Wishing Well(14)
Surprised by his rare honesty, Meadow admitted, “No, Penny wasn’t dumb in the slightest. Naive maybe. Young and inexperienced. But not dumb.”
Vincent grinned. “And yet, she still followed me home.”
“A mistake that cost Penny her life,” Meadow reminded him.
“I regret that. Beauty such as hers should never be so carelessly lost,” he mused, a hint of emotion playing across his softly spoken words. Of course, he ruined it with what he said next. “I guess it’s a good thing for this world that there is an exact duplicate...you.”
Anger was a tidal wave crashing through her. “That doesn’t minimize my loss. I still lost my sister. I still feel the pain of her no longer being in this world.”
He leaned toward her. “And you will carry that pain for a lifetime. My name, my face, etched within the memory of it, alive and well, even if I’m no longer breathing.” It was a stab straight to the heart, his words twisting the knife to force the full impact of agony.
Meadow refused to release the tears that threatened her eyes. “Is that truly all she was to you? A game? A chess piece you tossed aside like garbage?”
A negligent shrug was his answer, a wave of his hand as if that would brush away the memory of a human life. “Life has no meaning without death. And although Penelope lived a short one, she burned bright. Not many people can claim that. She was like fire, that one.”
“And you were the water that doused her,” Meadow chided, “That’s nothing to be proud of. But then again, in a way, she was the water that doused you. In three days, you’ll take a needle in the arm for killing her. It’s a pity the person sticking you can’t wear a mask that looks just like her.”
His eyes tipped up to capture hers. “But you are an exact copy. Perhaps they’ll allow you to prick me in the vein. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Clearing her throat of the ball of emotion she didn’t want to admit choked her, Meadow suggested, “We should move on Vincent. Already three hours have passed and we’ve barely scratched the surface.”
His face was an inscrutable mask, regal, godlike, wistful as he remembered back to the pawn he’d made of Meadow’s sister. “Shall I begin where you left off?”
Weaving his fingers together over the surface of the table, he blinked slowly, the fan of his lashes dusting his skin, the curve of his mouth drawing Meadow’s attention. She knew he was fighting a smile, knew he enjoyed tormenting her with the slow crawl of his memory. He wasn’t just telling a story, he was reliving it, experiencing it again in order to claw at the superiority he’d gained while playing Penny.
As much as that bothered Meadow, her curiosity was too much. There were still so many questions left unanswered, too many layers that needed to be peeled away so she fully understood what had been done.
She refused to believe he felt nothing for the woman he’d so callously destroyed.
“No,” Meadow answered, “from what I know, nothing more happened that night beyond you buying her buy some additional clothes, getting her personal information for the job and taking her to dinner. I’m not sure that’s important. We should move on to the next morning, when you introduced her to Barron for the first time.”
Lifting her eyes to Vincent, Meadow noticed his smile stretch, saw the flicker of humor in a green gaze that missed nothing.
“What?” she asked, knowing that when his mouth took that curve, there was something he’d buried coming to the surface, some secret, some joke that nobody but him had known. Everything about this man was recorded in the diary, almost as if Penny, by writing it, had attempted to decipher all the peculiarities, all the body language, expressions and rolling words of Vincent Mercier in order to pin him down and reveal that he wasn’t as elusive as everyone believed.
For as many times as she’d read the pages of the diary, for as tattered as those pages had become, Meadow still couldn’t shake the mystery that hovered around this man like a cloud.
Speaking slowly so that each syllable of his words could be caught and examined as they fell effortlessly from his lips, Vincent mused, “Perhaps the diary is not as complete as you believe.” Pausing, he toyed with the cuff that locked his wrist, ran the tip of his finger along the edge. “Something did happen that night, but you would need my perspective to discover it.”
Her heart lurched with a painful, powerful beat, the click of the recorder stopping adding the perfectly timed sound to her physical reaction. Her eyes blinked once before she regained the ability to think, to act, to push up from her seat and turn to switch the tape.
Pressing record, she wondered why Vincent was so silent behind her. Balancing herself with her palms against the surface of the table, she took a moment where he couldn’t see her face to get her emotions under control. What had he done that hadn’t been recorded in the diary? What detail had been lost?
“Fine,” she breathed, feeling his gaze trace the contours of her bottom, knowing he stared at every asset he could find in a woman that was the same as the one he’d destroyed. “Tell me what happened that night.”
Seconds passed silently, the clock ticking, time moving forward toward the ultimate of endings, and then, “Are you sure you want to know? We’ve barely begun and already you can’t look at me, ma belle .”
The gritty quality of his voice didn’t help, the loss of fluidity of language, the ease of the endearments that would normally roll from his hot tongue gone as he asked his question.