Just as I collapsed in a fit of fluids and sweat, Adam slid one arm behind my back and pulled me up into him. He kissed me, his tongue raking against my own, until our bodies were an indistinguishable tangle of sensual, tantalizing flesh. We made love for hours, exploring positions I would have never come up with in my wildest dreams. And when we were both drenched in sweat and panting for water, I laid against his chest and ran my fingers over the black ink on his muscles until we both fell asleep.
That night I dreamt that all three men were making love to me. One at a time. Even Julian, whom I hadn’t even been with yet.
And when I woke up in the morning, I realized that I wanted them all.
Adam held me in the bed for as long as he could before one of the Lineage Deans came bursting through the door.
“What the hell?” Adam said as he tossed a blanket over my body to cover me and tried to shove the Dean back out of the doorway.
“Please,” the man said as he rolled his eyes drolly. “It’s not like we all haven’t already seen it.”
“What are you talking about?” Adam asked.
The Dean reached up into the bedroom ceiling corner and tipped up the loose tile that was dangling there. He pulled down a small camera that still had an active red light glowing on it, which showed that it was on.
“What the hell is that?” Adam shouted as he tried to snatch the device out of the man’s hand.
“I guess you could call it an insurance policy,” the guard said with a nasty edge to his voice. “Would you like to tell Lisette about your backstory, or should we leave that up to her father to do for you?”
I looked up at Adam and saw that he looked as though all the blood had just been drained from his body. He stared at the Dean and said nothing.
“What is he talking about?” I asked Adam as I stood up with the blanket wrapped around me and put my hand on his shoulder.
Then, Adam silently turned to face me with a look in his dark eyes that made me feel like I was staring into an encompassing abyss.
“I’m sorry, Lisette. Please understand that I’m more sorry for this than I could have ever imagined.”
And even his apology didn’t cushion the blow that came next.
25
After the guard took Adam, I was left in the apartment alone and with more questions than I had started with even before all of this began. Everyone was gone, Michael…Julian…Adam, and I was left here alone in the deafening silence of my thoughts.
Everything was wrong, and I didn’t know how to make it right again. I didn’t know what the guard had been talking about, and from Adam’s reaction, whatever it was wouldn’t be good. Instead of sitting here waiting, I decided to get dressed and go see my father. I wanted answers, and if he wanted me to parade around in front of the press today like some sort of puppet being held hostage, then he would need to answer at least a few of my questions.
I walked across campus to the administrative office building and thought about all the ways that I would kill my father if I ever had the chance. I had almost settled on choosing to slit his wrists so that he could suffer what my mother had suffered. But then I remembered that he deserved to meet with a much more painful death than that. I wondered how many people my father had killed or been responsible for ordering the kill order on. I also wondered how many people were actually loyal to him and how many were just afraid. It was sickening that one man could have so much power and generate so much fear. My mother must have been ever braver than I thought to go up against him; as far as I knew, she had been all on her own.
Marta, on the other hand, was a coward. I watched her pour my father’s coffee into his cup as he sat at the Headmaster’s desk and smoked a cigarette, blowing foul-smelling puffs into the air. No wonder his teeth were so yellow.
“There’s no smoking in here,” I said as I walked into his office and sat at the furthest chair from his desk that I could find.
He laughed, and it distracted Marta enough to overflow his cup, just a tad.
“You’re a real pain in the ass,” he said to me.
“So, I’ve been told.”
Marta hurried around his desk to grab a napkin and wipe up the small spill before he noticed it had happened. She seemed more like a personal assistant now than a Headmistress. I thought back to seeing them holding hands and that visual, along with the smoke-filled room, made me want to gag.
“I have to say, I’m surprised that you came to see me today,” he said. “I figured that I’d end up having to send someone to drag you out of that apartment and bring you to me.”
“Like you did with Adam?”
He looked over the bridge of his thick nose at me.
“You don’t know that boy as much as you think you do.”
“Then please,” I said. “By all means, tell me about him. It’s why I came.”
“Is it? You came here this morning to see if I would tell you what you want to know about one of your lovers?”
My father’s choice of words made it sound like I was some sort of goddess with men falling at my feet, which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Instead, I was some ridiculously conflicted girl that found herself torn between three very flawed, albeit gorgeous guys. Although I guess Julian wasn’t that flawed, at least not that I knew of…my world seemed to change colors every day lately.
“If you expect to parade me around in front of the cameras without calling out the fact that you are a murderous bastard who is bleeding the top two colleges in the city dry of all their old money, then I want you to give me some answers.” I sounded much braver this morning than I felt.
My father didn’t seem to find that as funny as the last thing I said. He curled his lips around his words as he sneered at me.
“If you so much as put one dainty little finger of yours out of line, I will make those three boys suffer more than you can imagine.”
I felt my face drop, and all the courage that I was pretending to have was immediately sucked away.
