by L.J. Shen
“Edie,” Sonya whispered urgently, opening the door wider. “It’s okay. You can trust me. I’ve worked as a child psychologist for fifteen years now. Forget what you saw that day. This will not affect you or your brother.”
My brother. That’s right. She was the reason why I’d seen him that Sunday.
Gingerly, I took a step in. Bane was already in the living room, cracking the beers open, The Black Keys’ “Lonely Boy” blasting from the speakers. Sonya and I walked like two stiff figures toward the couch, and I tried to cough away the ball of shame and jealousy building in my throat.
“Wash it with a beer.” Bane flung his long legs over an ottoman, dropping to a shabby, something-from-Friends, purple couch. I glanced at Sonya, who gave me a polite smile.
“You’ve had a long week, I hear.”
I downed the can in a couple long gulps and threw my head onto one of the pillows, closing my eyes for a moment. Thank you.
Sonya laced her fingers in front of me, her legs crossed, giving me her undivided attention. She was dressed to kill, and my feelings toward her were at war. I wanted to dislike her, but how could I when she was hell-bent on helping me, and being so goddamn nice?
“Enjoyed that beer?” She grinned. I nodded, cradling the empty can instead of placing it on the coffee table. My father would kill me for less than staining his precious Italian oak.
“Did you know that in Europe it is legal to drink from the age of eighteen? I always preferred the Russian way better.” Her smile was so big it almost felt like a wink.
Roman ‘Bane’ Protsenko had an interesting mother. She’d run away from Russia with him, giving him freedom, and he, in exchange, lived his life the fullest.
And she was happy for him. Content.
How odd.
“Now, tell me all about your brother and your father’s threats regarding him. I want you to start from the beginning. From when your father placed him in the first group home.” Sonya grabbed a glass of what smelled like vodka from the coffee table and took a sip.
And I did.
I poured my heart out, telling her about how Theo was never loved, not really, by either of our parents. How Jordan had bribed his way out of being a parent, always taking the shortcut, always placing Theodore in institutions and hopping from city to city every holiday so we wouldn’t have to visit Theo.
I didn’t know what was more horrific—reciting the years in which Theo was neglected, saying it out loud and realizing how bad it sounded, or seeing their faces as I confided in them. Sonya looked like she was about to cry, and even Bane turned down the music at some point and stared at me like his world had turned a shade darker.
When I was done, Sonya cleared her throat, looking down at her thighs. “Roman, please step out of the room.”
If Bane was shocked, he didn’t show it, taking his beer and sauntering over toward the door. “I’ll be on the porch, smoking my ass off after that depressing story.”
When the door closed behind him, Sonya met my eyes. “Trent didn’t offer to help you?”
“I…” I tapped my lips, thinking about it for a moment. How much did she know? How much did I want her to know? Screw it. It wasn’t about my summer affair with an older man. This was about Theo. “We got involved for a while and he helped me with paying for Theo’s facility, but nothing more than that. And I doubt he’d wanna help me now. We’re…no longer in touch.”
Sonya uncrossed her legs, took another sip of her vodka, and pressed it to her cheek. Her eyes were glazed over, and for a moment, they held the same look as they had when Trent had entered her. Drunk. I shuddered into Bane’s shirt.
“Why?” she asked softly.
I blinked. “Why what?”
“Why did you end it?”
“Why do you assume I’m the one who ended it?” I wanted to get up and do something, anything, but the need to find out if she knew something I didn’t ignited and burst into flames in me.
Sonya put the glass on the table, looking up at me with a sad smile. “Because he never would.”
“How do you know?” I hated myself for asking. It shouldn’t have mattered to me. He needed to focus on his family.
Sonya looked up at me. “Because, Edie, he is in love with you.”
LUNA CAME FIRST, AND I had to remind myself of that.
The first thing to do was to secure my daughter’s future. With me.
