Page 23 of Lethal Obsession

But here’s what I know: all men have choices.

I made mine long ago, the night I told my sister to run and take Papa with her.

Not because of loyalty, honor, or some misguided sense of pride.

I became a killer because the Orlovs came into my house and tortured and murdered the people I love.

But I don’t blame them, just like I don’t blame my father or some stupid trinkets in a vault, no matter how valuable they might be.

Deep down, I know I was always a killer.

All I ever needed was someone to hand me the knife.

So I meet my father’s stare with my lone eye, evenly and steadily. And just as I glimpsed the steel in his soul, briefly, I allow him to see the darkness in mine.

The steel in his eyes fades to resignation as he turns for the door.

I give the square box a final look.

Then, driven by some impulse I truly don’t understand, I slip the box into my pocket.

Giving the vault one last look, I close the door on the past.

3

Ofelia

“We’ve talked about this before, Ofelia.” Seline gives me an extremely disdainful look across the cards on the table. “Diagnosing yourself from social media is unhelpful. Leave the diagnoses to me, oui, and use your telephone for talking, not as a substitute for a medical professional.” She glares at my phone like it’s a Trojan horse.

Remembering how much she hates modern technology, I tuck my phone back in my bag and do my best to hide my private amusement at the irony of being lectured on clinical diagnoses by a tarot reader. We’re speaking French, not least because Seline sounds far less patronizing in her native tongue.

Patronizing though she might be, she is also the only person I can confide in.

Here’s the irony about being born into what some people might call the criminal class: the only people who can ever be trusted not to talk about it are those who are also part of it.

Seline is a Romany Gypsy who has a lot of family in Spain. One of her cousins is a small-time arms dealer who, she told me in characteristically blunt fashion the day we met at a college party, my own father once indirectly helped escape a prison sentence.

Seline knows my story, or as much of it as anyone does, and isn’t either shocked or titillated by it, as a normal psychologist would be.

“I guess it’s just that I can really relate to the term limerence, you know?” I curl into the large chair in her attic office, located above a New Age shop in the 19th arrondissement. It’s late May, and Paris has burst into a glorious spring.

“Limerence is a pop psychology term, not a medical one.” Seline purses her red lips and doesn’t attempt to hide her impatience. “And it lends a certain tragic romanticism to your feelings about Alexei Petrovsky.”

Seline has been taking psychology classes via Open University for several years, so her sessions are half counseling, half tarot reading.

It works for me.

“Well, my name is Ofelia, after all. Tragic romanticism is kind of my thing, or at least it is according to Shakespeare.”

Seline gives a very Gallic eye roll and makes a sound that sits somewhere between huh and hmph.

Oddly enough, her complete lack of social niceties is the reason I’ve actually stuck with therapy, if that’s what you can call this, for the first time in my life. Maybe it’s something to do with having grown up amid hard men who don’t sugarcoat things, but I tend to respect people who don’t try to coddle me. I’ve been coming here ever since I started my master’s degree, two months after Alexei kicked me to the curb at my twenty-first birthday party. In a couple of weeks it will be my twenty-third birthday—and the topic of these sessions still hasn’t altered.

“Okay,” I say. “So what would you call it then, if not limerence?”

“Turn over a card.” She nods at the cards fanned out face down on the table instead of answering.

Obediently, I pick one.