by Myles, Eden
“Tying me down in bed and rogering me until you pass out does not a relationship make, Wolf.”
The silence that followed my statement was deafening. Finally, his face absolutely unreadable, Wolf said in a quiet voice, “Do you want me to let you go?”
“You can’t fire me. I own this company.”
“I can fire you as my courtesan. I can terminate our arrangement.”
“Yes, please, sir,” I said as sarcastically as possible and crossed my arms.
He looked at me, then, and his voice had a lilt to it that I had never heard before, the kind of old, haggard hurt I usually only heard in my dad’s voice when he talked about my mom. “You can leave now.”
I had exercised my own free will. I’d left his office. I’d left his employ as his courtesan. And for good fucking reasons. Thanks to Wolf, Jerrel had refused to sign the divorce papers and had reinstated the clause. He’d also threatened to get Child Protection Services on my ass and to have me cited by the courts as an unfit mother because of the nature of the magazine I published. I knew all of this was about Wolf and nothing else. I immediately called Jerrel at home, and sure enough, within seconds he said, “That guy you’re fucking is a pervert and a psychopath, Rache, and I will not have my daughter being raised by him.”
“What would you know about raising a daughter?” I countered.
“I had him checked out, Rache,” Jerrel said, diverting the conversation away from the one place where he could hold no ground with me. “Do you know Wolfgang Beck is part of some sleazy sex club for rich fucks who like to tie women up and beat the shit out of them?”
“And that girl you’re fucking is eighteen years old, Jerrel. Only five years older than Asia. So do not play this game with me!”
We’d hung up on each other almost simultaneously. That was a week ago.
Eventually, the lawyers called me back. Jerrel was willing to negotiate down to one week a month, but he wanted all the holidays with Asia. He knew how important it was that my dad spend Christmas with Asia. Christmas Eve was my mom’s birthday, his time to tell my daughter all about her grandmother who had passed away before she was born. But Jerrel played a hard game. He didn’t just want to hurt me, he wanted to hurt my dad just to win this pissing contest of ours. As a result, I was spending this Christmas without Asia.
Malcolm showed up at the café to collect Devon, and I watched with gnawing jealousy as the two men kissed like randy newlyweds, to the chagrin of some of the older patrons. Evelyn had told me they’d been together almost a decade, that Devon planned to ask Malcolm to marry him on Christmas Eve now that New York had same-sex marriage laws, and I found myself hating them a little bit more. I didn’t know a single traditional couple who had been together that long.
Our little get-together broke up after that, which was just as well. The happy, happy Christmas music was starting to grate on my last nerve. As I started out into the icy streets, wrapped in my wool coat and scarf, hoping to catch a cab back to the office that didn’t look like it had been used for a major drug transaction, and feeling like the most miserable Ebenezer on earth, I felt a presence close in on me.
“I’m sorry Wolf’s behavior disappointed you,” Evelyn said, standing at the curb with me. She set her hand on her belly. She looked like a Russian princess in a novel in her long wrap and fur-lined hat. Ian always dressed her so nicely. She also looked, quite literally, like she was going to burst if she didn’t have that baby soon. Ian Sterling’s Mercedes pulled around the corner to pick her up, and as the driver popped out and opened the door for Evelyn, she ushered me down inside the warmth of the car with her.
“It’s not that I’m disappointed, exactly. I know how he is,” I explained as I rode with her toward the office. “But he doesn’t know how vicious Jerrel can be.”
“Wolf can be pretty vicious himself,” Evelyn said. “At least, that’s what Ian has told me.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of.”
“He loves you, Rachaela.”
“Do you think so?”
“If he didn’t love you, he wouldn’t have gotten so angry with how Jerrel is using Asia to get to you.” She shifted around on the seat to accommodate her bulk.
“That’s none of Wolf’s concern,” I said bitterly. I was fine until someone drew my daughter into a squabble. Then my hackles just naturally went up. “I can take care of myself.”
