by Anne Malcom
“I used to think about what it would be like to jump,” I said, regarding the skyline to avoid the truth of what this victory meant.
Jacob’s heat kissed my back, but he didn’t touch me.
“I would be fascinated with the feeling, the aftermath of such a fall,” I continued. “On what it would be like to die. For it all to be over.” I steeled myself and turned. “And it is. Over.”
The words echoed through the office.
Jacob didn’t react.
“The threat’s been eliminated,” he agreed, voice flat, empty, like always.
I wished there was something more behind it. Something more behind his cold eyes. Something to hold onto.
There wasn’t.
Or maybe there was, and I was making sure I didn’t see it.
I couldn’t trust my own eyes when it came to Jacob. I couldn’t trust my own mind. Which was why I had to walk away.
“Your job is done,” I replied.
His jaw ticked. “With you, Boots, my job is never done.”
The jaw tick. The words. They hit me in that space reserved for my heart. I sucked in an unsteady and agonizing breath. “It needs to be. We need to be. You know this much the same as I do. There’s nothing left for you here. I have—” I cut myself off abruptly. I had nothing but an empty apartment and a fractured soul. I straightened my spine. “I have a job to do. Businesses to run.”
He wouldn’t stop staring. Stop picking apart the bits of me that he owned with his eyes. “There’s more to life than business, Boots.”
I shook my head. “No, life is always business. And that’s the only way I can live mine. My uncle was right. Something with me is...off. I don’t have the capacity for anything more. If I did, that’s been buried, and the gravestone reads Molly Crofton. I don’t want to have to pretend otherwise. I’m better as I was before.”
“Empty?” he pushed.
I nodded once.
He didn’t speak. Didn’t try to change my mind. To fight for me. The strongest, most violent man I’d ever encountered was refusing to fight, for me. He was surrendering after a handful of my cold and empty lies.
Or truths that I wished were lies.
He nodded once. The movement was violent.
My heart fell at our feet. Bleeding. Rotten.
He turned around and left it where it fell.
He didn’t look back.
After Jacob left, I decided it was time to keep a promise.
The promise had me traveling to a quiet street, walking inside a nondescript brownstone and inside one of the best high-security mental facilities in the city, if not the country.
My uncle had arranged it once he’d gotten a top tier law firm to cover her case when she was charged with my father’s murder.
The plea of insanity was a foregone conclusion, and it took a judge merely one glimpse at the shell that consisted of my mother to legally announce her not guilty by way of insanity.
My uncle’s power and influence had her put here.
When money didn’t let you get away with murder, it put you in a pretty cage.
But, facing my mother after more than a decade, it became apparent that her cage was not a brownstone in Manhattan, and it was not pretty.
“She doesn’t do much more than this these days, I’m afraid,” the nurse with the soft eyes and kind smile informed me.
My hard eyes focused on the skeletal frame sitting upright in an armchair facing the window.
The nurse moved forward to fuss with the pillows and brush a frizzy strand away from my mother’s face. “She seems to like sitting by the window,” she said, smiling wider at my mother’s unseeing eyes. She focused on me. “I’m glad you’re visiting. I was so sorry to hear about your sister.”
Her words seemed genuine and her eyes watery.
“You knew her? Molly?” I asked. Her name was broken glass against my throat.
The nurse—Judy—wiped her eye. “Of course. Everyone here knows and loves...I’m sorry, loved, your sister. She was—”
“Thank you,” I interrupted, unable to take her kind sincerity for another second. “I’ll let you know if I need anything.”
Judy blinked rapidly, likely surprised that someone with Molly’s eyes and bone structure didn’t have an ounce of her soul.
But she was a professional, and she nodded once and left the room.
I moved toward the chair, more afraid of the frail woman sitting in it than I was of the mass murderer I’d faced off with less than two hours ago.
We look at those people, you know, those insane people. The ones staggering around the East Village, muttering to themselves, or at least, muttering to people that only they can see. The people begging for change, cowering in doorways, dressed in rags, sometimes resorting to violence to get fed, or to get their fix. We dismiss them, more often than not. I say we, because it was in my practice to actively dismiss them, largely because of my past.
The past sitting in this chair, looking out the window at a well-tended rose garden, likely not seeing a flower.
Those people were a flesh and blood personification of everything that I feared. Of everything I was trying to escape.
Almost everyone thought of those people only in that moment. Where they passed them shouting at the air, or digging through trash cans. They are defined by who they are at that moment. We alienate them, imagining that they are like that because we tell ourselves they were always like that. When in reality, they weren’t. Once upon a time, they were whatever passes for normal. They had a family, a life, drank coffee in the mornings, read the paper, muttered to other people about mundane things, who took the trash out—that was before trash became their livelihood.
Maybe we ignored them because, on some level, we knew we were only one failed marriage, lost job, injury, death, away from becoming them. One triggering moment to turn us into...them.
We didn’t imagine crazy people having families. We didn’t imagine villains having families either. I wondered about the dead man in the alley. In my apartment. Who they left behind.
