I start the car, turning the wheel in the direction of Seacliff.
“Aren’t you going to answer me?” Mara asks from the passenger seat.
“I’m not just going to tell you … I’m going to show you.”
She falls silent beside me, watching the narrow roadways widen out as we leave her rundown neighborhood, venturing into the broad, tree-lined streets leading up to China Beach.
Tension builds in her body as each minute passes. Mara can’t help her curiosity, even when she’s afraid of what she might learn.
I rest my hand on her thigh to calm her.
It works—the tight muscle relaxes under my palm. She leans against my arm, her head resting on my shoulder.
I remember that Mara told me she doesn’t even have a driver’s license. In some ways she’s remarkably independent, but she has these holes in her education. Things she couldn’t teach herself, because nobody would lend her a car to practice.
Abruptly, I pull the Tesla against the curb.
Mara sits up. “What are you doing?”
“You’re going to drive us home.”
She sputters, holding up her hands. “I don’t even have a learner’s permit.”
“Oh, well in that case, we better not. I don’t want to break any laws.”
Mara snorts, but remains stubbornly seated on the passenger side.
“What if I scratch it? What if I run into a tree? This car probably costs a hundred grand!”
“A hundred and sixty, actually. It’s the performance model.”
Her face blanches, eyes widening.
“No fucking way!”
I reach across her to open the door, unbuckling her seatbelt and shoving her out.
“We’re not negotiating. You need to learn to drive.”
“What if I crash it?”
“Then I’ll buy another one. It’s a hunk of metal, I really don’t give a shit.”
I’m climbing out myself, trading positions with her. We cross paths in front of the headlights, Mara warily eyeing the car as if it’s an animal, crouched and ready to swallow her whole.
“Doesn’t it drive itself?” she asks, slipping behind the wheel.
“You’re gonna do it. Now sit down and buckle up.”
Once we’re both seated, I walk her through the controls, showing her the paddle shifters, the turn signal, the accelerator, and the brake.
Understanding that I’m not going to drop it, there’s no getting out of it, Mara pays attention. She remembers everything I tell her, and asks questions when she doesn’t understand.
“The regenerative brakes will kick in automatically once you lift your foot off the accelerator,” I tell her. “So you won’t even need the brake pedal most of the time.”
“Alright,” Mara sighs. “Let’s get this over with.”
She puts the car in drive, then slowly presses down on the accelerator. The Tesla leaps forward. Mara shrieks, slamming on the brake. We’re both thrown against our seatbelts, faces inches from the dash.
Keeping my voice low and calm so I don’t stress her out worse than she already is, I say, “Take it easy. Light on the accelerator and ease off if you want to stop or slow down.”
“I barely touched it! This thing’s a fucking rocket-powered go-kart.”
“Yeah,” I laugh, “that’s why it’s fun. Now try it again.”
This time, she presses her foot down gingerly. The car surges forward, still jerky at first, but smoothing out as Mara gets the feel of it.
“You don’t need to hug the line like that,” I tell her. “Stay in the middle of your lane.”
“I’m scared I’m gonna hit something on your side.”
“You won’t.”
I tell her where to go, pointing out stop signs she might miss, reminding her to use her turn signal. Mara’s awkward and jumpy to begin with, but she’s getting the hang of it.
I enjoy telling her what to do, correcting her, encouraging her. She has to obey me or risk running someone over.
When I think she can handle it, I turn on the music.
As soon as the first notes fill the car, Mara visibly relaxes. Her shoulders lower, and her turns smooth out.
“There you go,” I growl. “Now you’re getting it.”
Mara shivers with pleasure.
She loves to be praised—she can’t get enough of it. She’d probably take a compliment over a body-shaking orgasm.
I return my hand to her thigh, massaging gently.
“Turn left here. We’ll go down to Skyline Boulevard, and then up along the beach. It’s a prettier drive.”
We pass through Lake Merced Park, water on both sides, the zoo up ahead.
Mara is no longer driving ten under the speed limit, drawing honks and forcing annoyed commuters to speed around us. Now she’s cruising along, sitting up straighter, loosening her death-grip on the wheel. Watching the birds soar low over the lake, and the golfers shank their shots into the hazards. Actually smiling.
