Reborn to Ruin Him

CHAPTER TWELVE

Marisol Díaz had been Camille’s friend in two lives, and in both she saw straight through her, which was either the great gift of the friendship or its central danger, and possibly both.

They had met, this time as last, in the least likely place — the ladies’ room of a benefit, where Marisol had been reapplying armor-red lipstick and had caught Camille’s eye in the mirror and said, without preamble, “You’re the only person in that room not performing, which makes you either the most honest woman here or the best liar, and I’d like to buy you a drink and find out which.” In the first life that sentence had begun the one friendship that had survived the Whitmores.

In this one Camille had gone looking for it deliberately, arranging to be at the right benefit, in the right mirror, because a campaign needs a friend who can move in the world Camille could not — the world of columnists and editors and the people who decided what a city believed.

It had felt, at first, like a small betrayal — engineering a meeting that had once happened by grace, walking up to a stranger who was also the truest friend of her life and pretending not to know the shape of the years ahead of them. But Camille had made her peace with it on the drive over. Everything she did now was engineered; that was the condition of her second life.

The question was never whether she was arranging things. The question was only whether she arranged them toward something worth arranging toward, and Marisol Díaz, alone among all the people in her orbit, was someone Camille wanted in the light for Marisol’s own sake and not merely for the war.

Marisol ran public relations the way generals run wars. She knew which reporter owed which favor, which editor was sleeping with which source, how a story got planted and, more usefully, how one got killed. She was loyal to almost no one and, Camille knew from a whole other lifetime, absolutely to her. She was also, this time, not yet sure what she was looking at.

That was the danger of a friend who saw clearly. Regina could be managed with dullness, Adrian with mystery, Bianca with her own future crimes — but Marisol looked at a person the way a jeweler looks at a stone, turning it to the light, and dullness only made her look harder. Camille could not be boring at Marisol; boredom would insult her, and an insulted Marisol went digging.

So Camille gave her, instead, the one thing she gave no one else: a door left visibly ajar, and the promise that she would one day be allowed to open it. It was a gamble. It was, she thought, also the closest she had come to honesty in a long while, and she found she was hungry for it in a way that surprised her.

“So,” Marisol said, over the drink, several benefits into the rebuilt friendship. “I’m going to say something, and you’re going to let me say all of it before you do that pleasant deflecting thing you do.”

“I don’t deflect,” Camille said, deflecting.

“The woman who married Adrian Whitmore,” Marisol went on, ignoring her, “was sweet. Soft. A little lost, if I’m honest — the kind of pretty that apologizes for taking up room. I liked her. I worried about her, marrying into that family. And then she went on a honeymoon.” Marisol turned her glass slowly on the bar. “And the woman who came back is not the woman who left. She’s got the same face and a completely different spine.

“She reads a room like she’s already read the transcript. She’s three moves ahead of people who’ve been playing this game since before she was born, including that terrifying old woman, and she does it while pouring the coffee. That is not what a honeymoon does to a person, Cami. Something happened to you.”

Camille sat with it. She had known this conversation was coming — she’d had a version of it in the other life, later, once the war was already underway — and she had promised herself she would handle it with a half-truth carefully cut. But Marisol’s eyes in the low bar light were the eyes of the one person in the city who had mourned her, would have mourned her, and Camille found the deflection would not come.

Marisol did not accept the deflection. She set down her glass. “You arranged our meeting. You knew which story I killed last month before I told you. And you keep looking at the Whitmores as if you have already attended their autopsy. Give me one reason not to investigate you.”

Camille could lie and lose the only friend who had chosen her twice. Or she could spend a measured piece of truth and make Marisol an informed ally. She chose before fear could make the choice smaller.

“My name is not Ross,” Camille said. “And the family that took me in did not rescue me.”

“Yes,” she said. “Something happened to me.”

“Do I get to know what?”

