Brian Freeman - Stripped

“I don’t think Blake would have believed him,” Stride said. “Blake was too far gone.”

“He could have tried,” Clare insisted.

“Never,” Serena said gently. “There was no way Boni was going to tell the truth about Blake. Or Amira.”

“Oh, Serena, don’t protect him. He’s my father. I know what kind of a man he is. This time, he could have done the right thing. He could have told the truth.”

“It would have meant giving up the most important secret in his life,” Serena said.

Claire’s voice was bitter. “Mickey. I know.”

Serena shook her head. “No, not Mickey. He would have had to admit what really happened to Amira’s baby.”

Claire looked back and forth between them and read the discomfort in their eyes. “Why was that so important?”

Serena leaned forward and murmured in Claire’s ear, “Amira was your mother.”

Claire reacted as if she had been stung. She took a step back and shook her head violently. “No.”

Serena simply stared at her with sad eyes.

“I was born months later,” Claire told them. “My mother thed giving birth to me.”

“Boni’s wife thed in childbirth,” Stride said. “So did her baby.”

“That was me” Claire insisted.

“Boni went to Reno and found the family that adopted Amira’s child,” Stride said. “Not a son. A daughter. You.”

“You’re wrong.”

Serena put both arms on Claire’s shoulders and pulled her close. “Beatrice was the nurse in Reno who delivered you to them. She knew the story. She knew what happened. Boni wanted his daughter back. His only child.”

“He never wanted you to know,” Stride said. “He was afraid you’d find out the rest-that he was the one who had your mother murdered. That’s why he couldn’t let the truth about Blake come out.”

She took a step away from them. There were eyes and cameras on her everywhere, and for a moment Stride thought she might run.

“I’m Amira’s daughter?” Claire said, as if she were wrapping her mind around the idea. She was struggling not to cry. Then, in the next instant, her eyes sparked like flame. Amira’s eyes. “She wanted to be free. Just like me. God, I hate him. I hate what he did to us.”

“So did Blake,” Serena said. “It destroyed him. Don’t let it destroy you, Claire.”

“Are you saying I should forgive him? How can you say that?”

“I’m not saying that at all,” Serena told her. “I just don’t want this to consume you.”

Claire looked up at the riser, where the politicians and money men were gathered, waiting for her, watching her. It was her world now-Boni’s world-and Stride could see her questioning whether she really wanted it. Whether the prize meant anything at all.

Whether, knowing her past, she was different now than she had been moments before.

“You could have kept this from me,” Claire said.

“That’s true,” Serena said. “But you’re tough.”

Claire laughed and touched her shoulder. Something intimate flowed through their skin. “I don’t feel very tough right now.” She took a deep breath, steeled herself, and added, “Time to do what we do best in Vegas. Bury the past.”

“It’s just a building,” Stride said.

“Maybe, but I’ll be glad when it’s gone,” Claire said. “The ghosts can die with it.”

Serena shook her head. “It’s not that easy.”

“I know that.” Claire approached Serena and whispered, loud enough for Stride to hear, “I’d like you in my life.”

“I’m already in someone else’s life,” Serena told her. “I’m sorry.”

Claire smiled sadly. She looked at Stride. “You can’t tell me you haven’t thought about what it would be like. The three of us together. Can’t we share?”

Serena answered for him. “There’s only one of me.”

Stride knew the truth. Sure, he had thought about it, but it was nothing but a wild fantasy. There would have been physical moments, ecstasy, like a drug, lingering for a few seconds that felt like forever, but in the end, it would have been a cancer eating them up and splitting them apart. Some lines you can’t cross.

Claire knew it, too. She kissed Serena’s cheek and told her, “You’re deeper than Vegas.”

The crowd was restless. Impatient. They wanted a body.

Claire retreated to the riser, climbed the steps, and waved to the crowd, which cheered wildly. She made the rounds on the platform. The mayor. The demolition team. Investors from New York. All of them taking her measure and studying her suspiciously, this girl who would oversee the rising of the Orient, a gleaming red tower to replace the old, tainted past of the Sheherezade. Stride could see behind their eyes and toothy grins and knew what they were thinking. It was okay to let her handle the ceremony, but behind the scenes, she would flounder, and others would grasp the real power.

Stride thought they were all going to be surprised. Claire was tough.

She didn’t give any speeches. She just placed both hands on the plunger that would trigger the explosion, and the crowd instantly fell silent. The hush lingered for several seconds as faces turned expectantly toward the hotel. Strange , Stride thought, how we’re so fascinated with destruction, with the tearing down of idols. Maybe because it was so fast. Years to put it up, years to visit, pass by, and play, seconds to bring it all to the ground.

No one was watching Claire anymore, except himself and Serena, who saw the smile fade from her face as she stared up at the sign, SHEHEREZADE. It looked tired in the daylight, not like the multicolored glow that washed over them at night. Tired and ready to fall. Claire’s eyes were wet. He saw her lips moving, whispering silently to herself.

Good-bye.

She pushed the plunger down. Electricity sparked through the wires and made its way to the dynamite packed inside the columns.

There was a long moment when nothing happened, when people held their breaths and wondered if it had all gone wrong.

Then bang bang bang bang, the charges detonated in a staccato rhythm like cannon fire, shooting from top to bottom with flashes of orange flame. The ground rumbled and shook under their feet, as if massive tectonic plates were grinding together somewhere beneath the earth. The hotel stood proudly for another few seconds, defying the dynamite, as if it could stand forever suspended against gravity-but it couldn’t. Deep inside its bowels, the hotel had been eviscerated; its supports were gone, leaving only the crushing weight behind to go down. From afar, as it began, the implosion looked as easy and graceful as a puff on a dandelion, not like the rape of thousands of tons of rock and steel. As if they were of no more substance than paper, the walls caved in on themselves, and the glamorous hotel collapsed like a body that had bled out. The force of the fall caused another earthquake under the street, strong enough that Stride felt they might all be lifted from the ground.

The crowd gasped and then cheered nervously, as if it were a litde dangerous to spit in the face of so much power. They knew what was coming, too. Fearsomely, a mammoth white dust cloud billowed up from the earth, growing like fallout from a bomb. People began backing up, wondering how far it would spread, and Stride was anxious for a moment that there would be panic. In the towers across the street, voyeurs scurried nervously inside from their balconies, shutting their glass doors against the wave of dirt. Forty years of it, an accumulated exhalation of grit, detritus, and skin. There was probably a little bit of Frank Sinatra in the cloud. Amira, too.

The dust began to rise long before it reached the crowd, bubbling up toward the sky. As it climbed higher, wind off the mountains caught it and carried it northward, sprinkling its ashes in particles over the city. The haze on the ground began to clear, revealing the remnants of the hotel-a fiftyfoot jagged pile of rubble, walls, roof, floors, tiles, porcelain, wood, and gold leaf, all of its elements jumbled together. Earthmovers and dump trucks were waiting a few blocks away, engines thundering, to begin picking at the mountain arid hauling it away.