Kiss Kill Vanish Read online

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

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  Advance Reader’s e-proof

  courtesy of HarperCollins Publishers

  This is an advance reader’s e-proof made from digital files of the uncorrected proofs. Readers are reminded that changes may be made prior to publication, including to the type, design, layout, or content, that are not reflected in this e-proof, and that this e-pub may not reflect the final edition. Any material to be quoted or excerpted in a review should be checked against the final published edition. Dates, prices, and manufacturing details are subject to change or cancellation without notice.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  DEDICATION

  [dedication tk]

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Disclaimer

  Title

  Dedication

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Jessica Martinez

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  ONE

  “Jane, darling, you have to keep still.”

  Darling.

  I keep still. My muscles are screaming to stretch, release, contract, do anything but press my bones and blood into this pose for one more agonizing second, but I keep perfectly still.

  “If you weren’t so beautiful, I wouldn’t have to be such a perfectionist,” Lucien mumbles.

  My skin prickles. I stifle the cringe, but skin will be skin. “Maybe taking a picture would work better for this one,” I suggest.

  Only half of his face is visible from behind the easel, but it’s enough to see his eyebrow think about raising itself. That single eyebrow holds enough disdain to be the most expressive barely moving eyebrow in the world. It’s saying: Ridiculous. A picture.

  What’s ridiculous is that I was stupid enough to suggest it. I need to be necessary to his process. He has to find my presence as vital as breath and paint and canvas.

  “I can’t paint from a photograph when it’s my living, breathing muse that inspires me,” he says, voice slippery and melodic like it gets when he’s about to wax poetic. Sometimes, like right now, there’s a hint of faux-British in it—just enough to remind people he went to boarding school in London, not consistent enough to sound remotely genuine.

  It’s pretentious, but I prefer it to French, which he knows baffles me yet slides into anyway. He only does it every once in a while, to remind me how charmingly bilingual he is. Like everyone in Montreal doesn’t speak both. Aside from me, of course.

  “Painting from a photograph isn’t an organic artistic experience,” he rambles on. “Rembrandt, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso—none of the great portrait artists painted from photographs. Can you imagine da Vinci infusing all that life and passion into the Mona Lisa if he wasn’t actually in the woman’s presence?”

  I stare hard into the wall behind him to keep my eyes from rolling. He deserves to be mocked; I wish I could do it. The old me would do it. But Lucien has no sense of humor, so no ability to laugh at himself, and in the most literal sense of the word, I can’t afford to insult him. Instead, I say, “I’m no Mona Lisa.”

  And Lucien is no idiot. He presses his lips together, clearly reading my thoughts—you’re no da Vinci—which is probably why he doesn’t respond with another affected monologue. He resumes painting, eyebrow back where it should be.

  Lucien is not a terrible artist. The last two or three portraits have at least felt like me, if not actually looked like me. Dark hair, dark eyes, and I recognize the heart-shaped face because he exaggerates it every time. But honestly. Da Vinci. And as for referring to his muse as if she’s not present to hear how weird this is—it’s like he’s pulling me into his pretensions, making me complicit in his annoyingness.

  Still, I say nothing. Some days the layers of make-believe are wrapped around me so thick, so tight, it’s hard to breathe.

  Lucien tries to educate me because he thinks I’m a simple, ignorant girl living in a big city for the first time. If he knew that I grew up with a Klimt hanging in the dining room, a Dalí in my father’s study, and a Degas over my bed, he’d lose the smug smile. If he knew that I’d wandered galleries and auctions in London, Hong Kong, Buenos Aires, Dubai, that I know my Manet from my Monet and my van Gogh from my Gauguin, he’d stop trying to teach me something.

  If I told him who my father is, pouring his knowledge of the art world into my sweet little head would be the last thing on his mind.

  I stare at the wall. I keep still. I don’t think about Miami, or my father’s cigar-sweet smell and crinkled hands, or Emilio’s sad eyes. Instead I think about the ridiculousness of this pose, of the costume, of what I’ve become.

  The pose, well, I’ve done worse as far as comfort goes. I’m sitting in the curve of a gleaming grand piano, on the hip, so to speak, leaning back on one palm, holding the other hand in front of me with a skinny, ebony cigarette holder between curled fingers. It’s cheesy and seductive, and my wrist is sore from the leaning, but at least I’m not perched on a diving board like last time. It’s the absurdity of it that hurts more than anything.

  My costume is glitz and pizzazz, straight from the Roaring Twenties: black sequined flapper dress with a fringed hem and beaded spaghetti straps. It’s the kind of thing I would’ve worn to a party in my former life. Not to turn heads in the way my sisters love turning heads in their slinky cocktail dresses with slits up to there, but to be different. To stick out.

  I don’t try to stick out anymore.

  “Comfortable?” Lucien asks.

  “Yes.”