“This feels good,” she says. “It’s almost fun.”
She’s doing great until it’s time to exit onto Point Lobos Avenue, and a teenager in a Jeep tries to switch lanes right on top of her. Mara jerks the wheel hard to the right, way overcompensating, almost sending us spinning into the median.
I grab the wheel, wrenching it back to center again.
Mara is shaking so hard her teeth are chattering.
“Help me pull over,” she cries. “I don’t want to drive anymore.”
“No,” I refuse. “You’re doing great and we’re almost home.”
She’s pale and sweating, frightened to an irrational degree.
She knows I see it.
“My mother’s had four DUIs,” she says. “I was in the car for three of them.”
Hot, roiling anger surges up inside of me. I’m really starting to despise this woman I’ve never met.
“She’d pick me up and at first I wouldn’t know—it was hard to tell with her, because she was always some level of buzzed. But she’d start driving faster and faster, missing turns, swerving across lanes. And I’d realize she was not at a normal level, she was fucking blitzed. By then it would be too late, I’d be trapped in the passenger seat. All I could do was make sure my seatbelt was clicked, clinging to the little plastic handle inside the door, hoping to god she’d take us home and not drive around for hours like she sometimes did when she was pissed at Randall, or when she just fucking felt like it.”
Mara grips the wheel tight in both hands, staring at the street in front of her, but probably seeing a different road, one where the painted lines swoop back and forth under the tires of a weaving car piloted by no one.
“Anyway,” she says quietly. “Cars scare me.”
“Everyone should be more careful when they’re in a three-thousand-pound death-machine,” I tell her.
Mara glances at me quickly, her lashes going up and down like the flick of a butterfly’s wing.
“You’re very … understanding,” she says.
“It’s not difficult to understand you. Of course you’re scared of driving if your mother used to careen around like the fucking teacups ride. People drive their cars with one hand, scrolling on their phones like nothing can happen to them. Meanwhile, they’re terrified of some statistically improbable event like a shark attack on their vacation to Hawaii. The real dangers are all around you all the time.”
“Maybe even in the car with you right now,” Mara says, throwing me another quick look, this time with a hint of mischief in it.
“Are you talking about me or about yourself?” I ask her. “You’ve gotten me in more trouble than I’ve caused for you.”
“You think I’m a threat to you?” Mara says, her fingertips lightly caressing the wheel as she turns, already knowing the way to my house.
“You threaten everything I thought I knew, and everything I believed.”
We’ve left all the other cars behind us, alone on the long, winding drive up to Seacliff. She’s speeding up, taking the curves with confidence. She looks sexy behind the wheel of my car, wearing the suede moto jacket I bought for her. Her skin and hair glows with health. Even her nails look less ragged—she hasn’t been biting them as much.
Mara is flourishing under my care. Becoming more beautiful, more powerful by the day.
I’m doing this. I’m changing her.
“You like it,” Mara says. “You can’t get enough of it.”
I seize her face and force her to kiss me, pulling her eyes away while the car flies along the road.
She gasps as I let go of her, gripping the wheel tight once more.
“At first it was against my will,” I tell her. “But now I’m all in. I have to have you. Even if it blows up my life.”
Mara pulls into my driveway, the towering facade of Seacliff looming over us. The weathered dark stone is cave-like, as if the house is just more of the cliff, jutting up against the sky.
“Do you like this house?” I ask Mara.
She tilts her head to the side, examining it anew.
“It suits you,” she says. “On the outside: stark and intimidating. On the inside … surprisingly beautiful.”
“You haven’t even seen all of it yet.”
“I know,” she says, looking at me, not the house.
I take her hand.
“Come this way.”
I lead her around the side of the house, on the stone path that winds through thick hedges of wisteria long past their bloom. The private entrance is sheltered from all sides, so no one but my father could see who was coming and going.
I open his office door.
Mara steps inside first, looking all around her.
I follow her in.
The office has been destroyed. Books torn down from the shelves, their pages ripped out and scattered all around. The desk hacked to pieces with a hatchet. The artwork smashed where it hung on the wall. Even the sofa and chairs slashed open, stuffing hanging out like entrails.
