“You could have kept quiet,” Sofia murmured to her mother as Roman and Henry rallied the troops over their phones. “You could have let him die and kept your involvement secret.”
The queen, always such a dominating presence, appeared small and uncertain. Still, a lifetime of being rejected by her made the next words almost impossible to get out. “You don’t have to talk to an empty bedroom.”
Her mother looked at her with the tiniest quiver of hope. “Can I be forgiven for my mistakes?”
Sofia had every right to disdain and condemn. It’s what the queen had given her her entire life. It’s what the queen received her whole life from the man she loved.
“If you can forgive me for mine,” Sofia said as she gripped her mother’s hands and helped her stand with her. “When I have him back, we will talk.”
With a tremulous yet tender smile, her mother nodded.
When she said the next words to her mother, they sang inside her with hope. “We still have time to be different.”
September 28
Part Three
The gun prodded Aish in his kidney again, just above where his hands were bound behind his back, and he groaned around the cloth shoved into his mouth and secured with duct tape. He didn’t know how John had gotten him down into the tunnel system that ran below the Monte, but he felt like John had dragged him over every stair and stone and stalagmite before he’d slapped him awake. They’d left behind the cut-stone archways, endless rows of dusty wine bottles, and ancient iron gates signaling some hope of civilization, and not even the jab of that fucking gun could keep Aish moving forward into what looked like an endless black hole.
They were beneath acres of sunlit vineyard rows Aish had gotten to know intimately over the last month. But down here, the Monte was hostile, hard and careless stone. The black was immense. The headlamp John wore cut through the darkness about as effectively as a butter knife through concrete. Aish was a kid who’d grown up in the sun, so it made sense how uncomfortable he was in this dark underground tunnel. He held on to “uncomfortable” because it was better than the utter fucking panic he was fighting off with every step into this cold and alien world, with his cold and alien best friend poking a gun into his back.
John jabbed again, but this time with a chuckle. “I’ve been shoving you where I want you to go your entire life. You think now, when I’m holding a gun, you’re going to stop following my orders?” It was the first thing he’d said to him beyond grunted single words; they were deep enough in the earth that John wasn’t worried about their voices seeping up through someone’s basement. “Don’t make me use it. I’ll just shoot off whatever gets you walking again.”
That voice as familiar as his own saying surreal things in this dead place—Aish swung around to see him, to make what was happening real.
He was instantly blinded. John chuckled again.
“Still can’t believe it, right, buddy? What a fucking idiot you were? Get a good look.” Keeping the gun aimed on Aish, John slipped the headlamp off his head and pointed it at his face.
Aish blinked to clear the spots from his eyes and then focused on the altered face of a person he’d trusted like a brother.
John had never had a problem getting laid with his classic square jaw, straight nose, thick blond hair, and bright blue eyes. The plastic surgeon had made him a regular face in the crowd, made his nose broader and built bulk around his cheekbones. The shorn-close brown hair hid John’s thick waves. John had gone from an All-American prepster to a Jersey dockworker.
Those rich blue eyes, though, those eyes looking back at Aish with so much smug satisfaction, they were the same.
“He did good, right?” John said, grinning. The surgeon had even put a chip in his gleaming smile. “Found him through a sob story from one of the girls waiting for you backstage—she told me about his oopsies with underage patients. Got him to do the work for free and burn my records.”
John put the headlamp back on but tilted it up so it cast a residual light on their faces and then motioned with the gun. “Go.”
Aish grunted, gave an emphatic jut with his jaw.
John smiled again. “Got something you want to say? Cool, cool. No one can hear you.”
He ripped the duct tape off along with a decent amount of hair. Aish shoved out the disgusting rag and then bent over, gagged, spit on the ground.