Whenever we watched action movies where the hero cut through armies of people and called it a victory, Molly would focus not on the triumph of good over evil, but those faceless villains.
“What about their families?” She’d point at the TV. “That’s a child that’s lost a father, a woman that’s lost a husband, a mother that’s lost a son. Who knows if they were even really bad. Maybe it was a job to pay the bills, feed the children?”
That was Molly, always looking further. To her, the man begging for change was more than just that person in that second. She wanted to know who he was before, see beneath the surface of what he was now. Which was why she had worked at a homeless shelter whenever she had the time. Why she was the most beloved employee, and, why, when having dinner with me, she’d call them by their first name, talk about their lives, their experiences, their idiosyncrasies. Treat them like they were humans. Her friends.
She always saw the human underneath.
Which was why she had the reaction she did to Jacob. Didn’t shy away from him as was human instinct.
It kind of irked me in a way I couldn’t exactly understand. I thought we shared something, a connection that couldn’t be described as wholly natural, something more. Yet I failed to comprehend who he was beyond those wolf eyes, before the night in the alley. I failed to remember that once he used to be a boy that skinned his knees and had a mother that would kiss them better. That he was human before the wolf took over.
What was that saying? Even monsters had homes and mothers.
I felt some of it when I answered his phone, heard his sister, heard the resemblance of my own loving, albeit crazy twin. It began to click just then. I figured out that he didn’t just credit his origins to clawing his way out of the dirt. That he came from people, family.
A family that still called. A sister that laughed with a stranger, had children. A husband.
Jacob had something left
of his past, even if his future was a wasteland.
But me, my past was nothing but a foreign woman, whose illness stole her beauty, her soul and my father.
I didn’t speak.
Because it was obvious she couldn’t hear me. Her eyes were glassy, bloodshot, staring at nothing. Her mouth, thin and pale, was open and slack, a thin stream of saliva trailing down her chin.
She was nothing.
I stared at her a long time, tried to call up some affection for her.
None came.
So I turned around and walked out, avoiding Judy’s kind eyes as I walked out.
Walking toward the car, I sent a message to a number that I’d acquired when it became apparent that morals were absent at the top.
The text said nothing, but me sending it instructed the right people to ensure that Judy would find my mother’s body tomorrow morning, having died of natural causes in the early hours of the night.
It would never trace to me.
I felt nothing ordering the murder of my mother.
“Home, Ms. Crofton?” Ralph asked, holding the door open, his words more of a suggestion than a question.
“Home, yes,” I agreed. “The office.”
I didn’t meet his eyes and got in the car.
21
I worked for eight more hours. Long after the twinkling lights of the city snatched away the sunshine, and long after everyone abandoned the offices.
Vaughn left too. I barely looked up to say goodbye.
Because I was a coward.
I was avoiding his gaze, the sympathy, the kindness, the truth.
I was avoiding my empty apartment and the silence that awaited me.
But there was only so long you could avoid something. I needed to force myself into the discomfort of what my life would be like. So that’s what I did. Made sure the distance between Ralph and me was further than ever, even shutting the portion between us so I didn’t have the company of his silence. The entire ride, I focused on the mountain of work that came with my recent acquisitions. I set up meetings, performance reviews, overlooked press releases, RSVP’d to the appropriate events. Charlotte Crofton would not have a spare second in the foreseeable future.
Apart from the long seconds on the elevator ride up, I’d never felt more alone in my life as I did hurtling up to my beautiful, multimillion-dollar apartment.
My beautiful cage.
I stepped out of the elevator silently. My heels echoed on my floor. Everything I did was on autopilot.
Putting my coat in the closet. Placing my purse on the side table. Walking to the kitchen taunted by the emptiness of the apartment.
When I made it there, it was clear the apartment was anything but empty.
I didn’t even stutter my step when I caught Vaughn sitting at the kitchen island. Nor when I spotted the gun resting on the counter with his hand placed casually on it. The barrel was angled toward me.
His eyes met mine.
The truth hit me half a second later.
“You’re much more ambitious than I thought,” I said by greeting, opening the refrigerator to retrieve wine and two glasses.
A bottle of cheap pink fizz.
An apt last meal.
My hands were still as I poured the liquid. My heartbeat was even, though I suspected I was minutes from death.
Jacob wouldn’t save me from this one, I knew that with brutal clarity. He was not one to come and fight for a damned relationship. Or a damned soul.
Vaughn took the glass from me in the hand that wasn’t holding the gun.
“I’m much more everything than you thought,” Vaughn replied, spite saturating his tone and his expression.
“Or much less,” I murmured, taking a sip.
His eyes flared with a foreign fury that had always lurked behind the faux kindness I’d thought was genuine for so long.
I wanted to be surprised at the betrayal. But I was so jaded from the world it didn’t shock or surprise me. It hurt me, though. After Molly, I had been so sure that my ability to feel pain—whatever was left of it—was laying in my office where I said goodbye to Jacob.
Even the strongest of us were shown new ways the world could hurt us. Pain was the only thing on this earth that was infinite.