“I don’t need to tell you anything,” he said as he smudged the tip of his cigarette out on the top of the desk. “It’s amusing how you think you can threaten me when you have no idea how much of this city I already own. My hands aren’t just in these two schools; I have my fingers dipped in this whole town. There is a rushing pulse of illegal trade beneath almost every building here that you know. The aquarium, the police station, hell even that stupid halfway house of your mother’s. I own everything and everyone here. So, don’t think you can threaten me, girl. You can’t.”
If what my father was saying was true, then he was planning to bleed the entire city dry, not just Goldshire and Lineage Academies. He was going to suck the wealth and inheritances from every source he could by funneling it all right below everyone’s noses. And then when he had bled it dry, he would kill off everyone who knew about it. I bet he even planned to have all the board members killed as well. You know, once he had taken all their money and used them to further his plans. The sickest part was that they actually thought he was helping them.
It was obvious that he wasn’t going to tell me anything. I was a fool to have thought that he would have. People don’t get away with faking their own death and hiding from the public for this long without being extremely careful and prudent about who they talk to and what they say. He must have had some help, though.
“Can I have some coffee?” I asked.
Marta looked at me with disdain as my father waved her on as if instructing her to serve me.
I might as well at least enjoy the small things that I can, like watching Marta serve me coffee.
“You must feel pretty shitty about yourself, huh?” I said with a patronizing smile as she poured the black coffee into a cup in front of me.
I saw her face turn red and her lips purse, but she didn’t say anything in retort, and it was delightful to watch her squirm.
I snickered. “I mean, to think that all these years, you’ve been taking care of my father instead o
f taking care of your own son.”
“I haven’t been taking care of him, you little twat!” she hurled as she slammed the coffee pot down against the wood surface of the desk. “You think you know everything, just like your mother thought she knew everything too. Well, smarty-pants, why don’t you go ask your other boyfriend what his parents have been up to this whole time?”
Marta looked at me with satisfaction as though she had done a fantastic job of telling me off, but as soon as she realized what she had divulged, she turned a fearful face toward my father.
“Your big mouth is exactly why I had Julian’s parents hide me this whole time,” he snarled at her. “Leave.”
Marta scurried out of the room, taking the coffee pot with her.
Julian’s parents? They were the ones who helped my father remain hidden all these years? How could that be true? Granted, I never knew much about them, and they always seemed so busy with “work” that they were barely ever around. But, they were high-ranking board members at Goldshire, and they were friends of my mother. Right?
At least I thought that they were.
“Did my mother know?” I asked as I tried to show as little emotion as possible.
“About Julian’s parents?” Dad asked. “No, I don’t think Pauline knew. It was one of the few things that even she didn’t suspect enough to stick her nose into.”
I wondered if Julian knew. He couldn’t have. It would have killed him. I didn’t want to be the one to tell him, but I also thought that he needed to know. I was very familiar with what it felt like to find out that your parents weren’t at all who you thought they were. And as much as it sucks, it’s better to know the truth than to live in a lie. My mother used to always laugh at that old saying, “the truth shall set you free.” She said it was a bunch of garbage and that the more accurate saying should have been “the truth shall set you on fire.” Now I knew how right she was.
“Tomorrow is your publicity event,” my father said as he lit the tip of a fresh cigarette.
Who even smoked cigarettes anymore? It was disgusting.
“I thought that was supposed to be happening today,” I said, not that I wanted to do it at all. I was dreading having to stand in front of a bunch of good-meaning people of the press and lie my ass off in order to protect a man that I wanted dead.
“Oh, I rescheduled it. I have some things I need to do today.” He waved at me dismissively just as he had done with Marta, and I guessed that was my cue to leave. To which I promptly made my leave toward the door.
“Oh,” he added as I was walking out into the hallway. “Dress pretty tomorrow. You wouldn’t want to disappoint.”
And as I peered at him over my shoulder, only one thought crossed my mind.
I want to punch the yellowed teeth in his grin right through the back of his fucking head.
The campus seemed so peaceful and “normal”, and that gave me the creeps. Everyone was going about their day as if there wasn’t a monster at the helm of this sinking ship. I searched everywhere for Adam. I went back to the apartment, hoping he might be back, but he wasn’t. Then I went to all of his classes and asked around, but no one had seen him. I retraced the steps of every path we had walked together, and even stood at the edge of the campus and just stared out over the grounds for a while to see if I could see him slinking around as he sometimes did. Nothing. He was nowhere. I started to worry that something terrible had happened to him, but then remembered the look of guilt on his face last night. It was more like he had done something bad instead of the guards. All I could do was wait and hope that he was okay…hope that all three of the guys were okay. It was funny because there had been so many days that I was annoyed by how much they had all hovered over me and tried to protect me at every moment. Now that I was alone, I wanted them back more than anything; I’d even take the hovering.
When I got tired of standing around on campus, I went to the big tree near the cobblestone street at the edge between Lineage and Goldshire. It seemed like this was the longest winter I could remember, and as cold as it was outside, that tree made me feel warm. I grabbed one of the low branches and pulled myself up. As I climbed up, I searched for the exact branch that Julian and I had been on during the time that he had laid on top of me to keep me from falling off. I felt like a child searching for their security blanket and was filled with relief when I could still tell which branch it was. I wedged my body into the nook between where the base of the branch was attached to the tree and leaned up against the trunk. I sat there and thought about how lonely this felt without them.