  A lie. As much as I’d love to love the flapper dress, it feels like I’m wrapped in sandpaper. Since I put it on I’ve been fantasizing about ripping it off my body and scratching my skin till it bleeds. It doesn’t help that the feather headband squeezes my temples and the plume flops over, tickling my cheek. But still, it’s better than the 1950s bathing suit, and the Regency gown, which, humiliatingly enough, actually took his help getting into.

  “Don’t sigh like that. It changes the slope of your shoulder.”

  I un-sigh, but he frowns, so I half sigh. Half-un-sigh? He scowls. It’s all so polar and intense, the way he responds to me. I’m either something to be fawned over or annoyed by; there is no in between.

  Nobody from my old life would believe this of me,
this subordination. Valentina Cruz was sub-nothing. She had no idea that spitfire and spunk and guts were a luxury. I miss being her.

  “I’m serious,” Lucien says. “Stop sighing.” There’s a glint to his voice, a flash of something metallic and unyielding, reminding me of what my costume and his flattery occasionally make me forget. Power. I hand it to him at the door of this lavish loft. But sometimes I start acting and he starts acting, and the whole charade makes me forget. I shouldn’t forget. This is business.

  Lucien pulls his brush across the canvas and glares at it.

  When I really look at him, I have to admit it: Lucien isn’t ugly. But he’s one of those people whose personality is so pungent it soaks through his skin from the inside out. That first day outside the Metro station, maybe, I saw lemony hair, blue eyes, features all in good symmetry even if his face seemed a little thin. Now that I know him, though, those eyes are too deep-set and narrow, the tan is a suspicious orange, and his nostrils are freakishly small.

  It’s his costume that irks me most, though—not that he’d admit to wearing one. He’s dressed as the quintessential artiste: windswept bedhead we both know he spent time and sculpting gel perfecting, scruff on his cheeks, rumpled clothes with the designer labels clipped off, and wire glasses that sit like two Os on his face when he actually remembers to put them on. Nonprescription, I’d bet. I’d wager a lot on it, actually, but gambling has always been my vice. I’ve bet on all sorts of things and people I shouldn’t have.

  The door swings open. I can’t see it—I’m facing the opposite wall without permission to move—but I hear it, followed by the unmistakable clunk and clatter of a drunk man stumbling into a table, followed by the drunk man cursing out the table.

  Lucien scowls but doesn’t lift his eyes from his brush. “Marcel.”

  “Lucien.” The voice is not as drunk sounding as I’d expected. It’s swimming toward hung over, maybe floating on its back hoping the current will take it there. “Lucien’s model.”

  I don’t respond. I’m not getting paid to converse with repulsive siblings. I’m getting paid to keep still.

  “We need to talk,” Lucien says, his eyes still on his brush, still on his canvas, still full of sulk. He’s such a child.

  “Not now,” mutters Marcel.

  “Yes, now.”

  “But you’re clearly busy with . . . with . . . with . . .”

  Jane. I’m not saying it. I’ve been introduced to Marcel close to a dozen times, at least three of which he’s been relatively sober for. But today, Lucien doesn’t even say my name. No—what he thinks is my name. Either I’m not alive, or not to be shared this afternoon.

  “. . . with arts and crafts hour,” Marcel finally says.

  “I’m finished for today.” He puts his brush down a little more decisively than usual. “Jane, go put your clothes on.”

  Put your clothes on. As if I’m perched on the piano naked. I’d allow myself a glare in his direction, but he’s reaching for his wallet, coaxing green bills from a stack—no, a pillow—of fifties with his thumb, one at a time . . . three, four, five, six. Of course. The power. This is why I check mine at the door.

  He holds out the cash, and I slide my hips off the piano, taking the wad from his hand without touching his skin. The slips of paper are soft as clouds between my fingers. Three hundred dollars. My impulse is to kiss them. I don’t, and I don’t ask to look at the painting either, since I know what the answer will be. This is only the second sitting for this portrait. It’ll be another five or six before we move on, and I’m not sure I care what any of them look like anymore either. Money in hand, I make my way to the guest room.

  When I emerge, I’m myself almost. My boots, my leggings, my sweater, my expression. The cherry lipstick refused to be rubbed off completely, so my lips are still a little stained, and the “glossy curls” Lucien annoyingly demanded have been finger-combed out, the ironed ripple effect gone.

  I glance around for Lucien.

  “He left.”

  Marcel. He’s slumped against the doorway to the kitchen, cradling a tumbler of orange juice in his hand. I take him in. Black nail polish. Oily blond hair. Long, skinny fingers. Sly and leering.

  “He said not to wait for him.”

  I shift my bag to my other shoulder, sensing the swing of my cash-stuffed wallet. “I thought he wanted to talk to you.”

  “I guess I’m not that riveting a conversationalist.”

  “You don’t say.”

  He sips his orange juice, eyes still evaluating me. “You’re not as pretty as the last one.”

  I pause, surprised only at how quickly we’ve descended into insults. I don’t know him. Close to a dozen introductions to an inebriated guy don’t give you much to go on, and yet, I’ve always sensed that Marcel and I share a gift for bluntness, bordering on rudeness. Plus, Lucien is gone. This idiot isn’t my employer, and he’s probably my age.