“You’ve been roofie-ing me since we were kids,” he croaked, not a question as he focused on not puking. His body ached, his head pounded. During the walk, he’d been trying not to throw up and choke himself. Aish recognized this particular hangover. When he’d get embarrassingly drunk on just a couple of drinks, or get a bout of food poisoning or stomach flu when everyone else was fine, he thought it was the dues he paid for his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle.
He’d felt this way twice since John “died.” Once at the festival with the gin maker and the hidden camera. Once when he’d hoped to calm his nerves with a drive through the Spanish mountains.
He’d been such a fucking idiot.
“Why?” Aish demanded as he straightened, taking big breaths through his mouth, his bent back shoulders screaming.
John smiled like a papa proud of Aish for figuring it out. “It was my favorite way to put you on ice. Aish Salinger, the guy everyone loved, slurring and puking like an asshole. Manon’s going to tell everyone she saw you drunk, crying, stumbling down to the cellar.” John was so fucking happy. “I asked you to do one thing. I set it all up for you.
“All you had to do was tell everyone that I stole those songs.”
Aish looked at him sharply. In the text John had sent him that horrible morning, the text Aish had found after Devonte pounded on his door, he’d asked Aish to tell the world. Begged to let him correct his mistake and take the blame away from Aish. Steamrolled with guilt, Aish had kept the message for a month, then deleted it.
He’d been the asshole trying to preserve his best friend’s legacy.
“And you, you stupid fuck, you couldn’t even get that right.” John shook his head then motioned with his gun.
Aish lifted his chin.
John smiled wider. “Turn around. Keep walking. You stop again and I’m shooting off pieces. I’ll start with those famous, guitar-strumming fingers.”
Aish grimaced, but turned, walked. Even with his back to a gun, it was easier than facing John’s smug smile and his effortless words of violence.
John straightened his headlamp and cast it into the impenetrable blackness in front of Aish.
He’d go slow. He’d buy time. Someone had to notice he was missing by now. Someone had to be looking for him. Sofia knew these tunnels.
Would she care to look?
“If you’d done the only thing I’d asked you to do, we wouldn’t be here.” John’s voice bounced around him. “You tell everyone that I did the stealing, that I felt so guilty I killed myself...how many bands are going to sue us when we’ve got a sob story like that? The public feels sorry for us, the label pays a couple of little settlements, and our slate is wiped clean.
“But you had to be a pussy. You wouldn’t spill it when I started the rumor that you were involved with my death, you didn’t tell that guy at the festival. That’s what I paid for him to get on tape.” John’s audible frustration had Aish hyperaware of the gun. “If I couldn’t get you to open your mouth, we were going to get big-time sued, or worse, the label was gonna drop us, and then what? I can’t have the John Hamilton estate coffers getting lean.”
Aish moved to spin around, but he was sore, drugged, lumbering and John punched him, hard and sharp, in the kidney.
“Fuck!” Aish shouted, almost going to his knees, before stabilizing himself. Body vibrating with pain, he groaned, “That’s what this is about?”
John’s parents, a COO for a small LA company and a middle school teacher, had been surpri
sed when they were told his fortune would go into an estate that would benefit a variety of charities. Grief-stricken and financially comfortable, they hadn’t fought it or sought more information. Aish, too, hadn’t thought about where the royalties from their songs—all credited to Hamilton/Salinger and split fifty-fifty—would go. No one had followed up to investigate who the executor was. Or whether any of those charities had seen a dime.
“This whole fucking thing is about money,” Aish spat.
John grabbed him by his hair and breathed stale breath against his face.
“You’re such a spoiled little shit,” John said, shaking him, and the pull on his hair had tears coming to Aish’s eyes. “It’s not about money. It’s about millions. It’s about keeping my investment in the glorious Aish Salinger. I’ve enjoyed the ride on your coattails and you’re not going to take that from me just because I stole a couple of songs.”
The whole simple, senseless explanation echoed off the kingdom’s primordial stone.
He shoved Aish forward.
Aish couldn’t run, couldn’t fight back. All he could do was keep him talking.