Marisol did not push, which was how Camille knew the friendship was real in this life as in the last. A lesser ally would have pried; Marisol simply refilled both glasses and let the silence do the work, because she understood, professionally and personally, that the fastest way to lose a secret worth having was to grab at it. She had her own reasons for patience, too.

There was a man — a photographer she never named without a particular flatness in her voice, a story Camille knew the ending of from another life and would not spoil — and there were ambitions of her own that had nothing to do with the Whitmores, a firm she wanted to build, a name she wanted to be. Camille filed all of it away, not as leverage but as care.

A partnership that ran in only one direction was just another kind of using, and she had been used enough for two lifetimes. Whatever Marisol gave her, Camille intended to give back, in the coin that mattered to a woman like Marisol: the truth, eventually, and the win, and a friend who never once made her feel like furniture.

“So here’s how it works,” Marisol said, all business now, the general taking the field. “You don’t do anything with the press. Ever. Not a word, not a look, not a charming little quote. That’s mine. You be mysterious and expensive and slightly sad in exactly the right lighting, and I decide what the city makes of it.

“A woman who tries to manage her own narrative always loses, because she can’t see herself the way the room does. I can.” She tapped the bar. “Give me six months of access and no surprises, and I will make you the most interesting woman in this city — not the richest, not the prettiest, the most interesting, which outlasts both.

“And when the day comes that you want a story told, it’ll land like it’s been waiting its whole life to be true, because I’ll have spent six months teaching this city to believe it before it ever hears it.”

Camille looked at her friend and felt something loosen in her chest that had been clenched since the garage. She was not, it turned out, entirely alone in this. “Six months,” she said. “No surprises.”

“No surprises,” Marisol agreed, and then grinned, wolfish and warm at once. “Except the good kind. I do love a good surprise, professionally speaking.”

“Not yet. Maybe not ever all of it. But soon, some of it — the part that matters, the part I’ll need you for.” Camille turned her own glass. “I’m not the woman who married into that family, Mari. I’m the woman who’s going to take it apart. And I can’t do it without someone who owns the story before the story owns me.”

Marisol was quiet for a moment. Then she smiled, slow and sharp and delighted, the smile of a general who has been handed a war worth fighting.

Marisol demanded proof before partnership. She named a society columnist who had been quietly buying tips from Regina’s office and gave Camille four hours to demonstrate it.

Camille did not tell her what she remembered. She directed her to three public expense reports, a florist’s delivery log, and the columnist’s sudden ownership of an apartment routed through a Whitmore vendor. Marisol assembled the chain herself.

At the fourth hour, the columnist telephoned Marisol to ask why she was investigating the apartment. Someone inside the records office had warned him. Marisol ended the call, changed every communication channel, and looked at Camille with the exhilaration of a woman who had just felt the enemy move.

“You were right about the corruption,” she said. “You were also right not to hand me a conclusion. Fine. I’m in—but I choose how my people are protected.”

“Agreed. And if I conceal a mortal risk from you, you leave.”

That was the first rule of Camille’s war that Regina would never understand: allies were more dangerous when they were free to refuse.

Their first joint operation began before they left the bar. Marisol drafted two versions of a harmless society item, changing only the location of Camille’s supposed weekend trip. One went through the columnist’s assistant; the other through a Whitmore foundation aide.

The foundation version reached Regina in twenty-three minutes. The columnist’s version reached Bianca in thirty-one. Two channels, two rivals, two different lies. Marisol mapped them on a napkin and tore it into pieces before the waiter returned.

“You realize this is the most fun I’ve had all year,” she said.

“It stops being fun when they strike back.”

Marisol’s smile vanished. “Good. Keep telling me that part. It is the only way I remain your ally instead of your audience.”

“Well,” she said, and lifted her glass. “The woman who came back from that honeymoon isn’t the one who left. Fine. I liked the old one, but I think I’m going to love this one.” She clinked Camille’s glass. “So tell me, partner — I’ll help you bury whoever did this to you. Just tell me which grave we’re digging.”