THE RED DIGITAL clock on my nightstand turns from three-fifty-nine to four o’clock in the morning. Reina and I, having finally gotten our breathing under control, lay in bed with the sheets half on us and half hanging off the side of the bed. She has her head resting on my chest as she lays on her back with a champagne glass half-full of Cristal, while I lean back on the headboard, smoking a thick Cuban cigar. The white smoke curls into the air and forms a cloud above us, and I look up and through it, focusing on the image of Reina and me reflecting in the mirror on the ceiling. It’s been a few hours since she showed up, and seeing the two us together still feels brand new and strange, but it’s the best version of strange I’ve ever felt. I rub her soft, smooth skin as she sips the champagne, staring out the window in front of us. The city lights shine brightly into the dark room, providing us our only light, and I swear, there isn’t another place in the world I’d rather be.
As I marvel at her skin, I try to force myself to get over the awe of it all. It’s the best thing in the world having her back, but there’s so much I don’t know about what happened to Reina. If she didn’t tell me anything about the past seven years, I’d still love her all the same. But, my desire to know would never go away. She left, and I have to know why. So, after a few minutes of silence and letting her get a buzz from the Cristal, I ask the question I’ve been dying to ask all this time.
“What happened to you, Reina?” I say softly as I continue rubbing her skin. “Why’d you leave?”
Reina doesn’t move a muscle. She just keeps staring straight ahead, out the window. There’s something in her face that grabs my attention, though. Something about the way she doesn’t react makes me think there’s something dark in there that wasn’t there before. Reina looks like she’s been through something, and the look on her face reminds me of someone else whose been through so much trauma that people call him a madman. Me.
Reina lets out a loud exhale before swallowing the rest of the champagne in her glass. As she sits up, her demeanor darkens and her eyes turn cold. She had an innocence in her before, and from the looks of it, that innocence has been snatched out of her.
“I’ve wanted to tell you for so long,” Reina finally replies, looking down at the sheets that are still wet from our sweat and her come.
“I’ve wondered for so long,” I reply. “I wanna know everything. Everything, Reina.”
“You sure?” she asks. “Not everything is as pretty as you may think.”
“What makes you think I need it to be pretty? I don’t care how ugly the story is, Reina. As long as it’s your story. Tell me.”
With that, Reina leans over and grabs the golden bottle of Cristal from the nightstand, but she doesn’t pour any into her glass. Instead, she places the glass on the nightstand and keeps the entire bottle with her as she rests her back against the headboard next to me. She takes a swig from the bottle before staring straight ahead again, her bare chest drawing my attention from time to time. For a moment, I think she won’t tell me. But after a minute of staring out the window, she takes a deep breath and lets the words come out.
“I remember the last time I saw you,” she begins, still looking outside. Her eyes aren’t moving, but I can tell her mind is replaying like a movie, and she’s watching it, unblinking.
“We’d had sex in your mom’s basement,” she continues. “Then you walked me to the train station. I remember thinking about you the entire ride, wondering how somebody like me—somebody with parents like mine and a background like mine—could fall in love with somebody with a life like yours. I was shocked as I realized just how much I loved you while I was sitting on that train. I remember feeling like I was in heaven, on cloud nine, and then the train stopped and my cloud disappeared. It evaporated from under my feet and I plummeted towards the ground. You weren’t there to catch me though. Charlie was.”
I feel a sudden shudder hit me and my muscles tense at the mention of the name. How could I forget Charlie? He was the pompous little prick Reina was being forced to hang out with. Her dumbass parents were trying to play matchmaker and force her into Charlie’s arms, and when she wouldn’t do it, she’d get in trouble. He was the asshole I confronted at her prom. Scared the kid half to death. So hearing her say he was there to catch her and I wasn’t is like taking a knife to the gut.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I ask as I struggle to hold back the rage I feel surging.
“When I got off the train, Charlie was there,” Reina replies. “I can still see it all like it just happened this morning. He was wearing a royal blue letterman’s jacket that used to belong to his father, and he was leaning against his white BMW with a smug little smile on his face. He knew he’d caught me red-handed coming back from Strawberry Mansion because he’d followed me to the train station, saw me buy my ticket, and actually waited in the parking lot the entire time for me to come back. He wanted to catch me so he could tell my parents, and that’s exactly what he did.”
