Blind Alley - Iris Johansen [99]
And then the bastard had treated her as if she were a teenage Lolita.
Screw him.
She turned on her heel and went down the hall to her bedroom. Wash up and go to sleep and forget about Trevor. Look upon tonight as a learning experience. Didn't most teenage girls have a fixation on older men at one time or another?
She wasn't most girls. She didn't feel any younger than Trevor and he hadn't been fair. She had a right to make a choice, not be sent away with a pat on the head. It wasn't as if she didn't have friends her own age who already had sexual experience. One of her classmates had even gotten married last quarter and was going to have a baby in August.
And the only reason she didn't have experience was that she hadn't been tempted. The boys at school were . . . boys. She'd felt like their older sister. She had more in common with Joe and the guys at the precinct than she had with her peers.
But not with Mark Trevor. She had nothing in common with Trevor and there was no reason she should feel this closeness to him.
She opened the bedroom door and started to get undressed as quietly as possible. Her face and hands were smudged from the tunnel but she wasn't about to go down to the bathroom to clean up. She'd been lucky Eve and Joe had slept through their excursion in the tunnels and wasn't going to risk waking them. She'd get up early and shower before they got out of bed.
She moved over to the window to look out at the winding street. Was Aldo standing somewhere in the shadow of one of those shops? Down in the theater tunnel she'd been overwhelmed by death but not the death that Aldo represented. Trevor had made her see that ancient Herculaneum far too clearly. Young suntanned athletes, languid women on litters, actors rehearsing their lines. All cut off in the prime of their lives. She'd been deluged, chilled, and crushed by the realization of the scope of those deaths.
Yet she'd never felt more alive than that moment when Trevor had touched her cheek. Perhaps that was why she'd been so affected and caught off-balance.
But now she was back to the real world.
Aldo's world.
It was truly like a funeral procession, Aldo thought. The metal coffin was being carried by four of Sontag's students and the mourners were Joe Quinn, Eve Duncan, and the reporters and soldiers following the procession.
The coffin.
He stared with feverish intensity at the box that contained Cira's remains. He'd seen specially constructed coffins like that as a boy when he'd played around his father's archaeology sites. Sontag had obviously done everything possible to preserve that skeleton from disintegration.
It would do him no good. He would smash those bones, grind them to dust. He would defile and—
Jane MacGuire and Mark Trevor had come around the corner, trailing behind the crowd around the coffin. She looked pale and composed beneath the dim electric lights illuminating the sepulchral darkness. Her gaze was fixed straight ahead, not on the coffin. What are you feeling? Anticipation? Triumph? Or is it too painful, bitch? You don't know pain yet.
Do you feel me looking at you? Does it frighten you? But then you like to have men stare at you, don't you? Trevor is watching you now, devouring you with his eyes. How long did it take you to lure him into your bed, whore?
He could feel the fury explode inside him. It shouldn't have happened. Trevor had no business coming between them. It should have been him. It would be him. Before he took her face, he'd take her body. He'd spend himself, cleanse away the evil that was Cira.
But it might not be enough. What if he had only a few moments to enjoy that final victory? He needed more. He needed contact again, her voice, her words.
The procession had passed out of sight down the tunnel and he had to catch up before he lost them. He moved quickly down the robbers' tunnel that ran parallel with the theater tunnel. He wasn't really