Mara stares, mouth open.
Hesitantly, she approaches the desk, drawing her fingertip across its scarred and broken top, leaving a trail in the dust.
“Did you do this?” she asks.
“Yes. The night my father died.”
“Did you … were you the one who killed him?”
“No. That’s why I was angry. He was gone, with too many things left unsaid and unanswered.”
“What happened to him?”
“He had a degenerative kidney disease. I knew it was coming, but it happened sooner than I expected. Then I was angry at myself. There’s no closure from the dead.”
Mara gazes at the photographs hung on the wall, the images distorted by the shattered glass in each frame.
Unerringly, she finds the one of my father. He’s standing on a windswept hilltop in New Zealand, wearing his hunting jacket, his rifle over his shoulder. His black hair and beard immaculately groomed despite the rustic setting.
Mara is drawn to the figure next to him. A man with hair and eyes as dark as my father’s, but a much more youthful face.
“Is that …” Mara squints through the spiderweb of glass. “Do you have a brother?”
“That’s my uncle. He was twelve years younger than my father. Almost as close to me in age.”
Mara turns, understanding that this photograph is the reason I brought her in here.
“He looks just like you.”
“That’s not the only thing we had in common.”
She crosses the detritus blanketing the floor, her boots crunching on splinters of wood and glass. Sinking down onto the slashed sofa, she says, “Tell me everything.”
I sit next to her, my weight causing her to slide closer until her thigh rests against mine.
“My uncle Ruben was the only person my father ever loved. My grandparents had him accidentally, late in life. He was wild and unruly, and they didn’t know what to do with him. My father was the only person he would listen to, at least some of the time.”
Mara sits up straight, hands clasped in front of her, eyes fixed on my face, like a child enthralled by a fairy tale.
“My family’s money came from hotels and breweries, but by the time Ruben came along, most of it had been parceled out or frittered away, so the Blackwells were no longer truly rich. Meaning, my grandparents still lived well, but there was only a modest trust fund waiting for their sons. My father used his to start his venture capital firm. He offered Ruben a job, but Ruben didn’t want it. He waited till he turned twenty-one, got his money, then fucked off to LA to spend it. Around that same time, my father married my mother.”
Mara interrupts, “How did they meet?”
“Have you ever read The Great Gatsby?”
Mara nods.
“It was like that. She was from a level of wealth that made the Blackwells look poor. My father wanted her from the moment he laid eyes on her. She was very beautiful, but innocent and sheltered. Her parents had full control over her. My father had to impress them first to get access to her. When his company went public, he donated six million to the Bay Area Youth Center, her mother’s foundation. That’s how he got an invitation to one of their dinner parties, so he could start the process of seducing their daughter.”
“Do you have a picture of her?” Mara asks.
“Upstairs. There’s none in here.”
I can’t hide the bitterness in my voice. Mara presses her lips together, understanding.
“My father wanted anything he couldn’t have. I guess that’s the one thing we shared. He had a chip on his shoulder and wanted to prove himself to anyone who’d ever looked down on him. But he was petty and vindictive. He didn’t just want acceptance—he wanted to rub their noses in it. That extended to my mother. He had to have her, but once they were married, he treated her like she had been the enemy all along. Like she was the one keeping him out of the Pacific Union Club.”
“She told you this?” Mara asks, brows drawn together in sympathy.
“I read it in her journal. She was confused how the man who wined and dined and complimented her could turn into a completely different person the moment they were alone in his house.”
I close my eyes, quoting from memory the words she wrote out in her delicate script:
“It’s like he hates me, and I don’t know why. I don’t know what I’ve done. He used to kiss my fingertips and tell me I was the most exquisite thing in the world. Now he snarls if I even touch him …”
”Why did he change?” Mara asks.
“He never liked anything once he actually had it. It took him years to get this house—he had to bully and threaten the old woman who owned it. Had to fight with the zoning commissioner and the society that was trying to get it named a historic landmark. Once he moved in, he never stopped complaining that it was cold and drafty, and the wiring was ancient.”
“You’re not like that,” Mara says.
“No. To me, something has value if it’s rare.”
“I value things if they make me happy,” Mara says.
“But why do they make you happy?”