“Seriously?” I interject with a frown. “That prick from your prom told your parents you’d been coming to see me?”
“He took great pride in telling them,” Reina answers, her eyes still gazing out the window. “He was pissed about what happened at prom, and he was looking for a way to get his revenge.”
“On who? You or me?”
“On both of us. He wanted to hurt you by hurting me,” she says, her voice trailing off after the last two words. Her eyes finally move from the window down to the bed before she closes them tightly, remembering.
“What?” I ask, sensing her distress. “What’s the matter, Reina?”
“After hearing what Charlie had to tell them,” she continues, ignoring my question. “My parents decided it was best to send me away. I always knew that if I didn’t act the way they wanted me to act that they’d send me away, and after hearing about me leaving the safety of Center City to take the train to the poor people’s neighborhood of Strawberry Mansion, they finally decided to do it for real. They decided to send me to boarding school, all the way in fucking France.”
“France?” I snap, my voice booming down the stairs. “You went to France? That’s where you’ve been all this time?”
“I tried to call you at first,” Reina presses on as if I’m not even there. “But they took my phone from me. My father threw it on the ground and shattered it right in front of me. So I tried to sneak onto the train, but my parents were having Charlie tail me wherever I went. He caught me again—brought me back home.”
Her voice trails off again.
“That little bitch,” I say under my breath as the feeling of pinpricks settles into my face.
“Then that was it,” Reina continues again before taking another drink from the bottle. “The next thing I knew, I was on a plane, flying away from everything I’d ever loved—flying away from you.”
I puff my cigar and send smoke rising into the air above us as I look at Reina. She looks lost in her words. It’s like she’s not even here as her eyes bounce back and forth from the bed to the tall buildings outside. I want to be able to comfort her, but I’ve never been good at that kind of thing. I’m more of a laugh-at-your-pain kind of guy, and I don’t think that’s what this situation calls for. So, I just watch her and wait for her to continue as she takes another swig from the bottle and exhales.
“The boarding school was called Ecole des Roches,” she says. “When I got there, I knew from the beginning that it was going to be hell. After everything I’d seen in Philly, there was no way I could conform to that kind of life. With you, I’d committed robbery and bought fancy things, and lived a life that filled me with exhilaration. Hell, even my parents spoiled me enough before I was permanently on their shit list, and they knew what they were subjecting me to when they signed me up for Ecole. They knew I would struggle, because they knew that as soon as I got there, the staff was going to take everything away from me, which is what they wanted—to cut me off. No make-up, no nail polish, no jewelry, no phones, no laptops, no internet, no elaborate haircuts or anything else they considered to be fancy. I showed up and there was strict schedules and curfews, and a dress code where I had to braid my hair every day because it was too long. I was surrounded by snotty little rich kids who were so good at being sneaky, and school authorities who were verbally abusive in public, and physically abusive in private. They honed in on me from the moment I got off the plane, and they never left me alone. It was like they knew I was a rebel, and they weren’t going to get off my back until they broke me.
“My first year there was bad. I missed curfew my very first weekend, which meant I wasn’t in my room at the mandatory ten o’clock. When questioned by the Student Life Counselor, I told her the rules were ridiculous and that I wasn’t going to follow them, especially on the weekend. The counselor responded by calling a security guard in and forcing me to kneel on top of frozen peas they’d poured onto a concrete floor. I didn’t think it would hurt as much as it actually did, and the marks on my legs took three days before they finally went away completely.
“Even when I tried to do what they told me to avoid their punishment, I couldn’t do it for long. They reacted to the smallest things, and before long, I wasn’t having issues with other students. The staff became our enemy, and it was a war we could never win.
“Things only got worse as time went on. The longer I was there, the more I wanted to leave, and the less I cared about breaking their rules. Once, I left my hair unbraided on purpose. So my Activity Leader decided to give me a haircut in front of the class. I threw a fit and hit him, so he called the guards and they held me down while he cut my hair with scissors in front of everyone. I cried, but it didn’t matter to them. They wanted me to cry, and the staff made me stand in the middle of the hall with my nose in a corner while everyone walked by, laughing at my new, boyish haircut.”
