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I look at her, really look at her, and I ask, “Do you really want your sister here? You know what they’d do to her, right?”
Her lip trembles and she reaches up to wipe her eyes. “She’d be fine here. She likes… sex. She’s good at talking to men.” After a bitter laugh, she adds, “She’d do better here than me.”
“She’s, what, with Corvi and Guerra?” I say, trying to remember the situation. “Yeah, that’s probably pretty hellish for her.” I wonder if I could rescue the girl. Vanessa would think of me as a hero, which might be amusing. But Giulio would fucking kill me if I interfered with things in Benton City. Shit’s tenuous enough as it is with everybody licking their wounds and shoring up for bigger things.
Vanessa scrunches her eyes shut. “Angelo Guerra… I saw him… he killed a man with a pair of scissors. There was blood everywhere. I don’t… I don’t want Lucia trapped with him.”
Points for creativity, although Giulio had already said Guerra deserved commendation for his bloody ways.
I’m amused that Vanessa still thinks Guerra is worse than me, Damien, or Giulio, though. We either haven’t scared her enough, or the sex is good enough that she’s forgetting the bad parts.
I finish my sandwich and lick my fingers. “What do you think the consequences for you and me would be, if we pissed off Giulio like that?”
Vanessa pauses for a moment, then she says, “I don’t know. I doubt he’d kill us, and you wouldn’t just stand there and take punishment or whatever.”
I snort. “You think he wouldn’t try to kill us, if we pushed him that hard?”
She frowns at me. “Well… No. I mean, if I did something to Elena, he’d probably try to hurt us, but he just doesn’t seem like he’d—”
She stops talking as I start laughing. “Not that I’d just stand there and let it happen, mind you, but he wouldn’t hesitate to kill us if we pissed him off enough. He’d want to make sure to teach the others a lesson so they wouldn’t do the same thing.”
It’s cute how naive she is. I’m surprised she’s managed to stay like this after all this time in this dump, actually.
“Giulio takes his… fun… through all these games. The pretending. You’re the one who murders people and gets off on it. And when he stopped pretending, Giulio… seemed almost normal.” Vanessa wraps her arms around her legs. “But you know him better than I do.”
Yeah, I do, which is why my eyebrows kept going higher as she spoke. “No fucking way have you seen Giulio when he isn’t pretending. Nobody’s seen that.”
“You have, or you wouldn’t be so sure I haven’t,” Vanessa counters.
I’ve seen Giulio when he’s mad, but even then, I wouldn’t have said he wasn’t pretending. I like Giulio, I do, but I’d never claim to properly understand him. He’s got twenty layers of masks, and it’s probably good for everybody that he’s chosen to play this cheerful jokester.
“Maybe,” I say before settling down next to Vanessa on the bed. She tenses up but doesn’t move. “Let’s not talk about him anymore. Don’t you know it’s bad manners to discuss other men while in bed with somebody?”
Vanessa blushes deeply at that, which amuses me. I don’t know how she can still be so damn naive and innocent, but I like it. It’ll change, eventually, which will be a disappointment, but at least for now I get to have my fun with it. “Sorry,” she mumbles. She focuses on her food for a moment, finishing up the sandwich and brushing at a few crumbs.
I pull her into my arms, kissing her throat where Giulio had left a nice mark.
“How’d you end up involved in… all of this?” Vanessa asks me, startling me into sitting back and eyeing her.
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Well, with Giulio, and Damien… You don’t seem to like Damien very much, but you seem to like his…” She hesitates, stumbling over her words, “his… plans.”
“You mean to get you knocked up?” I say crudely, just to see her flinch. “Yeah, I’m okay with it. It’s not like I’ll be the one taking care of the kid. Me and Giulio will get to be the fun uncles either way.”
She blinks at me, looking a little startled. “You’re going to be a… fun uncle?”
I laugh. “What, I can’t like kids just because I have a nickname likeSlayer?”
“Well…” Flustered, she fidgets, and I kiss her forehead.
“Don’t worry. I won’t make the kid call me Slayer.” Probably.
After a beat, she asks, “What’s your real name, then? Since it’s not Slayer.”
Props for being direct. Some people might have told her, but I’m very conscious of where we are. I doubt the place is bugged, but who knows who’s listening via some secret back door or because the walls are thin?
“Call me whatever you want, sweetheart. I can be John McClane, if you want.” I grin widely at her. “I think I could have cleared the building faster than Bruce Willis did in that movie. But there would have been more blood.”