Mara considers. “Because they’re beautiful or interesting. Because they make me feel good.”
I put my hand on the nape of her neck, rubbing her gently. Making her purr. “That’s because you’re a pleasure kitten. You like anything that feels good.”
Mara cuddles up against me, comfortable even in this destroyed space.
“That’s true,” she says.
I continue the story.
“He was cold to her. Cruel, even. She wrote in her journal that she wanted to leave, but by that point she knew him well enough to be scared of what he might do. And then she found out she was pregnant.
“At the same time, my uncle Ruben came back to San Francisco. He’d burned through his money and was beginning to see the value of a place in my father’s firm. My father gave him a job immediately.
“My uncle was clever and could work hard when he wanted to. In fact, he was doing so well that my father promoted him again and again, until he was the acting VP, second only to my father.
“That wouldn’t have been a problem, except that my father now had an heir. At one point, Ruben might have believed that he would inherit the company, or receive equal shares in it. I was a complicating factor. Very much in his way. Especially after my mother died.”
I feel Mara stir against my side. I know what she wants to ask me, but she hesitates, knowing instinctively that this is the one wound inside of me, never healing, always raw.
I promised to answer her question, and this is a part of it.
“It’s alright,” I tell her. “You can ask.”
“What happened to your mother?”
Why is it still so hard to say the words out loud?
I hate that it hurts me. I hate that I care.
“She hung herself,” I say.
Mara winces. She takes my hand, squeezing it tight.
I look down at her hand, wondering why that feels so good. Why it comforts me.
Maybe because no one knows better than Mara what it feels like to be young, frightened, and deeply alone.
“I felt like an orphan. I had no warmth or connection from my father. Ruben terrified me. He was already showing his aggression, as much as he could get away with. He tripped me on the stairs. I broke my arm. He said it was an accident, and I was too young for my father to believe anything else. Later, he tried to drown me on the beach below the house. He kept pushing me under the waves, over and over again, laughing like it was a joke. All I could see was his teeth and the wild look in his eyes, and then he’d shove me under again, before I could get any air.
“That time my father saw it. He hauled me out. It was the first time I saw him truly angry at Ruben. Ruben was more careful after that. But I knew he hated me. He was jealous when my father gave me attention. He sabotaged me any chance he got.”
Mara rises from the couch to inspect the photograph once more. She brushes the glass out of the frame, frowning at Ruben’s handsome face, clear and uncovered.
“It was around that time I started to draw. I had always liked tinkering with machinery, working with my hands. My father encouraged that because he could see the use of it. He didn’t like me sketching. He didn’t care for the arts at all. He only donated to them because he knew philanthropy was part of empire-building.”
“What made you start drawing?” Mara asks me.
“At first I was sketching designs of machinery I wanted to build. The designs became more experimental, more aesthetic. Sculptures instead of machines.” I pause, because this makes me curious in turn. “What was the first thing you drew?”
Mara blushes. “The girls at school had coloring books. I didn’t have one, but I could get my hands on paper and pencils. I made my own coloring pages—mostly princesses in dresses, because that’s what they had. I realized I could draw any dress I could think of. Then I drew other things I wanted. Roller skates, unicorns, a bed with a canopy, ice cream sundaes …”
She trails off as if realizing that, to her, roller skates had seemed as unobtainable as unicorns.
“Anyway,” she says, shaking her head. “Keep going …”
I lost the thread, distracted by thoughts of Mara as a child. I want to know all her secrets. She keeps them buried deep. I’ll have to be the first one to break out a shovel.
Taking a breath, I continue, “I was having conflict with my father. I wanted to go to art school. He was, of course, opposed, expecting me to take over his company. He already knew by then that he was sick.”
“What about Ruben?” Mara asks.
“Well, that was the contrarian in my father. If I had wanted the business and Ruben didn’t, then he probably would have given it to Ruben. Ruben was acting up, pissing him off. I was playing hard to get—or at least, that’s how he saw it. The more I turned away from him, the more determined he became to mold me in his image. But I had already decided he was a fucking hypocrite.”
“Why?”
