by Anne Malcom
Because we were one half of each other and no damage truly done to one of us would leave the other unscathed.
I could live with every single bruise, every cut that would turn into a scar, but I would not accept even a blemish on my sister’s kind soul.
“You didn’t tell me.”
She was pacing.
She had been pacing.
Since she stopped crying, stopped staring at me in horror after I told her everything.
It was the only way I could explain away the fact someone broke into my house and beat me. No, in a civilized society, like the one we were meant to be living, there was no way to explain someone doing that. But I knew better than anyone, at the topmost tiers of this civilized society, things were anything but civil.
I had to tell her about the assassination attempts.
Both of them.
And then about who Jacob really was.
Though the lines between us were blurred, marred with blood and pain—if they had been anything but that from the start.
It was somewhere in the middle that she began pacing, and now I’d finished she was pacing a muttering to herself.
“Molly—” I started, quite unsure of what I was going to say. How I was going to frame this violent and ugly situation in a way that it made my sister feel safe.
“You didn’t tell me,” she repeated.
She stopped pacing.
“I should’ve felt it,” she whispered, her eyes shimmering, words broken. Fractured.
In that whisper, I felt more pain than any of the blows I’d sustained combined.
A tear trailed down her cheek. “The other half of me almost died. Twice. I should’ve felt it.”
“But I didn’t die,” I said, forcing my voice to be hard, because if I softened to my sister’s tears, I’d crumble. And when someone tried to break you apart, you either crumbled or you got stronger.
I’d always be the latter.
I had to be.
Even with Molly.
“I didn’t die and I’m not going to,” I promised.
She made a sound that was between a sob and a snort. “You may be the most powerful woman in New York and maybe the country, and you can boss countless people around, but death doesn’t listen to even Charlotte Crofton’s demands.”
I raised my brow. “I’m not the most powerful woman in New York, or the country, I’m the most powerful woman in the world,” I corrected. “And I’m not trying to control death, just those who think they have the right to deal it.”
The words hung in the air with a certainty that was familiar, even though the doubt challenging the pain for dominance was foreign.
16
“Where are you going?” Molly demanded as she looked up from the tray she had been making—likely for me, since it contained eggs and orange juice, neither of which she consumed—and glaring at my attire.
It hadn’t been easy getting my bruised body to comply while dressing myself. Nor was it easy slipping my feet into heels and trying to apply makeup with one hand, over the cuts and bruises covering my entire face. Makeup did little to hide it. I looked terrible. Battered.
Weak.
And there was only one way to stop looking weak. That was to act strong.
To perfect the art of pretending you were so. Weakness and strength were all about perception.
“I’m going to work,” I replied.
She dropped the tray on the counter with a clatter. Coffee spilled and the glass of orange juice overflowed and splashed into the eggs. Molly didn’t notice. She was too busy looking at me with a mixture of rage and disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”
“I’m always serious,” I said, walking slowly over to snatch the coffee with my good hand. I forced my eyes to move down to the area that had been stained with my blood, clean now. Molly must’ve cleaned it. A stab of pain lanced through me at her having to do that.
“Yeah, and you’re seriously fucking hurt, Char,” she snapped. “You’re not going to work. Even you can’t be beaten within an inch of your life and go into the office the next day.”
She had obviously demanded she stay last night. She slept in bed with me, holding my hand. Jacob slept in the guest room.
But neither of us did much sleeping.
Or any at all.
I’d waited until Molly was asleep before I moved my aching body from where it was resting against hers. It was impossible to sleep in this much pain, and I refused to take painkillers. Not out of some dumb sort of pride, but because I wanted the pain, I wanted to feel every inch of it. I needed it to fuel me. The best career decisions of my life came from pain.
Revenge was going to be served cold. And on a silver platter.
I’d gone into the living room because that’s where I’d left my laptop.
I shouldn’t have been surprised to find Jacob sitting there, reading under the dim glow of a lamp.
He’d known I entered the room immediately, but he didn’t look up from his book, didn’t offer to help me as I limped across the room. That’s because he knew an offer of help would do more damage than a painful shuffle across my living room.
“Shantaram,” I observed. “Good choice.”
He closed the book, not dog-earing it.
“You didn’t mark your page,” I said.
His eyes met mine. “I’ll remember.”
Yeah, he would.
We stayed like that for long beats.
“Scared the shit outta me, Boots,” he said finally, fists clenching.
By the way his eyes were running up and down my body, I knew he was restraining himself from doing something.
Touching me?
Holding me with that brutal tenderness from a lifetime ago?
Or leaving?
Walking away from the mess we’d gotten ourselves into.
“People say blood has a smell. I don’t know if it does. I think it’s death,” I whispered. “Death is something I’m sure you’ve seen.”
The ice in his eyes hardened a fraction more than I thought possible, his body stiff, the gesture serving as agreement.
You didn’t need words to know those eyes had seen death.
