doyenne.

by Anne Malcom

  I narrowed my eyes at him, finger on the doorknob. “That statement makes it sounds like there’s a quota on how much human beings are given. There isn’t. Enough is nothing but the point where weaker people give up.”

  I opened the door and pretended not to see Jacob, leaning against Vaughn’s desk and regarding me with a hard gaze. Hard but cold, all evidence of the elevator exchange gone. From his face at least.

  My uncle helped with me wrenching my focus from Jacob, striding into the foyer, cheeks red, eyes narrowed.

  “Is there a reason I was pulled out of one of the most important budget meetings this quarter?” he said by greeting.

  “You have one hour to pack up your belongings,” I replied.

  He blinked rapidly. “What?”

  I didn’t falter my gaze, though Jacob’s attention was taunting me with its intensity. I cursed Vaughn for getting him up here. I straightened my shoulders and said, “You heard me.”

  “You can’t fire me,” he hissed. “I’m family.”

  “Yes, you’re family,” I agreed. “Which is why I’m not having you arrested for corporate espionage.”

  He stilled. Opened his mouth to likely explain, try to justify, not to lie, because his guilt was painted all over his usually expressionless face.

  I held up my hand to silence him. “I was planning on doing this privately, to show you respect. But since respect doesn’t mean much to you, I’ll save us that conversation. I don’t want to have to call security.”

  Every employee within viewing distance was doing their best to watch without making it obvious.

  “You’re making a mistake, Charlotte,” he said coldly.

  “I doubt it,” I replied.

  He stared at me a beat longer and I was uncomfortable with the chill in his gaze that was something more than the normal emotionless expression I’d come to expect from my uncle.

  There was menace in it.

  I waited for him to do something more.

  Jacob’s taut body beside me told me he was doing the same thing.

  I hoped for Abe’s sake that he didn’t do anything more. Jacob wouldn’t hesitate to hurt him. And it wasn’t the concern of my family member being beaten by Jacob, it was more worry for the man dealing the beating. I knew calling up violence also called up some kinds of demons for Jacob. I wasn’t quite sure which, but I didn’t want him battling them for Abe.

  It seemed like a waste.

  But my worry was unwarranted, because Abe gave me one last sneer and turned on his heel and walked away.

  I didn’t look at Jacob.

  “Vaughn, you’ll have a list of competent replacement CPOs on my desk by end of day,” I said, turning on my own heel and into my office.

  I had work to do.

  10

  “You don’t have to come in,” I said to Jacob.

  It was the first words I’d spoken to him since the incident in the elevator.

  Two days ago.

  Even with our limited exchanges, no words—if you didn’t count his general intoxicating presence—in two days was somewhat of a record. The memory of our proximity and what he smelled like, what his wild fury felt like encased around my body was all consuming. I couldn’t speak around it.

  Something had changed.

  Definitely.

  Not just from his reaction, from him proving that he could control my body without mercy, but from his flinch when he jerked away from me.

  The man who embodied fear and death, who’d committed two murders in front of me, who didn’t flinch from blood, violence, death, recoiled from my touch.

  It didn’t hurt me, as it would different women, more ruled by singular emotions or self-esteem issues. No, it intrigued me. Made me ache to explore more of it. Dive into his dark and depraved psyche and figure him out. I wanted to tear him apart and inspect his pieces.

  He still turned up for a run both mornings. I still abandoned music for his footfalls and even breath.

  I still worked, obviously. Nothing short of death would interrupt my schedule. I waited for some kind of retribution from either my uncle or Kershaw.

  There was press about the failed merger and my uncle’s termination. I’d expected it. Not the sheer volume of it. The office had been all but swarmed with reporters on the first day.

  The second day they had disappeared.

  Not by choice. There was a story here. A big one. Bigger than most of them would even know. But I had connections that got them shooed. Mostly because I held the notes on some of the owners of their publications.

  Press was meant to be the fourth estate, holding power to account, but if power knew the dollar amount of the press’s account, then it held the press too.

  Every headline was controlled, paid for and orchestrated by those of us at the top. Ideas were some of the most sought after currency in the world.

  I hadn’t bothered myself with it before. I didn’t want to control the public’s ideologies. Just my own demons.

  I had very few morals left—the higher you got to the top, the more you shed away—but messing with freedom of speech hadn’t been a line I’d been willing to cross.

  Until now.

  Not that I was surprised, I knew that there would be no lines left to cross once I got high enough.

  I didn’t want some fresh-faced reporter trying to make a name for themselves in a dying medium to sniff the blood that lurked under the ivory façade.

  They would.

  Eventually.

  The smell of blood always found its way to the surface.

  Hence me sitting in the car outside Molly’s apartment building. I would protect her from this for as long as I could. I wasn’t so dense to realize that she wouldn’t find out eventually. I just planned on it being after the threat was eradicated. My mind stuttered on that thought. The threat would be eradicated. And so would whatever this was between Jacob and me.

  “My sister already thinks the wrong thing about us,” I continued from the first three words I’d spoken to Jacob in two days. “I don’t want her to build on that any more than she already is. Plus, there is only so long she will be fooled by the façade that we are...” I trailed off, my words catching in my throat with Jacob’s stare, struggling to put any kind of label on what we were.