“You could’ve just taken the deal,” Vaughn hissed, clenching onto the gun. “Then I wouldn’t have had to do any of it.”
I raised my brow and sipped slowly. “You had to do it?” I asked, placing the glass on the counter but holding onto the stem. “Ah, we’re both much too intelligent to believe that your hand was forced to have me attacked, have my sister murdered, and frame it all on the obvious villain. You did it because you’re greedy.”
That flare increased and his hand tightened on the gun. But he wasn’t going to use it yet. No, Vaughn was a drama queen and he wanted the theatre of a violent ending, after he told me all about how he’d done it. How much smarter he was than me.
He may have worn heels and eyeliner, but he was showing me he was just another man looking to crush me.
It hurt this time because he was the one—or one of the two—people left in this world who I thought I could trust.
Trust and love were two things wholly fatal to everyone.
“Greedy?” he screamed, leaning forward, wine sloshing onto my counter. “You’re calling me greedy, the woman with billions of dollars, thousands of employees, dozens of homes and who is never satisfied?”
I smiled. It was the first time I’d done so since Molly died. “That’s all true. But it doesn’t come from greed. It comes from a need for control. And everything I’ve acquired, I did it with my own blood, not by spilling the blood of innocents.” I paused. “I can understand how you could do this to me, but to Molly?” My voice cracked at the end. Only slightly, a hairline fracture.
Something moved on his face. Something human.
Grief.
Pain.
Ah, so not all of it had been a farce. Did that make it better or worse?
“I didn’t want to hurt her,” he said. “But it was you who taught me that once you committed to something, you never stop until you reach your goal.”
I took another sip. “So I only have myself to blame for all of this, I assume?” I asked dryly.
He clenched the gun tighter. “No. You know about my past. I know about yours. We’re both broken. In ways that make it impossible for us to be human. Don’t stand from across the room and try and make me feel bad for putting myself first.”
“You should get some kind of award for your performance,” I said, struggling to maintain the ice in my voice. In the face of my sister’s death and throughout her funeral, I’d managed not even a hitch in my tone. I stared down the man I thought responsible. I’d just said goodbye to the first and last person I’d ever love. But in face of what Vaughn had done, I was becoming unraveled.
Maybe because death didn’t have an affiliation, an affection, a loyalty to anyone. Death wasn’t a betrayal, it wasn’t a decisive action on the part of the person it happened to. Molly didn’t die because she didn’t love me, or because she wanted to hurt me.
But Vaughn had played this game, he had become someone to me, and he chose to do this. It hurt worse than losing someone.
“My award was meant to be my position at the head of one of the top security firms in the world,” he snapped. “Not testing lipsticks and planning fucking eyeshadow launches.”
I pursed my lips, the bitterness in his tone decades old. Rotten. I cursed myself for being blind to it. “Was it always the plan? From the start?”
His grimace turned into something softer, something more recognizable. Which hurt more, to see how easy he could transition between the two, changing faces. “No, Char,” he said, voice more familiar. “I cared about you. You are one of the only people I have ever cared about.” His eyes shimmered and the grip on the gun slackened for a second, his resolve wavering. In a split second, the monster inside of him took over and all softness, a
ll humanity disappeared.
“But people like you and me don’t let relationships get in the way of what we want,” he continued. “We’re not right, after what happened to us. We’re missing something. You fed what you were missing with your power. I wanted to be more than your sidekick. I needed my own power.”
“I’m nothing like you,” I whispered. “If you wanted it so bad, I would’ve given it to you. All of it. None of it was worth what you took from me.”
He sipped his wine, eyes shimmering, as if he could taste the memories of Molly inside it. “But it wouldn’t work that way, if you gave it to me,” he said. “You know that better than anyone. I had to work for it. Take it. Like you did.”
“I didn’t take anything,” I hissed. “I made it. I didn’t try to assassinate anyone. I didn’t get anyone beaten up. I didn’t kill—” I cut myself off abruptly, the words catching in my throat as the reality of it all sank in.
I knew the reality. I felt the wind whistling through the empty part of me every day, every moment she was gone I was a little less...everything.
It was one thing to lose a sister to an enemy. It was quite another to lose it to someone I considered a friend.
“You’ve been playing a long game,” I sighed.
“I didn’t plan it,” he returned. “Not at the beginning.” He lifted the gun, contemplating it. “I liked you. You were someone that believed in me, gave me opportunities. I wanted us to continue to take over the world together. But then you had to go and get morals. You. The ice queen. They say heavy is the head that wears the crown, but I don’t think it’s the crown that’s heavy, it’s the way you wear it. And you had honesty and ethics too high on your shoulders. Power is not gained honestly. Or without betrayal. You know that better than anyone. You also know about needing to get as far away from your past as possible. To build your ivory tower to get away from the skeletons of your past. I merely did that by creating some more skeletons of my own.”
It was there that I lost it. In his cold and contemplative assessment of the actions that took my sister from me. Like power was something that was important enough to snatch away life.