Portrait of Deception by Kathryn Dodson

Author:Kathryn Dodson [Dodson, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Renegade Reads
Published: 2024-01-18T00:00:00+00:00

The photos were good. Too good. She could hardly remove her eyes from the one where the drone approached her, a blurred, menacing mass, while Andrei stood in the background, controls in hand, basking in her defeat. He would love the photo, and the world needed to see it.

How could he have flown that drone at her, hovered it inches from her, when he knew it had a bomb? The thought caused bile to rise in her throat.

She hated war, had never been as terrified as when embedded with a US Army division in Afghanistan. At least until now. As much as she wanted to follow in her father’s footsteps, she didn’t have the stomach for gore.

But Kirk did. A cub photographer along with her on that trip, he reveled in war. Perhaps it was the machismo band-of-brothers thing that she never really understood. Perhaps she couldn’t find beauty in a war zone bereft of love.

Kirk quickly became the dashing center of attention in the horrible place. When he befriended her, she’d been grateful. She felt safer just being near him, as if he repelled the ugliness of war.

They both lived in New York, met up occasionally, became friends, she thought. Soon they became more than friends, but never anything permanent. They slept together, took a few trips together, often ended up in each other’s beds when they happened to be in the same locale. Beyond Liliana, she probably would have counted him as her closest friend, all the while knowing he wouldn’t have done the same.

But for him to have taken money to drug her and let others ruin her life, all while he stood to gain professionally, was a far leap beyond what she could have imagined from him. How could she be so naïve?

Everything she’d thought of as bedrock had crumbled. Her career, her so-called friendship with Kirk, her safety. When she looked back at her life, it seemed so ridiculous. Her quest for fame was as useless as her mother’s quest for love. Except for the photographs. She had created beauty.

And now, she used her lone gift to promote a man who didn’t deserve it. A dam inside her cracked. The trickle of hate that had always pushed her to be better, to chase her father’s glory, gain her mother’s love, became a torrent. It spilled its blackness through every cell in her body, filling her with self-loathing.

She deserved whatever punishment Andrei meted out today. Yes, drugging her in Italy was unfair, but what had she been doing with her life, anyway? She’d chased fame and landed infamy. Wanted adulation and earned self-disgust. Poor lonely little girl. Her father died before she was born and owed her nothing. Her mother preferred the love of drunks and abusers to the daughter standing at her feet. And her mother was dead. There was no redemption.

Margo wiped the tears from her eyes and tried to leave the past behind. She saved her favorite edited photos to a file on her laptop.

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