  I cleared my throat.

  “There is no threat inside that building.” I nodded to the shabby walk up, quickly being cleaned up by gentrification, to Molly’s horror.

  “I’ll have my phone,” I said as if I were ever without it. “If there is trouble, I’ll call. For now, wait.”

  I expected an argument. Not a verbal one. Jacob’s version of an argument was a glare and then him disregarding everything I said and following me out of the car.

  He didn’t do so.

  The entire walk up to Molly’s apartment, I wondered if he believed in my safety or if the moments in the elevator had something to do with the fact he was still in the car.

  I felt naked without his stare.

  I should’ve felt more vulnerable without the monster protecting me. Instead I felt stronger without the man dissecting me.

  It took Molly five minutes to answer the door. When she did, she was wearing an oversized men’s shirt, a kimono over top, her hair was messy and eye makeup smudged.

  “Why are you here so early?” she whined.

  My mouth turned up. “It’s two in the afternoon.

  She leaned against the door frame. “Yes, early.”

  I raised my brow. “Do I need to even ask?”

  She yawned. “Oh come on, I was just up all night painting. Canvases. Not the town. For once.” She winked and held the door open so I could step inside.

  My heels clicked against the wood floors.

  “I felt inspired,” she said to my back as I stared at the paintings strewn around the place.

  They were amazing. All of Molly’s were. But this was something else. Violent. Dark.

  Unlike anything she’d ever painted before.


  Fear clutched my throat as I looked at all the canvases.

  I turned to watch her putting coffee into two large mugs. “Are you okay?” I demanded.

  She glanced up. “Apart from sleep deprived, fine. Why?” She screwed up her nose. “Oh, because of the paintings. I should’ve known you’d get all worried about them. You never see the surface, even on first glance.”

  She padded over and handed me the mug.

  “But it’s me who should be asking that,” she said after taking a long sip. “This didn’t come from me.” She waved the mug at the paintings.

  I gaped at her. I knew what she was insinuating. What she meant. I opened my mouth to protest, but then I looked at the paintings again. Something crawled over my spine as I took them in. It was me. All of the prickly, violent thoughts that had been clawing at my mind, they were splashed all over those canvases.

  I froze as I spotted one that I hadn’t seen on first glance. I don’t know why my eyes weren’t drawn to it the second I step foot inside the apartment.

  Wordlessly, I walked over to stand in front of the canvas that was set apart from the others.

  It was a large wolf, depicted in painstaking realism. Which was something in itself. All of Molly’s work was abstract. It was chaotic. It didn’t bow down to the rules of reality. She created and broke her own rules. She didn’t do portraits or landscapes. She was exceptionally good at them, but she never did them.

  “I don’t want to paint what everyone else sees. I want to paint what I feel when I see what everyone else thinks they see.”

  But here it was. A wolf. Real in every stroke, apart from the eyes. They were ice blue, so haunting that it could’ve been Jacob’s irises plucked from his head and flattened onto the canvas. There was enough violence in them to make it known that pain created them.

  “Molly,” I whispered, my voice fractured as I turned to regard her.

  She was smiling at me with eyes that were usually full of youth and chaos. But now there was a wisdom to them that only peeked out in these moments.

  Our twin moments.

  When I forgot all the rules I lived by and realized that my ordered world wasn’t as simple and brutal as I pretended it was.

  “I think, when we were in Mom’s stomach, we were one person,” Molly said, by way of answer. “And then, someone, something, maybe even us, realized that we were going to be too much to fit into one mind, so we split into two. It’s like the yin and the yang, without us being dark or light, we just are. We’re okay apart.” She looked at me pointedly. “Rather, one of us is more okay than the other.”

  I glanced around the albeit messy rooms, my own eyes pointedly staring at the clear masterpieces amongst the chaos. “I would disagree on that point.”

  She grinned. “It’s paint on a canvas.” She shrugged. “Nothing like thousands of jobs and really serious computer stuff that pretty much holds the fate of thousands of people in the little hard drives or whatever.”

  I smiled inwardly. Little was not the word for our hard drives. And it wasn’t because Molly wasn’t wildly proud of me that she didn’t know that, it was because it was all far too big for her to comprehend, too invisible. She lived in tangibles. Her paintbrush, the ink on her skin, whoever she was in love with that week.

  She squinted at the painting as if seeing it for the first time, as if she weren’t the one who painted it.

  A moment of dread clutched me with that look, that beautiful confusion so familiar. So reminiscent of the woman who had no beauty left in her stare. None left in her soul. An ugly and cruel disease had rotted her from the insides out.

  Schizophrenia was genetic.

  It could manifest in women in their early twenties and thirties.

  I tasted bile at the thought of Molly being yanked out of herself by her own mind. All of her vibrancy sucked away by drugs that would fight what was wrong inside of her by muting everything that was right.

  No matter how visceral my fear was for that to be my fate, if it was a choice between sanity and watching my sister decay like my mother, I’d take the disease.