Wolves, after all, were carnivores.
As were humans, by instinct. By nature.
Killing was a way of life for both wolves and humans. Death, a way of life.
We’d just tried to convince ourselves we were civilized, evolved, telling lies about the rise from savagery, what separated us from the animal kingdom. But we were worse than them all. Because animals killed for a reason. For food, for protection. We, as a race, killed, raped, pillaged, ruined the very planet that sustained our life. We did this to entire nations, entire races, religions, and castes. And not for food, or survival. For power. For no other reason than because we could.
I kept my own face blank though my breathing came in strangled pants.
“I don’t think there’s a way to prepare someone for that. Not even a soldier.” I gave him a pointed look, though not an inch of his carefully crafted façade flinched in the slightest to signify agreement. So I continued. “Especially not a sixteen-year-old girl that comes home because she forgot her notes for SAT prep and finds her mother bent over her father’s corpse, sobbing and covered in his blood,” I said. My voice was robotic, emotionless. On the outside, at least.
Inside, my insides were screaming at the pressure of keeping it in.
The sorrow.
The panic.
I met his eyes. They were unyielding. Glacial.
“The knife she used to stab him eighteen times was discarded at her feet. She didn’t pick it up when I came in. It had gone—the demon, she said. The one that was inside Dad that needed to be killed.” I laughed, the sound was ugly and empty. “Though, she was wrong. The demon wasn’t gone. Never would be. And it didn’t live inside Dad. No, it was inside her. And still is, hidden under layers of pharmaceuticals that are administered three times daily at the facility in lower Manhat
tan she’ll live in until she withers away and dies.”
I thought of the last time I saw her. Years ago, and even then she looked like she would have been at home in a coffin. Insanity chipping away at the beauty that had radiated from within her. Before. Before whatever disease in her mind stole it away just as it stole my father. “Shouldn’t be long now.”
I didn’t miss the way my own words were saturated in hope. Hope for my mother’s death. Hope to turn me into an orphan. Though, I was already an orphan. Had been since that day sixteen years ago.
“Molly visits her,” I told him. “I thought it was because she got the story that everyone else got. The one my sixteen-year-old self crafted and then managed to convince everyone else that wasn’t the police. Of course, they know it was my mother that ultimately killed my father. But the story goes that she was trying to harm herself and when my father tried to wrench the knife away from her he was killed in the struggle.”
The vision in front of me flickered, like a mirage in the middle of a road on a hot day. I lost his eyes for a long moment, lost the room, lost myself. I saw it all. The blood, the long trail of it, splattered along the walls, the carpet, marring the photo of us grinning and clutching my silver-haired father last year at the beach.
Everything was red.
Then it wasn’t.
My silver-haired father was now silver skinned. That’s the way he looked, anyway. He was stained with blood. A lot of it. But his skin, his face, it was almost glowing, transparent.
All of it was horrible. My sobbing mother, clutching at her hair, not seeing me, or anything at this point. The bloody knife, tossed carelessly away, close to a pair of Molly’s discarded ballet flats.
It was all bad.
But it was the eyes. His eyes. Always full of life, a smile, crinkling the skin at the sides. Lit up with some awful joke that we couldn’t help but laugh at. Not at the joke, but him, laughing at his own terrible jokes. Every time.
He wasn’t laughing now.
He wasn’t anything.
The eyes were glassy, staring off into some non-existent distance, drained of whatever made him him. They were staring at me. And I was locked into their stare. At the horror they would have seen in their last moments.
I snapped myself out of it and forced myself to focus on Jacob.
I flinched.
Not because of the emptiness of his stare. But because of how full it was. Of emotions I’d refused to let myself admit that I had and hope that he did.
The truth of my past, ugly, decomposed and rotten, somehow leeched into the present and forced the truth between us.
There were no words of admission because we were both smart enough to understand what was happening. We were surrendering, to each other. To something outside each other.
“I’ll never provide for you, give you a home, look after you,” he said finally.
“I’ve provided for myself,” I replied. “All the material things, if that’s what you mean.” I glanced around at the crisp and cold living room, illuminated in the lamp’s glow. “And if you think this is a home, then you’ve been in your warehouse too long,” I commented dryly.
He didn’t answer.
Didn’t move closer to me.
He didn’t need to. He was already inside me, poisoning my veins.
“Does my success threaten you?” I asked after a long silence.
I already knew the answer, so I didn’t know why I feared the response.
“Fuck no,” he said, voice gravelly and foreign. “I’m not threatened by much, Boots. And that short list does not contain anything to do with your success. Dollars and cents mean shit to me. You mean everything. You’re not made up of the money you make. And that’s not who I’ve fallen in love with.”
I froze. “You love me?”
He moved now.
It was the first time he’d touched me gently. His palm spanning my hip in that feather touch. “If there’s anything left inside of me that’s able to love, then yeah,” he murmured. “Whatever else there is, is yours too. I don’t have much to give, especially to the woman who has everything, but I promise I’m not here to take anything.”