As Reina speaks, I feel my blood staring to boil. I wasn’t there to protect her while she was going through absolute hell. I thought my life was bad after Whitney died and Reina left, but after all of that, I was making a name for myself. I was stealing money and becoming a legend on the streets while Reina was being tortured in France. Every bone in my body wants to get up and head straight for the airport. I’ll burn the whole damn school down for what they did to her.
“It was my second year that got me out of there, though. That was when things hit rock bottom.” Reina swigs more champagne as if she isn’t even affected by how much she’s had already. She still looks like the Reina I once knew, but something inside of her is different. Darker. “I had a Student Support Advisor who thought I was pretty. His name was Arthur. He had black hair, a clean-shaven face, and a smile that immediately told me he was a creep. But he also had a reputation around the school of being abusive. There was a rumor that he once made a kid wear a hat that he called the Cone of Shame. Kind of like the ones dogs wear when you don’t want them to lick themselves. When they sent me to him, I was nervous, I admit. I got sent to his office after one of my teachers found some scratches on my leg where I’d cut myself shaving. They thought I did it on purpose, so they sent me to Arthur—told him I was troubled and needed special attention.”
As Reina tells her story, I want nothing more than to hunt this Arthur down and drive a knife into his throat. I don’t even know exactly what he’s done yet, but I already want him dead. I want the entire staff dead and buried in unmarked graves.
“He was cute,” Reina says, cutting off my train of thought with her shocking words. “I have to admit he was cute for a forty-five-year-old. But as soon as we started talking and I saw the way he was looking at me with his dark brown eyes, he was instantly hideous. Before the first of our three meetings was over, he’d already written on my arm with permanent marker after I told him he could go suck himself for accusing me of being a cutter. His response to my insult was to write the word Monster on my forearm in thick black letters for everyone to see. I scrubbed my arm all night until it was red and raw, but it still wouldn’t come all the way off. Everyone could see it, and they knew he’d given it to me.”
“Son of a bitch,” I snip, but Reina mows over my words as if I never said a thing.
“The second time we met, he gave me a compliment for not going off on him. It’d been a week since the marker incident, and the letters were mostly gone by then. The session went well and he told me I’d made progress since we first met, and when I went to leave, he got up to walk me out. At the door, he rubbed my shoulder, and then slid his hand down to my lower back before unsubtlety grazing my ass as I stepped over the threshold. When I turned around to look at him, he was already closing the door behind me.”
There is fire in my veins, but Reina takes another drink, makes herself more comfortable, and keeps talking. It’s as if a gate has been opened that she can’t close now.
“The next session we had he tried to rub his penis against my hand as I sat in the chair in front of his desk,” Reina says, and I feel like screaming. “When I felt it, I snapped, because he wasn’t even trying to be slick about it. I grabbed a pen from his desk and stabbed him in the leg with it. When he screamed, I pulled it out of his thigh and stabbed him again, this time aiming for his prick. I wanted to stab a hole right through it. He screamed and pushed me away, and I walked out of the room, leaving the pen stuck in him. I don’t know if I actually hit his dick, but I tried with everything I had, and his scream of agony was music to my ears. They kicked me out after that, and my parents refused to pay for my flight back home, so I was forced to stay in France with barely any money and no place to live.”
“Why didn’t you call me?” I ask her, wishing we could go back in time and do it over again. I would’ve been there on the next flight. I was already halfway to being a millionaire by the time Arthur tried this shit. I would’ve flown over and burned him alive inside his office.
“I told you I had no money. The school took everything I had, and my dad had broken my phone before they ever sent me away,” Reina explains. “So once I was on my own, I learned a new trade. I learned how to manipulate people.”
As if a switch has been flipped, Reina sits up straighter and finally looks at me. Her eyes are wet with tears that never fell, but her expression is pure defiance. When she was talking about the boarding school, it was a difficult memory, but now that she’s referring to something afterwards, she’s different. She looks strong and intimidating in my dark bedroom. The lights from the city shine in and plaster shadows to one side of her face, and I can see a feint grin on her lips.