A vibrating buzz coming from behind my ear nearly made me fall off the branch. I held onto the tree as I turned around and looked up into the nearby branches above me. To my absolute surprise, I saw my cell phone sitting tucked inside a carved out notch in the bark. I reached up and grabbed it, and the screen lit up with a dozen or so missed texts, all of which were from Michael.
I immediately texted him back. “Oh my god, are you there?”
I typed so fast that I had to be careful I didn’t drop the phone out of the tree.
“Lisette! I’m here!” Even though they were just letters, I heard Michael’s voice behind the words.
“How did my phone get here?” I asked.
“I found it at the greenhouse. Julian knew that eventually, you’d go back to the tree, so we figured that was the best place to leave it for you.”
“Are you guys okay?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Michael typed as I waited for the three pulsing dots to reveal what else he was going to type. “How are you holding up?”
“Not great if we’re being honest. Adam is gone.”
“Gone where?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, I’ll see what I can find out. Hang in there. You’re coming here tomorrow for the press event, so I’ll see you soon.”
“Okay.” I didn’t want to stop texting with him. “Wait, can I call you? I need to hear your voice.”
For a second, I thought he had already gone. I heaved a sigh of relief when I saw him typing again. “No, I’m sorry. There are too many ears listening. Text is better, just delete the messages.”
I nodded as I typed. “Okay.”
“Lisette, it’s going to be okay. I promise.”
His last message made me start to cry, and I tried to see the screen on my cell phone through my clouded eyes.
“Don’t promise things that you can’t keep,” I said.
He quickly texted back, and even though they were only letters, I still believed them. “I’m not.”
After that, the messages stopped. I scrolled back up to the top so that I could read all of the messages that I had missed. They were all most of the same thing; Michael asking me if I was there and if I was okay and telling me to answer back as soon as I could. There was one message in there from Julian, too; I could tell it was him because he always used a lower case “l” when he wrote my name. Even when it auto-corrected to a capital, Julian always changed it back. I never asked him why it mattered; I always just chalked it up as being one of the cute quirks about him.
I shoved the phone in my back pocket and climbed down out of the tree. At least I had a way of reaching out to Michael now if I needed to. I could tell he was being careful about using the phones, though. I stood at the edge of the cobblestone and looked across at the Goldshire campus. It seemed like it would be so easy just to run across the street and run to him, but it wasn’t. All of the other people walking around on campus had no idea that there were invisible lines drawn, which kept us all prisoner, especially me.
On the walk back to the apartment, I went slowly and took the long way. I walked down the path where Michael and I had gotten into that brawl that left us both with a black eye the next day. I had been so busy trying to fight him and not die in the process that I hadn’t even noticed a small structure that was tucked back off from the path a bit. It looked like it might have been an old cottage at one point, maybe a plac
e where a groundskeeper stayed or kept their things.
I walked over to it and pushed open the door to see the stone room. And naturally, I figured there was no bigger threat than the one already looming over my head.
So, I ventured into its confines to see what the hell was going on behind its heavy wooden door.
26
“I expect you to behave today,” my father said as we walked into the Goldshire offices.
“What am I, five?” I snarked as I pulled my arm away from him.
As soon as I saw Michael come into view, I got ready to run to him and throw my arms around his neck. But my father pulled me back and rooted me firmly beside him.
“Might as well be, you act like your five,” he said.
I felt like an imposter. Marta had come to the apartment in the morning, and since there were no locks on the doors, she had walked right in and woken me up by dropping a cup full of cold water on my face. I hated that woman, almost as much as I hated my father. She brought me an outfit to wear to the press event today, and I would have rather gone naked than put it on, literally.
I stood there next to my father, completely decked-out in Lineage Academy garb, and stared at Michael. He glared at my father first, and then at his mother. Then he asked the three of us to sit down at his table. Now that Michael was the Headmaster of Goldshire, he was the boss, at least he could pretend to be. Everyone here knew that it was really my father, who was the boss, but the press was not to know that small and important fact. We were meeting behind closed doors first so that everyone got their story straight, and there was no margin for error. The door opened, and Julian came in to sit down next to Michael. He had a harder time keeping in character than Michael did. Julian wanted to run up and hug me too; I could see it in his face. But he didn’t. None of us did what we wanted to do; only my father got that privilege.
“You will tell them that since you are now the Headmaster of Goldshire,” my father said to Michael, “that you will be doing some restructuring for the betterment of the schools. One such move, of course, will be the merger between Lineage and Goldshire as allies instead of our continued rivalry. The public won’t question that decision. The leadership here at Goldshire had been long lacking and the community will be pleased to see the two elite colleges joining for the betterment of all students.”
Ruined: A Dark Bully Reverse Harem Romance (Beautiful Tyrants Book 1) Page 17