When I finally come up for air, my mascara is a black smear on his collar and my hair is plastered to my forehead.
“The lilies,” I croak. “It was the lilies.”
He looks at me, brows furrowed. “Lilies?”
“Stargazer lilies. They had them at my sister’s funeral. All over. The funeral home upsold my parents on the deluxe package because they thought— I don’t know what they thought. That a fancier coffin made up for a closed lid, maybe.” I laugh, except it isn’t a laugh, not even a little bit, not even close. “I haven’t smelled them in five years. But then I walked into that church and it was like she died again. Right there. In front of me.”
I’ve never told him about Giana. He seemed content to believe that I wanted Raymond dead because he was cruel to me.
That’s true, of course.
But it’s not the real story.
The rain splatters against the slate. We’re alone out here in this little side yard. If I’m ever going to say this out loud to him, it’s now.
“Raymond killed my sister,” I whisper.
Matvei goes deathly still.
With a deep breath, I dive in. “Giana was a call girl,” I explain. “Not at first, of course. She was six years older than me. After our dad lost his job in ‘08, things got tight. Giana was supposed to go to FIT. She told everyone she didn’t get in, but that was bullshit—she got in, I saw the letter before she tore it up. She knew we just couldn’t afford it.”
I’m staring at a crack in the slate between my ruined pumps, watching the water fill up the spaces. It’s oddly therapeutic.
“She started waitressing instead. Then she got a fake ID and started bottle-service-ing. Then somebody at the club introduced her to somebody else, and— I don’t actually know exactly when she crossed over. She never told me. But by the time I was a junior in high school, there was a guy named Vladi who called her phone at weird hours, and she was driving a leased BMW, and she had an apartment in Murray Hill that her cocktail-waitress money definitely was not paying for.”
“Cass, you don’t need to?—”
“Let me say it,” I whisper. “Please. Let me say it once. I just need to get it out of my head before it kills me.”
He nods and his arm tightens.
“She paid for everything,” I say. “She didn’t just pay for her own life. She paid formine,too. She paid for my college tuition, my books. She slipped twenty-dollar bills into my wallet whenI wasn’t looking.I have a whole life because she… becauseshedecided I was going to have one. And she funded it.”
The rain falls harder. Matvei’s hand keeps moving on my back. Slow. Steady.There.
“She didn’t want me to know what she did to make that happen. But I knew. And I just… I just… I’m a fucking coward, because I pretended I didn’t, and I said that was for her sake. But what if it was just so I could keep doing the things I wanted to do, while she kept doing what shehadto do? It’s like, if I acknowledged that I knew, then I’d have to stop accepting her charity. Am I selfish? Am I a horrible person?”
“You were a child,” Matvei chides.
I shake my head. “I was old enough to know what was being bought for me, and with what.”
He exhales, but doesn’t argue.
“Then, five years ago,” I whisper, “she had an ‘appointment.’ That’s what she called them: ‘appointments.’ This guy was a regular, a rich one, and he had specific tastes.She would never tell me straight up, but I sort of got the idea that he liked to be really rough, and that she didn’t love it, but the money was very, very good, and she always figured she’d find a way out if it went too far.”
Like he knows I need it, Matvei’s arm tugs me even closer. I’m practically in his lap now, the rain still soaking us through to the bone.
“They were at a hotel. He was drunk and pushing the boundaries. She tried to say no, and that’s when he hit her. Shewasn’t expecting it. She lost her footing, went down hard, and cracked the back of her skull on the lip of the tub.”
I’m crying again. Quietly, this time. No sobs.
“He could have called an ambulance,” I whisper. “But he didn’t. He stood there for— I don’t know how long. Long enough that when they finally found her, she was too far gone. I only found out all this afterward, piecing together what I could from the detective and the other call girls at her agency who were willing to talk to me. But from what I gather, Raymond had his lawyer there before the paramedics. It’s a straightforward story, especially when you’ve got enough money to convince people of your version of things. Hooker comes up to your room, she’s wasted,oops,she’s dead. Who’s gonna care about the hooker, you know? Not when Raymond fucking Snyder is there to say she was no one.”
Matvei’s breathing is strangely labored. I wonder what he’s holding back. “And then you married him,” he fills in.
“Yeah.” I laugh miserably. “I sure did.” I turn my face up to his. I don’t care anymore that I’m a wreck. “Pretty early on, I realized just how this was all going to end. I figured out who he was, and I thought, okay, well, the justice system isn’t going to do a damn thing, because the justice system doesn’t see girls like Giana, it just sees thething she did. She was just a girl who got what she had coming to her. So fine.If no one is going to do it, then I will. And the fastest way I could get to him was through his front door. So I walked through it. I never let him know I was Giana’s sister; I had a whole fake backstory and he was happy to swallow it all. Besides, I’d learned from her what he liked. It was almost embarrassingly easy to get him to choose me. I let him propose. I let him buy me this fucking ring.” I hold up my left hand, where Raymond’s diamond is dripping rain. “Once I was in, I had myplan. But I knew it couldn’t come too fast or all the heat would fall on me. So I waited. I let him hit me, Mat. I let him beat me silly for four years straight while I bided my time. But when that time finally came, I… I couldn’t do it.”
“And so you walked into Khaza,” he says. “To find someone who could.”