“I met a man named James a week after I left Ecole des Roches,” she goes on, looking me straight in the eye now, more confident than I’ve ever seen her. “He was a bank manager and financial consultant for a big time law firm here in the states, but he did it all from France. He was a multi-millionaire who liked to cheat on his wife when she went out of town on business. We went out on three dinner dates, becoming more flirtatious with each one. I made sure to lead him on. I wanted him to think he had a real shot at an affair with me behind his wife’s back, and he bought every bit of it. The day he tried to sleep with me in a hotel I’d rented, I told him I’d recorded the entire thing and that I’d tell his wife if he didn’t pay me off. He didn’t believe it at first, and left the room in a laughable fuss. The next day, I emailed him a video snippet of the moment he pulled his teeny, tiny, little prick out of his pants in front of me while I sat on the bed, in perfect view of the camera I’d placed in the room two hours before. I told him I had his wife’s email address, and that if he didn’t wire a million dollars to my account in the next hour, I was going to click Send. Forty-three minutes later, I was a millionaire.”
My eyes bulge.
“You blackmailed him out of a million dollars?” I ask, in complete shock.
“Yeah,” Reina answers behind a giggle, her mood quickly perking back up with the story.
“Damn,” I exclaim as I take the champagne bottle from her and swallow a swig of my own. “Okay, then why didn’t you come back after you had all that money?”
“I wasn’t ready yet,” she says, still looking right at me. “Once I had the money, I knew what I wanted to do. It wasn’t enough to blackmail one guy. I needed to make more than just a million if I wanted to have an impact.”
“An impact? An impact on what?”
“Everything,” Reina replies. In her eyes, I see something I’d never seen the entire time we knew each other before she was sent away. Ambition.
Reina looks at me and smiles from ear to ear for the first time, and I feel a tug on my heart. I’d forgotten how gorgeous that smile is, but it’s made even brighter by the look of aspiration I see in her eyes.
“A few weeks after you and I met, you said something to me that I never forgot,” Reina continues as she snatches the bottle of Cristal from me. “You said that one day you’d have everything you’d ever wanted. You told me that the things you’d do to get them wouldn’t be pretty, and that you liked it that way. You said you were gonna be the most feared and respected man in the city. When that money hit my account, I knew I had the power to make that dream come true for myself. Getting the money didn’t make me want to quit and fly back home to my parents, or even to be your trophy girlfriend who needed to depend on you for every dime. Everything I’d been through made me tougher than that. It made me want to take more and more, so that when I did come back, I could change everything. I knew that when I came back, I wanted to be powerful enough to bring the people who’ve hurt me to their knees. Everyone who’s ever done me wrong, or taken advantage of me, I want them all to suffer. So, I stayed and got to work. I started conning people.”
“Are you kidding?” I ask behind a chuckle. “You became a con artist?”
“The best you’ve never seen,” Reina replies, grinning like the Cheshire Cat. “Over the next few years, I conned countless men, a few women, and a few couples. I’ve taken more money from people than I care to count anymore. But I know one thing for sure—I have more money than the first guy I ever conned.”
“Who? James, the multi-millionaire?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How do you know that?”
“Remember I told you James was a bank manager and financial consultant?” Reina asks, and I nod. “The bank he works for is called Natixis, and a year ago, I bought out the owner of the France branch. James works for me now.”
“What the fuck?” I blurt out. I can’t believe what she just said. “You own a bank?”
“Not the entire company. I’m not the CEO of Natixis, but I bought quite a bit of the shares and stock, and I own the branch in France. James works for me as the manager.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me!” I exclaim as I rush to get out of the bed in pure excitement and shock. “You’re only twenty-two years old!”
“True, but I’m also a Wilde,” Reina says as she looks down at my naked body. She smiles at my length before looking back up at me. “My parents are worth at least three or four billion at this point, and I grew up watching them hustle money. I guess some of it stuck, and I learned a thing or two about investing and acquisition. One thing my dad always said when I was kid was, ‘Make your money work for you.’ My father bought businesses and sat back, watching the profits pile up while he moved on to the next business to acquire. When you’re the owner, the business makes money without you having to show up to work. My parents are sick, twisted, corrupt, vicious people who’ve always treated me like crap for not conforming to their rules. But they’re smart, and soon, they’ll realize that they taught me exactly how to be their worst nightmare.”
As I stand next to the bed with my dick in plain sight, I realize what Reina is saying, and it’s like a slap in the face. For me, making a name for myself and coming up was about getting out of the dirty gutter that was Strawberry Mansion. I wanted to be a big deal and run the criminal world because it was what I was always good at, as if I was born to be bad. For Reina, it was about leaving a life that she felt she wasn’t supposed to be a part of. She wanted to be like me, but she was trapped in her parents’ world. So when she went to France and her parents cut her off, she decided to come up as well. She decided she would grow up to be even bigger than her parents, and she had one thing in mind the entire time. Revenge.