  “And the last one,” I say, “how long did she pose before Lucien got bored? Was it a month? Oh no, it was two weeks, wasn’t it?”

  He grins, but I’m not entirely sure why. “No surprise there.”

  I don’t ask. The reminder—that I’m not the first obsession for Lucien’s artistry to feed off of—is not upsetting like Marcel thinks it’ll be. More a happy reassurance, really, that this creepy excuse for a job is temporary.

  “Tell me,” he says, “does he let you keep the feathers and sequins and garters and all that?”

  “Let me? I don’t want them. I don’t wear costumes in real life.” I let my eyes make an obvious sweep of his clothes. He’s a cliché of a rock star with the leather pants, tight T-shirt, and lip ring. I’m not scared of him. I knew too many rich boys like him in my former life—gritty and slick, all pretending to hate Daddy while snorting coke paid for with Daddy’s cash. “Are you sure he said for me to go? He usually schedules my next sitting before I leave.”

  “You know how artists are.” Marcel laughs. It’s not a kind laugh. And his eyes aren’t kind eyes. They’re dark as a bruise, edged with eyeliner that’s smudged under his left eye.

  “No,” I say. “How are artists?”

  “Unpredictable. Flighty.”

  Lucien is neither. We both know it, and that’s where the humor lies, but Lucien is flawed in too many other ways for me to stick up for him. So we share this moment, Marcel and I, knowing exactly what the other is thinking: Lucien is a joke.

  “So why do you do it?” he asks.

  “Sit for Lucien?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you that naive?”

  “Naive,” he repeats, rubbing the pad of a bone-white finger around the lip of the tumbler. “How old are you, fifteen? Sixteen? How do your parents feel about you posing for a twenty-one-year-old artist who makes you dress up in costumes so he can stare at you for hours?”

  “I’m nineteen.” I find if I deliver this lie with relentless eye contact, it isn’t questioned, but Lucien is staring at his ink-black fingernail. Maybe he believes me. “And how old are you?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “I don’t live with my parents,” I continue, ignoring how annoying it is that he’s actually older than me, “and by naive I mean you obviously don’t realize that some people have to survive without billion-dollar trust funds. Unbelievable, I know.”

  His eyes are flat, registering none of the shame he should be feeling, or even annoyance.

  I did exaggerate. It’s unlikely there’s a billion dollars sitting in his trust fund. More likely it’s just many millions for the second son of a soap tycoon. Ironic. Bar soap, body wash, liquid soap, hand sanitizer—I wonder if suggesting he use the LeBlanc family products from time to time would be taking our mutual rudeness too far.

  “This is a business transaction,” I continue. “Something I do to make rent. Are you familiar with the concept of rent?”

  He narrows his eyes. “Are you?” That bruised gaze sees something it shouldn’t, and the sudden spinning in my
gut tells me he knows. His eyes say liar and he’s right, because I’m not what I’m pretending to be. Not at all.

  I take a steadying breath through my nose so he won’t see that I’m rattled. Marcel is nothing but a drunk sack of dumb. The only truth he might guess is that I’m a runaway. I’m poor and desperate—the hallmarks of runaway-dom—but he can’t possibly know that the precious three hundred dollars in my wallet would have been a single shoe in my old life. Lunch on South Beach with my sisters. A trim and blow-dry at Petra’s.

  And now, well, if Lucien hadn’t seen me busking outside the Metro that day two months ago, if he hadn’t stood and stared, leaning his shoulder into the wall, leaning his eyes into me for an hour before walking up and sliding a crisp hundred-dollar bill in my open mandolin case, I wouldn’t have lasted another week. I was down to my last few dollars. I’d have had to . . . I don’t know. Not go back to Miami.

  Marcel’s still staring like he knows exactly what kind of money I came from.

  “Am I familiar with the concept of rent? Are you kidding me?” I snap.

  “Don’t get all riled up, sweetheart. I only meant you seem a little above it.”

  “You don’t even know my name. You definitely don’t know what I seem.”

  “Sure I do, Jane,” he says, a smirk on his lips. No hesitation, no head scratching, no fumbling through June-Jenny-Joan first. “You seem bored. I guess a little angelic or sexy or whatever it is that gets Lucien’s artistic juices flowing, but mostly just bored.”

  “Bored and getting paid for it,” I spit back.

  He stops and grins, showing his teeth—perfectly aligned and nicotine gray. “That’s something to be proud of.”

  “I just pose. He doesn’t—”

  “Oh, you don’t have to tell me what he does and doesn’t do,” he interrupts. “If you were sleeping with him, you’d be gone tomorrow. Lucien’s a freak. His muses are only good as long as they keep their halos intact. That what’s-her-name before you, she was gone two days after I walked into the kitchen to find her making an omelet wearing half of his pajamas.”

  “I’m going.” I don’t give him the satisfaction of seeing me shudder, or ask him to pass on a message to Lucien, or let his slimy eyes touch mine.