Wishing Well(20)

“We’ll leave you just outside the first set of gates. There are bathrooms if you need to use one and a vending machine if you’re thirsty or hungry.”

The guard moved as if to leave, but turned around again, searching Meadow’s face. “How can you sit in there and listen to him? Didn’t he kill your sister? You should hate him.”

“I do,” Meadow answered, crossing her arms over her chest.

Scoffing, the guard shook her head. “Doesn’t look like it. If you were to ask me, I’d say you have a thing for him.”

“I guess it’s a good thing I’m not asking you,” Meadow snapped. “Perhaps you’re just projecting your own feelings onto me?”

The guard chuckled. “Can’t blame me. It’s not often we get the pretty ones in here.”

With that, the guard left and Meadow choose a seat on an utilitarian bench, pulling up her feet so she could wrap her arms over her shins and lay her head on her knees. Skull throbbing with anger, excitement, agony, and questions, she let go of her disgust with the guard to focus on what Vincent had implied about her family home.

He was wrong in his assumption that Meadow and Penny had been raised without etiquette, without having been taught right from wrong, without having it drilled into their heads the merits of gracious manners and proper behavior. But unlike the lives some led when money was never an issue, or when constantly in the public eye, their childhood home had been comfortable, an environment built on a modest income where love had been more valuable than diamonds.

Penny knew how to behave, but whereas she had taken on more of the personality traits of their father - a stern man that still knew how to deliver a well-timed joke and who would often let loose to shirk the stress of responsibility - Meadow had been more like their mother. Refined. Educated. Demure.

They had been identical twins in looks, in strength, in fortitude, but in personality, there were some subtle differences. Penny was the more relaxed of the twins, the one who believed that life could be lived on the cuff, decisions not always carrying permanent results, that fun and relaxation were more important than constantly worrying what the future would hold. She was fun, while Meadow was responsible. She was brash, while Meadow was reserved.

Had Meadow been the one to end up on the streets, she would have suffocated beneath the pressure rather than enduring it long enough to discover a new home.

If Wishing Well could have been considered a home. According to the diary, it was more like a prison. But unlike the one in which Meadow now found herself sitting, Wishing Well had been built with the simple idea of opulence and excessive luxury. In that, Vincent’s hotel had been a lie intended to settle the mind of its guests, a dream intended to deceive the mind of a wayward and rebellious girl.

How would Meadow fair against a man that not even Penny had been able to see through?

She didn’t know, but she would try. She would bite her tongue each time she wanted to compliment him, would dig her nails into her skin each time she felt herself sliding into his orbit.

Lost in her thoughts, the half hour passed quickly, and Meadow was escorted back to interview room three, and back to a man that followed her with his observant eyes, his posture relaxed, his aura even more alluring now that his hunger had been sated by a female guard.

Meadow didn’t have to ask to know what he’d done in the short time he’d been held in an alternate location, his teasing smile and bedroom eyes said it all. She could clearly see him stretched lazily over the white linens of a large, comfortable bed, his tan skin striking against the soft sheets.

Shaking herself of the image, she pressed record on her machine and took her seat. “I want to discuss the following morning, the first time you introduced Penny to your friend, Barron.”

Vincent’s lazy grin stretched wider. “I knew you would ask about that morning next. That day. That...encounter.”

Meadow bit the inside of her cheek to keep from screaming. “Encounter isn’t exactly the word I would use. From what I know, it was more like an attack. A lie. A test that Penny didn’t know she was taking.”

“It was a taste,” he said, correcting her. His shackles rattled when he moved just a fraction to stretch the breadth of his strong shoulders. “How is a man to know how far a woman has come along if he doesn’t determine who she was before the training?”

Planting her palms on the surface of the table, Meadow had to fight not to stand so that she could be bigger than him as she argued, “You intentionally deceived her into believing you were innocent. That you gave a damn what happened to her. That you would protect her from men just like you!”

A simple shrug, a grin that revealed nothing. “I fail to understand why it upsets you so much, Meadow.” Stressing her name, he met her eyes, daring her to reach across for him with shaking arms and fingers that wanted to strangle. “You weren’t the woman who was led astray, were you? You hadn’t been the one to be deceived.”

“She was my sister -“

“That you hadn’t spoken to in over a year by the time I found her. When she had her heart broken by her boyfriend, where were you? When she was sleeping on the streets, when she was cold, scared and alone, what had you done to save her?”

Knowing he’d cornered her easily, he folded his hands together over the table, and straightened his posture. “Perhaps you’re here to accuse me alone of her death because you’re attempting to rid yourself of the role you played in her destruction.”