“You want to take over your parents’ business,” I say, my look of excitement replaced by a hunger I’ve never felt before as her plan becomes clear to me. The whole time I was dreaming about being big, Reina was dreaming about being even bigger. Her ambitions have far surpassed my own.
“I want us to be king and queen,” she replies, “of everything.”
I smile as wide as my face can manage as I jump back into the bed and kiss Reina on the mouth. After all this time, I was becoming the king, and my woman was becoming the queen. Now it’s time for us to rule together!
“Okay, so how do we start?” I ask. “Let’s not waste any time. Tell me what to do, Reina, and we’ll go after your parents starting first thing in the morning.”
“No,” Reina answers. She places a hand on my cheek and rubs my face, staring into my eyes. “It’s not just about them, Solomon. It’s about us.
“When I came back to Philly, the first thing I wanted to do was find you, so I started digging, and when I finally tracked you down after three months of trying, I also found out that you were about to go to war with the Scarfo family. People talk. When I heard the Scarfo family was about to come after you, I decided to step in. That’s how I met Dante.”
I don’t even know what to say at this point. It’s like she’s become a criminal mastermind, I just stare at her in awe as she goes on.
“Dante’s wife died two years ago, and he’s known for getting around and courting younger women these days. So, I put myself in his path on purpose, so I could learn about him and his businesses. I wanted to come back to you, but more than that, I wanted to help you. Now, I know everything about Dante Rossi and his dealings. I know exactly how to get rid of him and the entire mafia in Philly.”
“But you’re putting yourself at risk being inside like that. If he finds out you’re conning him, he’ll kill you, and I won’t be able to take that,” I say.
“I don’t care about the danger,” she answers as she scoots closer to me. “It’s about us, Solomon. When Arthur wrote the word Monster on my arm, it meant something much different to him than it did to me. I remember not being able to get the letters off after I’d scrubbed so hard, and it made me sick at first. But after a while, I liked it. I embraced it. I realized that I am a monster, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I am what they made me. I’m a monster, and you’re my beast, Solomon. You’re the only one I belong with, and just like I showed Arthur the day I stabbed him, no one can handle me but you.
“We’re soulmates—two peas in a pod, and together, no one can stop us. Not Dante Rossi, and not my parents. Together, we can make them all pay, we can make them all bow to us. So we need to do it one step at a time.”
“And the first step is Dante,” I say, finishing her sentence for her. “We take the mob out first, then we step up to something bigger.”
“Wilde Inc.,” Reina says now, filling in the rest for me just before finishing off the rest of the Cristal with a big gulp.
“Wow,” I say to her, rubbing my hand through her golden hair. “Who would’ve thought that you’d end up just as twisted as me after all this time apart? I love it, Reina. I love you.”
Reina stops moving. She stares at me with her eyes wide just as a smile spreads across her mouth.
“That’s the first time you’ve ever said that to me,” she says, her voice shaking with emotion.
“I’ve always loved you, Reina,” I reply. “You know that.”
“I did, but hearing you say it is another thing entirely. It means everything.” Reina leans over and kisses me gently on the lips. Here, in this moment, sitting in darkness, our bond is made stronger than ever. We’re inseparable now. As our lips touch, it erases the last seven years. It’s as if we were never apart. Our hearts have been together the whole time.
After our kiss, Reina and I lay down in the bed together. She rests her head on my chest and rubs my stomach while I look out the window and go back to my cigar, puffing smoke up to the ceiling, feeling every bit like a true king.
“So,” I say. “Whatever happened to Charlie?”
I hear her hesitate before clearing her throat and answering.
“He became CFO of Wilde Inc.,” she replies. “He helps run the business with my father now.”
I sense something in the way Reina speaks when it comes to Charlie, but I can’t put my finger on it. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something about him that bothers her. I’m not one to mince words, so I ask her.
“What is it, Reina? You obviously don’t like talking about Charlie. So, what is it? Is there something else I need to know about all of this?”
Reina stops rubbing my skin for a second, before clearing her throat and starting up again.
“In due time, my love,” she says, more confident now. “All in due time.”