Slow him down. Someone will come. Sofia will come. If he died down here, the chance to make things right for Sofia died, too. Her reputation, her winery, and her efforts to save her kingdom would wither right along with his corpse.
He worked hard to calm his breathing. “So...you fake a suicide, keep me making music, and live off the royalties on the beach in Cabo?”
John huffed. “Something like that.”
“How long have you hated me, John?”
That got a pleased chuckle out of him.
“For a real long time, Aish. A real long time.”
Aish thought of the girls who asked John to vouch for them and the smaller trophies John would put next to Aish’s big ones and the backup vocals and the bass playing.
And then he thought of Sofia and any guilt evaporated.
“What are you doing here?”
Their words had taken on a hollow quality, losing their echo, and Aish saw, ahead of them, the tunnel widening.
“I needed to keep an eye on my boy, didn’t I?” John answered. “Make sure you didn’t fuck it all up and turn the public against us? I told those old guys I could help them out. But then I hear you and Sofia in the cellar, the fighting, the fucking, I forgot how hot it was listening to you two, and she mentions the evidence she had. Finally, after she almost ruined us, that royal bitch was going to be the answer to my prayers.”
Pure, throbbing rage blocked out the ache in his shoulders, sent feeling back into his bound hands. But he couldn’t fight, and he couldn’t run, so all he could do was verify one last awful truth.
“She almost died from her miscarriage,” he said through his clenched jaw.
“Huh,” John said. “She didn’t tell me she was dying.” Not even an attempt to deny it. “Wouldn’t have made any difference. The road was calling, man.”
The tunnel opened up and they were walking into a massive cavern. It would have been magnificent, something to behold, if John’s headlamp wasn’t focused on the huge pond in the middle of it. He nudged Aish forward with a hard jab of the gun when Aish hesitated, finally understanding. Their footsteps struck hollowly against the stone, like the black pool sucked up all the sound and light and life that came near it.
When they were at its edge, John came up beside him, the headlamp tilted up from his face and the gun pointed at Aish’s side.
“Remember when Sofia told us about this?” he said, looking into the pool. “The source of the river. You wanted to see her kingdom so bad. Now you’re going to be, like, fertilizing it.”
John looked at him, now a stranger inside and out.
“I never wanted it to end this way,” John murmured, motioning Aish toward the pool with the gun. “But you can’t give away our money.”
Aish had to stall. He needed to buy more time. And he was getting really fucking annoyed at the lazy way John was trying to kill him.
“What, you think I’m just going to get in?”
John rolled his eyes and smiled. “Yeah.”
Because wasn’t that what Aish had done his whole life? How many hallways and pathways and stadium tunnels had he followed John down, letting his “friend” hold doors for him and walking through, so assured of his own perfection and graced life that he never stopped to look where he was going? Of course John thought he could lead Aish to his death.
Of course he thought he could force Aish to abandon Sofia once again.
Like he’d summoned her with his desire to finally put his foot down, he heard the most glorious and terrifying yell in the world behind him: “Aish, no!”
“No,” he groaned back because, fuck, he never thought it would actually be her saving him, her literal vulnerable self, and Jesus Christ he hoped her brother and that behemoth were with her because all he could do as John started to whirl around was slam his shoulders into the smaller man.
“You pathetic fuck,” he got out, rearing back to slam into him again, hoping to make him drop the gun, hoping to send him into the pond, hoping to make him shoot a hole a foot wide into Aish, anything other than letting John hurt his girl.
John’s look of shock and his shaky hold on the gun gave Aish a second of triumph.
Just one second.
John steadied himself and the end of the gun barrel suddenly looked wider and blacker than the pool.
Thank God Aish could swim like a fish.
He turned and dove into the water.