“Because he thought he was this ruthless titan of industry. He taught me to avoid emotional entanglements—only family deserved loyalty. But he never gave a damn about my mother, and she was the one who should have been his family. He loved Ruben, while Ruben would have cut the heart out of my father’s chest and eaten it raw if it suited him.”
“Ruben didn’t care about anyone,” Mara says.
“That’s right.” I nod. “And that’s what we truly had in common. I looked like Ruben, more than my own father. Sounded like him, even. Most of all, I understood him. I knew he was stone cold inside, because I was too. He didn’t only hate me because he was jealous—he hated me because I saw what he really was.”
“Was he still trying to hurt you?”
“Worse. He convinced my father to make him my guardian. I was sixteen. My father was getting sicker all the time. If he died, the money, the house, the company, all of it would fall under Ruben’s control. I’d be fucked.”
Mara looks down at the framed photograph clutched in her hands, lifted off the wall. She glances between Ruben’s face and mine, equally handsome, equally cruel. She understands the havoc he could wreak, in the two years before my eighteenth birthday.
“What did you do?”
“I organized a hunting trip for the three of us, knowing my father would be too ill to come with us. Ruben knew it, too. I think he anticipated what I planned—or at least, he thought he did.”
Mara returns to the sofa, but she’s stiff with apprehension, unable to sit back against the ruined cushions.
“Then why did he go?” she asks me.
“He thought he’d turn the tables on me. And I let him think it. We went out into the woods of northern Montana, just the two of us. It was the coldest week of January. That forest is thick and wild. I had been there before, and so had Ruben, but not together. You have to leave long before sunrise to hunt mountain lions, tramping through snow up to your knees.”
Mara rubs her palms against her upper arms as if she can feel the chill.
“I was a teenager, skinny, half-grown. He was twenty-eight, bigger than me, stronger. He thought he was smarter, too. I let him load my gun with blanks, pretending not to notice. I let him walk behind me in the woods. I could hear his breath slowing, his steps pausing. I could feel him lifting his rifle, pointing it at my back …”
Mara has her fingers pressed against her mouth. I know she desperately wants to bite her nails, but she refrains for my sake.
“I heard the rifle blast and I thought I’d timed it wrong, I was dead. Then I turned around and saw the hole in the ground. He’d walked across the deadfall just as I hoped. The rifle shot went up in the sky, and he plunged down twenty feet into the pit.”
Mara lets out the breath she’s been holding, her sigh caressing my forearm.
“Was he dead?” she says.
“No. It took six more hours for him to actually die. I sat and waited. That was the hardest part. He begged and pleaded. Then he cursed and screamed. Then he pleaded again.”
“Did you want to let him out?”
“If I did, I might as well cut my own throat. It was him or me, long before the pit.”
“What were you waiting for, then?”
“I was making sure no one else came along.”
Mara’s throat jumps as she swallows. Even with everything she knows about me, my callousness shocks her.
“What about your father?” she asks me.
“I told him it was an accident. That I tried to run for help, but I got lost in the woods.”
“Did he believe you?”
“He knew I would never get lost.”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘That was the only family you had left. When I die, you’ll be completely alone.’ ”
Mara takes my hand again. Not squeezing it this time, just holding it in her lap, her fingers linked with mine.
“And you were,” she says softly.
“I thought it was better to be alone. Safer. More pleasant, even.”
“But you still did this,” Mara says, looking around at my father’s office, smashed to pieces with a rage that still screams from every corner of the room, all these years later.
“It affected me more than I expected,” I admit.
Mara lifts my hand to her mouth, brushing my knuckles against her lips.
“I can’t blame you,” she says. “Your uncle sounds terrifying.”
I set her hand down gently on her lap, facing her and looking her in the eyes.
“That was the first time I killed,” I say. “But there were more. It’s like losing your virginity … the first time seems so significant. Each one after is less and less important. Until you barely remember their names.”
Her tongue darts out to moisten her pale lips.
“Who was the second person?” she murmurs.
“I was drunk at a club in Paris. Three men followed me out, planning to mug me. I fought one off. The second ran away. The third … I slammed his head against the alley wall until his skull cracked.”
Mara’s hand floats up to her mouth. This time she bites down hard on the edge of her nail.
“That was the only time I killed on impulse, without a plan. The others were more strategic.”