“I don’t think this is about you, exactly. I think it’s the way Jerrel is treating Asia.” She put her hand on mine again. “Let Wolf be a dad, Rachaela. He never gets the chance.”
I laughed a little nervously. “Why would Wolf have any interest in being a dad?”
She looked surprised. “You don’t know about Rainer, Wolf’s son?”
I felt a dull shock. “I didn’t even know Wolf had a son.”
“Ah.” She thought about that a moment. “I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to tell. I’ll just blame Devon if it gets out,” she grinned. “When Wolf was very young, his father arranged for him to marry a German baroness ten years his senior, part of some property arrangement they had that would allow him to mine a certain region of Namibia that he didn’t have access to. They weren’t in love, but Wolf did it to please his father. Anna and Wolf had a son he was very dedicated to—Rainer—but after Wolf’s father died, they divorced and the baroness took Rainer to live with her in Germany. In time, she remarried, but she and her husband haven’t allowed Wolf to see his son in more than ten years. He must be about eighteen by now.”
“Why did she block him? Because of the Dollhouse?”
“No, this was long before that. Anna hated the fact that Wolf was using so much of his father’s money to develop the desert. Then again, she’s always felt that Wolf was beneath her station.”
“That must be hard on Wolf,” I said. “I can’t imagine what’s it’s like to be a father without his child.”
She gave me a sympathetic look and touched her belly again as we pulled up alongside my building.
I’d just gotten through the doors to the office when my receptionist Diane popped up and waved to me “Why isn’t your cell on, Rachaela! I’ve been dialing you for half an hour. So has Jerrel.”
Truthfully, I’d shut it off while I was taking lunch with Devon and Evelyn, and I’d forgotten to turn it back on. My mind had been on other things. I checked my phone. Jerrel had left seven calls so far. “Christ, what now?” I asked.
Diane gave me a stone-cold look. “It’s about your daughter, Rachaela. This morning, she ran away from Jerrel’s house in the Hamptons and no one’s seen her since.”
* * *
“This is all your fault!” I shouted at Jerrel on the phone as I paced across my office suite.
“How is this my fault, Rache?” Jerrel shouted back.
“You couldn’t keep it in your pants, right? One fucking week with your daughter, and you had to trot out the teenage whores in front of her. You had to destroy everything she respects about you.”
He didn’t say anything to that because he knew I was right.
“She fucking worshipped you, Jerrel, her daddy the celebrity. But you’re a playa and you never gave a shit what she thought. You never gave a shit about Asia, period, except as a way to get to me.” I hung up on his attempts to defend himself.
To my credit, I hadn’t panicked yet. I’d phoned everyone Asia knew—Christa, her boyfriend Jayden, even my dad in Brooklyn and the desk concierge at home, in the event Asia had turned up there. But so far, no one had seen or heard from my daughter. I’d called around to all her friends, praying that maybe she’d called one of them to come pick her up, but she wasn’t with any of them. Finally, desperate, I tried all the cab and bus companies I could find in the yellow pages. They weren’t obligated to share information with someone who wasn’t a police officer, so I had begged practically on my knees for them to tell me if my daughter had used her credit card to pay for a ticket. They’d checked and nothing had come back. Defeated, I’d finall
y called Jerrel back to rant him out.
Now I sat staring at the cell phone on my ink blotter, wanting so bad to call the police again even though Jerrel had already done that. We’d gotten the usual story from them: unless Asia went missing for twenty-four hours, they wouldn’t even begin searching for her. I wasn’t about to wait twenty-four fucking hours. I jumped to my feet, shrugged into my coat, and started for the elevators. If I had to canvas the entire state of New York to find Asia, I’d do it. But as the elevator door shushed closed, Wolf caught it.
“What didn’t you tell me your daughter is missing?” he said angrily as he tucked his scarf into his wool overcoat.
“My daughter is missing,” I said, my voice flat and dead.
“Rachaela…”
I hadn’t spoken directly to him in a week, not since our fight. “Leave me alone, Wolf!” I screamed at him now. “I don’t have time for you and the fucked up issues you have with your son!”
