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“He wasn’t kind when he was sped up?”
“No,” she said. “No. If Luke has any gift, it’s getting other people to do whatever he wants. He used to say he could see the marionette strings that held people up. He could just tug them this way and that. And if he deemed someone unworthy, he could just …” She made a snipping gesture with her fingers. “He’s not just a narcissist. No, that would be easier. But Luke, Luke gets in your head. All the way. Makes you do stuff.”
“Did he ever hit you?”
“No.”
“Threaten you?”
“No.”
Evan took a moment to filter the skepticism from his tone. “What then? How does he make you do stuff?”
Her gaze was penetrating. “If you meet him, you’ll find out.”
He wondered if Echo’s feelings revealed more about her than they did about Luke.
She was watching him intently.“What?”
An accusation.
Evan trod carefully. “No one canmakeyou do anything.”
“You don’t get it.” She shook her head. “All of a sudden you’re doing something that you thought was your idea. But it wasn’t. It was his.”
So much of what she said was slippery and vague and frustrating.
“When he speeds up, there are only two things,” she said. “What he wants to have happen. And collateral damage. He starts moving so fast he forgets that other people are … well,people.We’re so much slower, burdened down with feelings and … and consideration.”
Luke Devine sounded just as enigmatic as when Naomi Templeton had laid out his profile. And Evan wasn’t sure how much more clarity he could get now from a woman who not ten hours ago was out on the brink contemplating the drop.
“What does he use his influence for?” Evan asked.
She gave a mirthless laugh. “Forcing through legislation he deems convenient. Steering billion-dollar defense contracts. Destroying the livelihood of competitors who dare challenge him. Burying inconvenient news stories. Kneecapping foreign leaders whose interests aren’t aligned with his.” She lifted one shoulder in a halfhearted shrug. “Whatever he desires.”
Evan thought of President Donahue-Carr’s trillion-dollar environmental bill, hung up pending the approval of two senators Devine controlled.
“Why did you stay with him?” he asked.
“I kept hoping he’d be like he was before. And the thing with people who are …”
“Who are what?”
“Crazy. Brilliant. Crazy brilliant. When you’re with them, if you’re not strong enough, it feels like everything’s your fault. You feel like it’s you. And …”
Evan waited.
“My whole life,” Echo finally continued, “I felt like I was waiting. For life to get better, for me to … I don’t know,arrive. To be happier or more secure. Dumb, I realize. With him? It felt like you weren’t waiting. It felt like you werethere. Everything was like”—she closed her eyes, lips pursed—“like the first time you perform the Bach Prelude.” Her eyes opened abruptly, as if she’d found the darkness no longer safe. “Until it wasn’t like that at all.”
The conversation hadn’t yet touched on anything Evan had wanted to find out about Luke Devine. But he’d learned from Jack that what he wanted to know wasn’t always what he needed to know.
“The best people are the worst people,” Echo continued. “All that sensitivity and insight focused on you—the real you. It’s likethey know what chords to tap deep down to make you … resonate. With yourself, the world. But then once you let them in”—her expression darkened—“they can hit those same chords with amallet. And make you vibrate so hard you think you might come apart.” There were big round tears in her lashes, and she blinked and blinked, but they wouldn’t fall. “It’s almost not worth it. Opening up. Do you know what I mean?”
Evan thought of the self-contained ecosystem of his penthouse, his poured-concrete floors, the speckless countertops, the pristine façade of the Sub-Zero, as cold as the Icelandic landscape. He thought of the Veras he’d failed, the interior vertical garden that breathed his opposite, carbon dioxide to his oxygen, and how it all kept him safe from the chaos of the world. The dollhouse view through the bank of east-facing windows that looked in on an array of lives in the building across—a female couple singing karaoke, Latin parents teaching a toddler to bang a tambourine, an elderly man with a bedbound wife who spent hours every night over his stovetop concocting elaborate French meals for two. Noise, color, smells. Life in all its richness. Life that Evan could only watch through aquarium glass while he sipped seven-times-distilled vodka, purifying his insides, making sure no pollution of the outside world could take root inside him.
He said, “No.”
“Well, Luke was like that. A guy with a mallet. Volatile. Charming. Dangerous. Everything filled with … too-much-ness. He went from the A string to the C string. Nothing in between.”