“Yes, you are,” I whispered. “You’re here to take it all. All that matters, anyway. And if you didn’t take it, I’d give it to you freely.”
I forced myself into the daylight, the stark truth of it, with my bruises from the beating. I was fundamentally changed.
Not by the violence of the assault.
But the violence of the love that Jacob and I had.
It terrified me.
Molly’s eyes moved and I already knew who she was focusing on before she addressed him.
“Thank the Lord, Rambo, you’re here. You can talk Charlotte out of this insanity.”
“It’s not insanity and no one is talking me out of it,” I said, voice sharp.
Molly put her hands on her hips, eyes still on Jacob as he approached me, his eyes running over my body and attire and injuries. His gaze lingered for a long time on my face.
I ached for him to touch me.
He didn’t.
“She thinks she’s going into work, please tell her that’s not happening. Use your Jedi mind magic or whatever,” Molly demanded.
“She doesn’t think she’s going anywhere,” I said instead of letting Jacob answer, though I doubted he expected me to stay silent. “She can speak for herself and she has a company to run. Jacob has no say in it, nor does he have any power over me to change my mind.”
That was a blatant lie. Jacob had more power over me than I had over myself.
“Jacob?” Molly said, her voice expectant, as if she expected him to perform some kind of mind control over me right in front of her.
Which was exactly what he was doing, in a sense.
Just not in the way Molly wanted.
Or I wanted.
I wasn’t happy or relieved after last night’s admission. Love was not a relief. Not Jacob’s.
Jacob’s eyes had never moved from me.
“I’ll call Ralph to get the car,” he said, giving me one more meaningful look before striding off to likely call Ralph.
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Molly hissed, throwing her hands up. She glared from Jacob’s back to me.
It’s the first time I’d heard real fury in her voice.
“Someone is trying to kill you. Someone has beaten you up for a business deal. It’s not worth your life.” Her voice broke at the end. And so did a little piece of me.
I didn’t let it show.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said, voice ice. “Business is worth my life. And no one will take it from me.”
With every ounce of strength I had, I turned from my sister and strode to the elevator.
The response to my condition was not mild.
Not that I’d expected it to be.
Everyone considered me to be made of stone, and I’d done a good job of living up to that reputation over the past decade. Seeing cracks in the façade was notable, and no doubt a source of satisfaction for a lot of people.
Ralph was the first.
I assumed Jacob had warned him, because his body had been tense as he waited outside the car before he got a good glimpse of me.
When I left the building and his eyes took me in, he flinched. Physically flinched.
I kept my face blank and tried to keep my gait smooth and swift. It was hard to do with my injuries combining with six-inch heels, and the residual pain of being so cruel to Molly, but I did it.
“Ralph,” I greeted.
His eyes shimmered and it hit me, that obvious emotion on the man’s face. I’d expected something of a reaction, I’d seen how he was on the night of my first attack, I knew he cared about me—for whatever reason I was unsure—and as a good, old fashioned man, he abhorred violence against women.
But I didn’t expect this, to see the tears well up in his weathered eyes. The man had seen horror. I knew that. I’d read his
files. He’d been embroiled in wars, deaths, brutality. Nor was he a saint, war made sinners of everyone. But he had come back and managed to turn himself into a warm, human being. Though there was a familiarity with violence that I expected him to have here. A jaded air.
Yet he was physically fighting tears at seeing my injuries—relatively minor compared to what I knew he’d seen.
I braced for the emotional reaction the same way I’d braced for another hit yesterday.
But none came.
He cleared his throat.
Blinked away the wetness in his eyes.
“Morning, Ms. Crofton,” he said, voice thick.
He held the door open for me, Jacob took my elbow to help me get in.
I didn’t want his help.
But I needed it.
I also needed his touch.
What I needed most of all was revenge.
Which was what I worked tirelessly at on the drive to the office. Jacob and I didn’t speak. Last night pulsated between us, but there was no change in the way we interacted. He was silent, watching me, eyes back to cold and empty. I was grateful for it.
Vaughn’s reaction was not as controlled as Ralph’s.
“Oh my god,” he whispered upon seeing me sitting at my desk, dropping the coffee he had been holding.
It hit the floor soundlessly, liquid spilling all over the carpet.
He didn’t even look down, nor did he try to dodge the liquid that would stain his suede Manolos.
It was safe to say Vaughn was shocked when he didn’t even care about the fate of the shoes.
“We both know God didn’t do this,” I replied mildly, glancing back down to my laptop, hoping for no dramatics.
But this was Vaughn.
He rushed over to me, rounding my desk. “Char,” he whispered.
I sighed and turned to regard him. I guessed it was too much to ask for him to react to my injuries with indifference and not some kind of emotion. He cared about me, and normal human beings had intense reactions to people they cared about being hurt.