Still, the need to confront Edie was almost feral. I wanted to slam my fist above her head and yell at her for giving Jordan the flash drive. I wanted to scream, and shout, and curse, and fuck her despite all of this shit. To make her see how not over we were, how we were only just beginning, how I was losing my mind over her. I wanted to show her how I loved the fuck out of her body and hated that we were wrong. Deeply, crazily, absurdly wrong for each other.
Which meant I had to take a step back.
The moment after Jordan and Val left, I was in the car, slicing through the streets looking for the one woman who could help me, who wouldn’t betray me. I called Dean on my way to her.
“I need you to go to Edie Van Der Zee and get some of my shit from her.”
“Why don’t you do it yourself?”
“Because she handed my ass to her dad. Because she fucked me over. Because if I see her lying, cheating face in person, I would shit on everything I care about. In a nutshell.” I cleared my throat, my eyes on the road. People were walking, and laughing, and living their lives, not giving a damn that mine was collapsing.
No one was taking my daughter. No one.
“I take it you’ll elaborate later.” I heard Dean trying to calm crying Lev down. “What do I need to do?”
I told him, adding, “And whatever you do, don’t tell her about what happened with Jordan and Val. Her loyalty lies with one person—her brother—and she’ll do whatever’s best for him. I’m still not sure if it’s what’s best for me. Got it?”
“Got it,” he said.
I arrived at the office of the woman who was there for me, who’d help me take down Jordan.
“Oh, and Trent?” Dean asked from the other line.
“Luna will always be yours. You better goddamn believe we’ll make sure of that.”
Very few things are certain in this life.
One day, you’re going to die. Every year, you’ll pay taxes. If someone hates you before you even open your mouth—watch out for them, they’re out for your blood. Before I’d even had the chance to shake his hand, Jordan Van Der Zee had it out for me.
It turned out Val hadn’t needed a new identity; she had Jordan. He housed her. Gave her his credit cards—under his name. Cash galore. He paid for her lifestyle and her every little whim to keep her happy. And he promised her that one day, when the timing was right, he would strike and give her the life she’d always dreamt of. The kind of luxury only Todos Santos and the South of France had to offer.
Val was content with waiting, because she had nothing to lose. She’d never really cared for Luna or for me. She cared about materialistic things—the same materialistic things Edie hated so much—and Val knew no matter how much Jordan loved her, he was going to replace her with an upgraded version one day, just like he did Lydia. Coming back here would secure her financial support for the next fourteen years—four-fucking-teen—plenty of time to get her shit together and find another idiot who was stupid enough to give her his credit card. She had that shit all figured out.
Or so she thought.
As for me, I finally understood why Jordan hated me so much—I’d touched what was his and chained my destiny to her. Jordan didn’t love Val, though. He thought he did, but it didn’t matter. She was his. He was not the losing kind.
I made him lose.
He hated that.
Val had come back for Luna because she wanted to enjoy both worlds. Living with Jordan in Todos Santos and getting child support from me so that when—and yes, it was when, not if—he dumped her, she’d have something to fall back on. Luna
was no longer a baby. She was relatively independent. She could dress up and parade around like a pretty accessory.
Jordan and Val thought they had this shit on lockdown. I could see it from the way they strode out of my apartment like they had me in their pockets. They were sorely mistaken, and I wondered how they’d even gotten to the conclusion I was a pushover. The facts spoke more loudly than I ever did.
Val had spent the last years in hiding from me, because she knew my wrath.
And Jordan held four times as many stocks as I did in Fiscal Heights Holdings and still couldn’t move an inch without me breathing down his neck.
That’s why I went prepared to the office the next day.
Amanda’s main job hadn’t been to find Val. What she did give me in spades—what I securely kept on my flash drive—was a lot of dirty, dirty information about Van Der Zee.
Which was why I felt completely at ease sitting on his chair, my signature legs-on-desk position with my hands behind my head, waiting for him first thing in the morning.