  In a second.

  Because it would take more from Molly than it would from me. She had more life in her than I did. Much more to steal. Illness was greedy, darkness was. I knew it’d take from the most vibrant if it was the choice between the two of us.

  My eyes ran over the complex brushstrokes of the painting in an effort to shake the demons from my mind. Then I looked back to the wonderful artist that simply could not be taken from me like that.

  My Molly.

  I made a mental note to put another ten million into my research fund for mental illnesses.

  I stared at her as if the effort might be able to chase away what lay dormant in our blood. “It’s beauty,” I choked out, unable to say anything else.

  She rolled her eyes with a warm smile, waving her hand. “Whatever. I need to get back to my point, I know I left it somewhere.” There was a small pause and I imagined her rustling through the corridors of her mind that likely resembled this very apartment. “Right,” she said, eyes lighting with the lightbulb of recovery. “We were meant to be one. Well, in biology’s standards. But by whatever else runs the universe, we were meant to be two. You were meant to be the strict, regimented and wildly successful, albeit slightly robotic—” she winked—"superstar. And I was meant to be the one who reminded you of your humanity, that it’s okay to smile and laugh. You were meant to be the one that protected me from the world. The one outside, and more importantly, the one inside. Three minutes may be long for some people, but not to you. It’s the time that defined our relationship, to a point.” She smiled wider. “I think even if you were the biologically younger sister, you’d always be the big sister spiritually.”

  She whirled around the room, the billowing sleeves of her kimono moving with her.

  “And I was meant to be like this,” she sang. “The strictly unregimented, irresponsible, romantic sister who will always lean a lot to the left. We fit because we don’t.”

  She stopped and regarded me. “We’re one person still, because I feel what you’re feeling.” She nodded to the paintings. “You’re not going to tell me, are you?” She didn’t need to ask outright, but she knew something was going on. We didn’t need words when she had the paintings, when we had our connection.

  I shook my head. “Not yet.”

  She nodded. Didn’t argue. Molly knew me well enough to know that whatever she got through our connection was all she was going to get. “It’s him, the wolf man, Jacob, isn’t it?”

  My hand clenched around my mug handle. I couldn’t lie to her. I physically couldn’t lie to my sister. No matter how much I wanted to. “Yes,” I said, little more than a whisper.

  She nodded again. “I thought so, only thoughts as dark and painful as that could have been born from love.”

  I jerked. “I don’t love him.” The words were sharp and violent. A tone I’d never taken with Molly.

  She didn’t flinch from it. She didn’t argue with me. Just regarded me and faced me with that ridiculous notion. Not that I could fall in love with a man who I barely spoke to, who I’d seen kill two other men. No, that I was capable of loving anything. Even the monster that Jacob was. Because I was a different kind of monster. Maybe not as obvious. But a monster nonetheless.

  “I didn’t come here to speak about my personal life,” I said.

  “Obviously,” she replied, sinking down onto her bright purple sofa sitting in the middle of the room, for no apparent reason. Molly didn’t own a TV.

  “I came to give you your birthday gift,” I said, reaching into my purse to hand her an envelope.

  She eyed it. “Is it a car?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  She took the envelope and opened what was inside. Her eyes flared. “Ten days in an Ashram in India?” she all but yelled. Her mouth stretched into a smile. “I thought you were totally against me going on spiritual journeys.”

&
nbsp; I folded my arms. “I’m not against you doing anything that makes you happy,” I said as response. It wasn’t a lie. But my motivations behind such a thing were not purely to make her happy, they were more to keep her safe.

  It was an over precaution, one I hadn’t spoken to anyone about, but I didn’t want to take risks after my meeting with Kershaw. I couldn’t rule out anything with a man like him. And having Molly in the middle of nowhere in India with armed guards following her at a distance would set my mind at ease.

  Her gaze was sharp and knowing. “There’s something you’re not telling me.”

  I hated that she read me so well.

  “But I’ll wait until you’re ready to do so,” she continued. “Until after I get back from India.” She got up, put her mug down amongst three more on her cluttered coffee table and came over to hug me.

  She smelled of paint and strawberries.

  I relaxed into the embrace, and despite what she said before, I wasn’t the older sister. She was the one that was taking care of me.

  “Your present is obviously unwrapped, and your announced house call ruined the surprise,” she said, letting me go. “I was going to break into your apartment and get it hung without your knowledge.”

  “You do realize that breaking in doesn’t work in this scenario since you have the key code to my penthouse?” I asked.

  She waved my hand. “Don’t ruin my fun.” She screwed her nose up, concentrating on the painting I knew she had meant for me. “There’s still a couple of things I need to unperfect.”

  “Unperfect?” I repeated.

  She nodded. “Yeah, it’s too perfect. It needs to be a little...” She trailed off. “Wrong,” she decided.

  “Yeah, wrong,” I whispered under my breath.

  Molly left the day after she delivered the painting to my apartment. She had “unperfected” it. I wasn’t sure how, it didn’t look physically different from the painting I’d seen two days’ prior. But it was. Everything about it was.

  Wrong.

  Beautifully so.

  Painfully so.