He looked down at me with blank poker eyes as he hit the button for the underground parking garage. Something wanted to break inside me. I wanted to scream and cry. I wanted to pound my fists against Wolf’s chest. I wanted him to hold me. Instead, I just looked up at him, waiting for his rage. “You don’t have a car,” he said quietly. “You’ll need one.”
Good sense prevailed, and though Wolf was the absolute last person I wanted to spend time with right now, I followed him through the parking garage to his roadster. We got in, and Wolf backed out of the garage and onto the icy streets, heading for the Long Island Expressway, which was the most logical route from the Hamptons to the city. We’d driven along for about ten minutes when I finally said, “I’m sorry I said that about your son. I had no right.”
A few moments of uncomfortable silence passed before Wolf said, “He’s going to be a doctor.”
“Rainer?”
Wolf nodded, once, sharply. “Last time I spoke to Anna, she told me.”
“You must be proud. Are you proud?”
“I don’t really know him anymore, Rachaela.”
I thought about that. “But you could. He’s eighteen, isn’t he? He could see you if he wanted to.”
“I doubt he wants to see me.”
“Have you asked him?”
“No.”
The snow had slowed things down considerably, forcing road workers to erect blinking hazard signs everywhere. The angry grey clouds above promised even more of the white stuff. It was a hundred miles to the Hamptons, roughly a two-hour drive on a low-traffic day. But I had a feeling it was going to take us much longer than that. And all I could do was hope and pray I maybe spotted my daughter walking on the side of the highway somewhere. I tried calling her cell for maybe the hundredth time, but, as usual, it took me to voicemail after seven rings. “I don’t understand why she’s not picking up,” I said.
“Generally speaking, children who are running away don’t want to speak to their parents.”
“She hasn’t run away!” My voice sounded much too screechy for my own liking. “Asia’s a smart girl. She wouldn’t do something so stupid.” I knew it was a lie even before I finished saying it. Asia was angry—as pissed at her dad as she was with me. She might do anything. I stared blankly out the window at a car that had skidded off the highway. “Christ, this is all my fault.”
“It’s not your fault, Rachaela.”
“I should have just let Jerrel have his fucking two weeks. I shouldn’t have stuck her between us like a bone in a dogfight.”
“Yes,” Wolf said, sounding angry. “And Asia would still have run away.”
The silence drew out between us out as the miles took us further upstate. I felt like I was going to go snow blind, watching the edges of the road. “Who told you about Rainer?” Wolf finally asked, and I realized it bothered him more than he was letting on.
“I don’t want to say.”
“It was Evelyn, wasn’t it?”
I looked over at him. “I thought you’d sooner accuse Devon. He likes Dollhouse gossip.”
“But Evelyn is the matchmaker. She’s the one who encouraged Devon to propose to Malcolm on Christmas Eve.”
“Don’t confront Evelyn with this,” I snapped at him tersely. “She just wants to help.”
“I have no intentions of confronting Evelyn. For one thing, Ian Sterling would likely kill me. For another, it’s bad etiquette for a gentleman to converse with a courtesan that way.”
“You and your Dollhouse. Your fucking rules and regulations. I’m starting to think that Jerrel is right. You’re just a bunch of rich, twisted perverts.”
“Is that how you think of us?” Wolf asked.
I sat shaking with rage for a few moments before the remorse set in. “No. I don’t. If I thought that, I would never have become your courtesan.”
“I understand if you can’t handle this. Most women can’t.”
I glared at him. “I can handle you just fine,” I told him, and Wolf raised his eyebrows at that. “Everyone thinks you’re something to be feared. Everyone takes cover when the big, bad wolf is on the hunt. But you’re not scary. You just need to learn some humility, Wolfgang Beck.”
“My father never disciplined me.”
“He should have. Someone should put you in your place.”
“Do you have anyone in mind?” he asked, and I knew what he was doing. I knew he was trying to calm me, distract me from my own panic.