He walked into his office at eight a.m. like nothing had happened. Like it wasn’t his mission in life to try to destroy me. Like his other partners didn’t know he was now a lying, cunning piece of trash. Jordan stopped on the threshold, staring at me vacantly. His unpleasant surprise—me—stared back at him with enough hatred to blind him.
Reaching for the breast pocket of his blazer, probably to call security, he stopped when he heard me laughing as I lit a J.
“What in the world do you think you’re doing?” he asked through gritted teeth, taking a step forward. I tapped my chin, pretending to think it through.
“Making myself feel at home, seeing as this office will be my second home, soon.”
“Smoking here is illegal,” he pointed out, choosing to ignore my blunt statement.
“Funny you should mention that, Jordan, since illegal seems to be your favorite flavor.” I got up from his armchair, strolling over to him with the wickedest smile in my arsenal.
“What are you talking about, Rexroth?” His voice sharpened with panic, coated by annoyance.
Progress, I thought, but not enough. I wanted to pull it out of him. The terror. The inability to fucking breathe it hurt so bad. Because that’s what losing Luna would feel like.
When my pecs nearly brushed his, I stopped, towering a few inches above him. “You need to sit, Mr. Van Der Zee.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” he spat out the words, but did as I said. This was the best kind of victory. The one where I got what I wanted watching my opponent dragging his feet. He was about to take a seat behind his desk when I tsked from my place in the center of the room.
“Forget about it, Jordi. Where you’re going, not only do they not have executive chairs—but I hear the mattresses are really fucking bad.” I tilted my head toward an ottoman by his oak bar. He stared at me. When he saw I wasn’t kidding, he warily made his way there, grunting. Jordan was eager to find out what I knew. The answer was simple.
I knew everything.
Amanda had helped me build my case, slowly. Slow enough to know I couldn’t take him down while Edie and I were forming a relationship.
But then yesterday changed everything. I’d sent my friends to Edie while I drove straight to Amanda. I’d turned the world upside down. I’d fought the waves. I hadn’t drowned.
I would never drown. Not when I needed to keep my kid afloat.
I knotted my hands behind my back, pacing the room leisurely, the joint still clasped between my fingers. “You know what I never understood, Jordi? How come you were so goddamn successful, when every company you’ve ever incorporated before ninety-seven failed miserably and went under? It was like you were fiscal poison. Everything you touched turned into shit. The growing list of companies you’ve founded and filed for Chapter 11 was the first warning sign. We all saw it as a red flag, but your track record after two thousand and three was so solid, my friends decided to overlook it. Well,” I shrugged, taking a hit of my joint, exhaling the smoke on a smile, “I didn’t.”
At first, I’d thought all I was going to find out about Jordan was the usual shit—money laundering and maybe a bit of tax evasion. Even his affairs didn’t strike me as too interesting. After all—he wasn’t even trying to hide them. But I’d found more. So, so much more.
Jordan’s teeth gritted so hard I could hear them all the way across the room. His face remained tense, holding onto the last shreds of his dignity.
“I went to a private investigator and asked her to find me everything there was to find about the massive success story that was Jordan Van Der Zee. The first thing I found out was that you may have gone to Harvard on a scholarship, but that scholarship wasn’t entirely kosher, was it? You had someone footing the bill for your education after the first year. The poor Dutch kid who couldn’t even afford butter and bread—your words, not mine. I wondered who could help you with such large sums of money and found the name. A shady McConman who lived in British Virgin Islands named Kaine Caulfield. Caulfield is such a peculiar name. Very Catcher in the Rye. Some would even say…fictional. I decided to dig deeper, especially considering you shouldn’t have known someone who’d lived in the British Virgin Islands. Unless…” I put the joint between my lips and fished a document from my back pocket, throwing it in his face with the rollie still in my mouth. “Money laundering.”
“This is preposterous,” he muttered, intending to stand up, but I pushed him back down to his seat with the tip of my shoe.
“Sit,” I commanded. “So, drugs, huh?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He flung his arms in the air, visibly shaking. He was losing it, and fuck if it wasn’t the best show in town.