A bullet winged near him, almost meaningless against the arctic cold and ancient dark that swallowed him, an electrocution of pain to his aching body. He kicked hard with his hands behind his back, trying to stay near the surface, trying to keep John’s gun aimed on him and away from Sofia. But he could feel the pull, the whirlpool trying to sacrifice him to the river. With his hands tied, his battered body was not cooperating in the freezing water.
And soon, too soon, he had to breathe.
He tried to mermaid up to grab a sip of air. But he couldn’t get his head back above the surface.
He could see lights bouncing above him as an invisible force tried to drag him down.
Maybe those ghosts Sofia talked about were real.
Maybe he’d join them and one day get to tell her that he was sorry. That he loved her. That, in a happy and blessed life he hadn’t earned or deserved, she was the happiest and most blessed thing that had happened to him.
That he’d never felt more worthy than when he was striving to be perfect for her.
Feeling the last of his breath burn up in his body, Aish closed his eyes and began to sink.
The water moved beside him and slim arms surrounded him. Those hermetic monks were welcoming him to their ranks.
But instead of going down, Aish felt his body being lifted up. His head broke the surface and then he was given a slap to the back of his head.
“Respira, idiota,” said the most lovely voice he’d ever heard. “Keep...treading.”
Aish was never going to be manipulated again. He was going to stand on his own two feet and bear the weight of his own decisions. But in this, for this woman who showed him how to carry a kingdom on her shoulders, he would do what she said.
He opened his mouth and breathed deep, moved his legs to help her fight the whirlpool’s claim on them.
His coughing spasms made him slip through her hold before she clenched him again.
“Román,” he heard her call, saying her brother’s name in the Spanish way, and although he felt like he was kicking through quicksand, he kicked harder to soothe the panic in her voice. They were fine, he wanted to tell her. They were together.
Everything was going to be fine.
Seconds or minutes later, a bright light shone in his face as hands hooked under his armpit
s. “I got him,” Sofia’s brother grunted, and Aish sucked in with pain as he was dragged over the sharp rim of the pool and every muscle in his body howled. That didn’t stop him from struggling to rise once solid stone was beneath him. “Get her out, gotta get her out, gotta...”
Before he could even struggle to sitting, a dripping Sofia was kneeling next to him on the stone. “Roll over,” she said, her teeth chattering. “I’ll free your hands.”
When he rolled over, he realized why he could see her dripping and chattering and wide-eyed beautiful. Glow sticks had been snapped and scattered around them. John was on his stomach, knocked out, his hands bound behind him. Roman was kneeling and rooting through a backpack.
Aish felt the bind give behind him. His shoulder screamed as he rolled to his back, brought his arms forward, grabbed Sofia’s face in his big hands.
“I’m sorry. I love you. I need you. Nothing’s brighter than you.” He was shaking so hard he was afraid she couldn’t understand him.
But her wide, liquid eyes, her trembling smile as she hovered over him, told him that she did. She grabbed his wrists as she tried to control her own shaking.
Roman dropped a Mylar emergency blanket over her shoulders. “Okay, lovebirds, let’s get you two warmed up.”
Aish wanted to fight her brother when he pulled Sofia’s hands down and swaddled her in the blanket. But he couldn’t get the words out, and then Roman was pushing Aish up to sitting, wrapping him in his own blanket, rubbing his chest and back through the sleek material, and Aish thought how nice it was to have a big brother. He rested his head on Roman’s shoulder. He loved the Esperanza family.
He heard a sweet sound, opened his eyes, saw Sofia’s tooth-bitten grin. He realized he might have said that out loud.
Her brother grumped but patted his head. “We love you, too. I think.” Roman raised a walkie-talkie to his mouth. “Now let’s get outta here.”
I think. Aish kept his eyes on Sofia as exhaustion weighed his lids. He wasn’t going to be disappointed that Sofia hadn’t said it back. She didn’t have to love him. She didn’t owe him anything. Just as soon as he took a little nap, he’d make sure she knew that.
Hate Crush (Filthy Rich) Page 29