, NOW!” Victor grabs me by the elbow and jerks me out of the bed and to my feet.
He doesn’t stop long enough for me to even grab my things and he’s opening the door and pulling me out into the hall alongside him, my hand wrenched within his.
We run down the hall and another man rounds the corner with a gun in-hand. Victor raises his suppressed 9MM and drops him in the center of the hall before the man can get a shot off. He pulls me past the body, his strong fingers digging into my hand as we rush toward the stairwell. He swings the door open, pushes me in front of him and we hurry down the concrete stairs. One floor. Three. Five. My legs are killing me. I don’t think I can walk much more. Finally on the fifth floor, Victor pulls me out into another hall and toward a back elevator.
When the elevator doors close and we are the only two inside, I finally get a chance to speak.
“How did you know I was here?” I can barely catch my breath, winded from the constant rushing and the adrenaline, but I think mostly because Victor is standing beside me and he’s holding my hand.
My eyes start to burn with tears.
I force them back.
“What were you thinking, Sarai?”
“I—”
Victor grabs my face in both of his hands and shoves my body against the elevator wall, closing his lips fiercely over mine. His tongue tangles with my own, his mouth stealing my breath in a passionate kiss that is what ultimately makes my knees buckle. All of the strength I had been using to keep my body upright before vanishes when his lips touch me. He kisses me hungrily, angrily, and I wilt into his arms.
Then he pulls away, his strong hands wrapped around my biceps as he keeps me pushed against the elevator wall. We stare at each other for what feels like an eternity, our eyes locked in some kind of deep contemplation, our lips inches apart. All I want to do is taste them again.
But he doesn’t let me.
“Answer me,” he demands, the corners of his dangerous eyes narrowing with censure.
I’ve already forgotten the question.
He shakes me. “Why did you come here? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”
I shake my head in a short, rapid motion, part of me more concerned with that precarious look in his eyes than what he’s saying.
The elevator door opens on the basement floor and I don’t have time to answer as Victor is once again grasping my hand and pulling me to follow. We weave our way through a large storage room with boxes piled high against the walls and then down a long, dark hallway that leads into an underground parking garage. Victor finally releases my hand and I follow him to a car parked between two black vans with the hotel’s logo on the sides. Two beeps echo through the space and the headlights on the car flash as we approach, illuminating the concrete wall in front of it. Wasting no time, I jump inside the passenger’s seat and shut the door.
Seconds later, Victor is driving casually through the parking garage and out onto the street.
“I wanted him dead,” I finally answer.
Victor doesn’t look over.
“Well, you did an excellent job,” he says with sarcasm.
He turns right at the light and the car picks up speed as we get on the freeway.
Stung by his words, I know he’s right and so I don’t argue with him. I screwed up. I screwed up bad.
But I don’t realize just how much until Victor says, “You could’ve gotten your friends killed. You could’ve gotten yourself killed.”
I feel my eyes widen beyond their limits and I turn around further to see him. “Oh no…Victor, what…are they OK?”
I feel like I’m going to be sick again.
Victor glances over at me briefly.
“They’re fine,” he says. “The first room Hamburg’s men went into was empty,” he adds and looks back out at the road. “I arrived as they were leaving it. I followed one of them to the room you were hiding in, let him unlock it and then I made my move.”
The room keys. Both of my extra room keys were in the purse I lost at Hamburg’s. And the room numbers were written on the little paper sleeves the keys had been tucked into when the front desk clerk presented them to me. I was so worried about keeping my gun and knife hidden that I didn’t think to hide the keys.
“Shit!” I look out at the road, too. “I-I lost my purse at the restaurant. My room keys were in it. I left them bread crumbs!”
Thankfully I didn’t have an extra key to Dahlia’s room, or else she and Eric might be dead right now.
What in the hell was I thinking?!
“No, you literally left them the keys to your rooms with the hotel name emblazoned on them. Sarai, I should’ve killed you and saved you and myself all of this trouble, a long time ago.”
I swing my head around to face him, anger and hurt weighing heavily in my chest.
“You don’t mean that,” I say.
He pauses and glances at me. He sighs. “No. I don’t mean that.”
“Don’t ever say that to me again. Never say anything like that to me, or I’ll kill you and save myself anymore trouble.”
I look away.
“You don’t mean that,” he says.
I glance back over into those dangerous greenish-blue eyes that I’ve missed so much.
“No. But it would probably be the wise thing to do.”
“Well, you’re not exactly scoring wisdom points tonight, so I can feel safe for another twenty-four hours at least.”
I hide the smile in my face.
“I missed you,” I say distantly, looking out at the road.
Victor doesn’t respond, but it would be odd if he did, I admit. Despite his lack of emotions though, I know he missed me, too. That kiss in the elevator said things that words never could.
Victor takes an exit and pulls the car underneath an overpass bridge. He puts the car in Park and the area fades to black when the turns the headlights off.
“What are we doing here?” I ask.
“You need to call your friends.”
“Why?”
He reaches into the console between us and retrieves a cell phone.
“Tell them to go back to Arizona,” he instructs. “Do or say whatever you have to to get them to leave Los Angeles. The sooner, the better.”
He places the phone in my hand. At first, I just stare at it, but he urges me with that look of his, the one that screams hurry-up-already but only someone like me, someone ‘close’ to him would ever notice it.
Fumbling the phone in my hands, I hold it steady and punch in Eric’s number. B
ut then I change my mind, hang up on the first ring and call Dahlia instead.
She answers after the fifth ring.
I take a deep breath and do what I do best. Lie.
“The truth is, you both hurt me. I doubt I’ll ever be able to forgive either one of you for what you did.”
“Sarai…God, I am so sorry. We really didn’t mean for it to go that far. I swear to you. I don’t know what happened—”
“Listen, Dahlia, please just listen.”
She becomes quiet.
I turn on the waterworks. I never knew I could cry on cue and it could be completely fake.
“I want to believe you. I want to be able to trust you again, but you were supposed to be my best friend and you betrayed me. I need time alone and I want you and Eric to go back to Arizona. Tonight. I don’t think I can stand seeing either of you again—wait, where are you right now?”
It just dawned on me that if she and Eric were at the hotel then surely she’d know by now that two men were shot to death on the floor where their room is.
“We’re at some rooftop party,” she says. “A-Are you OK with that? I thought it was messed up for us to go out, but Eric said you insisted—”
“No, it’s fine,” I cut in. “I did insist. Where is he now?”
“I left him on the roof so I could talk. It’s really loud up there. What is this number you’re calling me from?”
“It’s a friend’s phone. I lost mine. Did Eric tell you that if anyone comes looking for me—”
“Yeah, he did,” she interrupts. “What’s that all about anyway? Jesus, Sarai, forget about this issue with me and Eric for a moment and please tell me what’s going on. The blood. The weird clothes you were wearing and that thing on your head. Was that a wig cap? You’re in some kind of trouble, I know. I know you hate me and have every right to, but please just tell me what happened.”
“I can’t fucking tell you!” I scream at her, letting the tears strain my voice. “Dammit, Dahlia, just do what I asked you to do. Give me that much! You fucked my boyfriend! Please, just go back to Arizona, let me get myself together and then I’ll be on my way home. Maybe then we can talk. But right now, just do what I ask. OK?”