Laughing, I shook my head. “I mean, I guess it could explain how you even got that far in your first company. Or how you put down some investment money when you opened your own firm three years after graduating.”
“This is hearsay, and if you continue this line of conversation, I will have to contact my lawyer…” Jordan started, standing up on his feet.
I pushed him back down again, not even sparing him a glance and walking over to his bar. “Finally we can agree on something. You should definitely call your lawyer. But not yet. You’ll ruin the surprise.”
I poured myself three fingers of scotch and downed them in front of his floor-to-ceiling window, turning on my heel to look at him again. I felt oddly content with fucking up his life. The only person whose feelings I worried about was Edie, who was about to part ways with her father, but hey, she didn’t need him anyway, and I was going to do her a favor by locking him up.
I was going to give her Theo.
“You know? I think I’m going to be the one to take your office. It’s plenty spacious. Luna will have a place to play when she visits me every Tuesday,” I mused, brushing my fingers along the giant canvas painting on the wall. A Dutch painter. Another Van Der Whatever. Waves crashing on the shore.
Edie.
“You’re leaving the company, Rexroth,” he said tiredly, but he didn’t mean it. Not really. I could see it in his eyes. The defeat. It had a color and a smell and a fucking taste. It was everywhere on his features, everywhere in the room.
“Save me the bullshit. You and I both know that time is money.” I polished off his liquor and dropped the remainder of the joint into the expensive glass. “So—drugs. They put you through school. Good for you. When my PI came to me with this information, I was surprised to say the least—a man like you, who fell in love so fucking hard with the glitz and glamour, wouldn’t be dealing with crackheads and drug dealers? Nah. You’re fancier than that, Jordi. That’s why you struck a deal with MNE Pharmaceuticals. They provide you with prescription drugs. Have been for twenty years now. Oxy. Ambien. Vicodin. Xanax. Valium. Codeine. I can continue, but you get the picture. You got them. You sold them through hundreds of salespeople you have carefully targeted and trained. You laundered the money through offshore companies,
and that’s how you managed to invest in new companies and become the mogul you are today. But fucking up strangers’ lives wasn’t enough, was it, Jordan?”
His face was so white I thought he was going to faint. I didn’t help him when his legs failed him and he crashed on the floor. My shoes next to his face, the only thing he saw from his position.
“I dug even deeper,” I continued.
“Stop, stop,” he choked, spluttering saliva all over like a fucking pussy. I chose the exact same time to wipe his desk of the documents I prepared on it in advance, making it rain statements and pictures of him meeting with the CEO of MNE and checking big trucks full of boxes containing drugs.
“I was wondering about that pretty wife of yours.” My voice was velvet, almost soft. “I mean, Edie got her beauty from somewhere, and it sure as fuck wasn’t from you. My PI told me that your better half barely leaves the house anymore, which is sad, really, but also suspicious. And oh, so fucking convenient.”
He got up on his knees—shit, on his fucking knees—and crawled toward me. This had escalated so quickly, I couldn’t keep a straight face. Then again, I couldn’t exactly laugh at him, either. This wasn’t a joke.
“No. No. No. You don’t have any evidence,” he kept chanting, clutching my legs. I took a step back, repulsed with his eerie behavior.
“I clearly do.” I pushed one picture of him next to a truck at the pier in his direction with the tip of my Derby shoe. “You’re not the only one who knows how to use a goddamn printer.”
“Lydia didn’t…she never…”
“You fed her drugs. You messed with her prescriptions, didn’t you?” I asked dryly. He shook his head. Liar. I saw him, under me, and for the first time, it was without the screen of hatred. I saw the boy who wanted to get far and didn’t know how. Then I saw the greed. The gluttony. Everything that had ruined Edie’s life. I saw it and I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that regardless of what we were—or weren’t—I needed to protect her from her father and his destructive lover, but even more importantly, I wanted them out of the picture. For good.