“How many?” she whispers.
“Fourteen.”
Mara makes a faint choking sound. Her cheeks have gone pale and grayish, her knuckles white.
“None were women,” I say, as if that will comfort her.
“Why not women?” she asks faintly.
I shrug. “Men deserve it more.”
Mara sits forward, elbows on her knees, hands covering her face. I give her time to process, knowing that she suspected some of this, but could never have guessed the full truth.
After a moment, her shoulders stiffen and her head snaps up. She sits up, regarding me with sudden animation.
“You killed Sonia’s ex-husband,” she blurts out.
I frown at her.
“How do you know that?”
“Sonia told me how he died. I thought it was very … convenient.”
“It was very inconvenient when he was dragging her to court for months on end. It affected her work.”
Mara squints at me. “You could have just fired her.”
“Hiring someone new is even worse.”
“You wanted to help her.”
“I helped myself. It just happened to benefit Sonia as well.”
Mara shakes her head at me, already recovering her amusement. “You have a soft spot for women.”
“The fuck I do. Don’t forget how we met.”
“I remember.”
The office is growing dark. I never switched on the lights, because I shattered the overhead fixture along with everything else in the room. We’ve been sitting in the little light that could filter through the wisteria and the dusty windows. Now it’s all fading away.
“You know, that wasn’t the first time I actually saw you.”
Mara blinks, her lips forming a small circle of confusion.
“What do you mean?”
“I saw you at the Oasis show. Shaw did, too. He saw me watching you. Jack Brisk spilled wine on your dress. I thought you’d leave the party—instead you used more wine to dye the dress. It surprised me that you were so innovative. Surprised me more how beautifully you did it. I was impressed. Shaw couldn’t understand that, of course. He thought I wanted to fuck you.”
Mara stares at me, mouth open.
She says, “Is that why he took me?”
“Yes,” I admit. “I insulted him. I said he was undisciplined, out of control. He wanted to prove I was the same … under the right temptation.”
Mara blinks slowly, finally understanding.
“You chose me.”
“I didn’t know it then, but I already had. I tried to leave you on that mountain … you survived anyway. From that moment, I was obsessed. I had to know how you did it. I had to understand.”
Mara’s eyes are dark and liquid in failing light.
“And do you? Do you understand now?”
I rest my palm against the edge of her jaw, stroking my thumb across her lips.
“I know you can’t be broken. I’m still testing if you can be tamed …”
Mara catches my thumb in her teeth, biting down.
“You’re not tame yourself.”
I like how hard she bites, the little savage.
It makes me want to bite her back.
“No, I’m not,” I agree. “And I never will be.”
“Neither will I,” Mara hisses, equally fierce.
She’s not afraid of me. She never has been.
I remember how she confronted me in my own studio, eyes blazing, fists clenched at her side. Demanding to know how I dared leave her to die. Scoffing in the face of my lies.
I seize her by the throat and kiss her, pinning her back against the slashed sofa.
She’s out of her fucking mind, and so am I.
Our madness aligns in all the right ways.
When we’ve pulled on our clothes again, I remind Mara, “A question for a question. I haven’t forgotten.”
Mara sighs. “You kept your word. I’ll keep mine.”
I take her hand, pulling her up from the sofa. Mara doesn’t flinch away from me—she loves when I touch her, even knowing of all the blood on these hands.
Her normal-meter is broken. She’s been around too many horrible people. She doesn’t know how brutal I truly am, how unredeemable.
Lucky for me, I suppose.
“Come up to the kitchen,” I say. “I can’t get you a unicorn, but I can damn sure make you an ice cream sundae.”
Mara follows me up to the main level. Despite me telling her exactly what I was going to do, she’s still delighted when I put down a giant bowl of vanilla ice cream in front of her, covered in chocolate syrup and mounds of whipped cream.
She’s always more surprised by kindness than by cruelty.
Mara takes a massive bite, eyes closed, letting the ice cream melt on her tongue before she swallows.
“I needed that,” she sighs. Then, setting down her spoon, “Alright. I’m ready. What do you want to know?”
I sit next to her at the counter, our knees almost touching.
Leaning forward, I say, “Tell me about Randall.”