“Rachaela,” he said in a very serious voice.
“Yes, Wolf.”
“Does your daughter own a backpack with Raven Symone on it?”
The question was so unexpected that it took me a moment to answer. “Yes. Why?”
Traffic had opened up in the last few miles, and we’d been cruising at a steady sixty-five miles per hour. But now Wolf jerked the wheel of the roadster so hard, the car fishtailed on the icy road. I cried out as I was thrown violently against the door and I felt the seat belt snap painfully across my boobs as he performed a surprisingly smooth three-hundred-and-sixty-degree spin in the middle of the highway. “Wolf!” I roared, bracing my hands against the dashboard, sure I was going to throw up all over the car.
“Hang on,” he said as he put the car in a lower gear to better grip the icy road. We were now facing the opposite way, back toward the city, with a car’s headlights bearing down on us. Wolf floored the accelerator and the whole car leaped forward smoothly, and at speeds not normally recommended for winter weather. I nearly screamed as Wolf jerked the car right, missing the oncoming pickup truck by inches, the Porsche making me a true believer in the wonders of German automobile engineering. The guy we’d nearly collided with was not such a believer and laid on his horn, but by then we were already a half mile away.
“What are you doing?” I screamed as the car tore on. I scrambled to grip the hand braces in the roof of the car. I swore to God that Wolf had stomped the accelerator flat, and if we went any faster, we were going to go back in time.
“That silver Jetta we just passed had a pack like that on the back dashboard.”
“How could you possibly remember something like that…?” I started asking, and then kicked myself. Eidetic memory, of course. Wolf had probably spotted the bag on the sideboard when he left the apartment that last day we were together.
With a gut-wrenching jerk, we swerved around the slow-going SUV in front of us, came almost nose-nose with a semi in the opposite lane, and then jerked back into the right lane as he passed illegally. I scrunched back in the bucket seat, trying to brace myself, trying to ignore the invisible eggbeater turning my stomach into mush.
The Jetta lay ahead of us, maybe a half mile off.
Wolf kept the accelerator glued to the floor and jerked the stick shift into a higher gear. The tires slipped for one second and I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth as I expected us to veer off the shoulder and smash into the guardrail, which would likely slingshot our little roadster right into the opposite lane—and probably into the grill of another semi.
Wolf swore violently and ground the gears so the car skidded, then righted itself in the middle of the highway. Jesus, I thought, we were going to fucking die. And yet, somehow, miraculously, he got the car back under control and we started to overtake the Jetta. It was a Jetta, after all, and there was no way in hell a Jetta was going to outrun Wolf’s Porsche. As we hugged the Jetta’s ass, I spotted the pack.
Wolf’s face was lean and fierce as he leaned on the horn.“Gottverdammt!” he said when the car just accelerated, and I didn’t need Babelfish for that one. Again he jerked the car, this time into the opposite lane where there was, thankfully at the moment, no traffic.
The roadster zipped up alongside the Jetta and I got my first good look at the driver, a thirty-some-odd-year-old burnout with a prison tattoo on his cheek. He looked rough. When he turned to glare at me, I jerked at the sight of those burned-out, dead eyes, like the eyes of some game animal that belonged on the wall of a study.
“Get over!” Wolf shouted at the driver.
The driver just flipped us the bird.
Wolf snorted. “Get in my lap, Rachaela.”
I looked at Wolf. “Are you insane?”
“I’m running him off the road, Rachaela. Get in my lap!”
I scrambled across the seat and started wriggling sidesaddle into Wolf’s lap, no small feat, as there wasn’t a lot of room between him and the steering wheel. He was a big enough guy, and he filled his side of the car so I was pressed against the steeling wheel and had to wrap my arms around Wolf’s neck.
“Hold on tight,” he told me, pinning the Jetta with hunter’s eyes.
“Oh Jesus,” I said and pressed my face into the sweating hollow of Wolf’s throat.
Wolf jerked the Porsche into the Jetta. We were both going at least eighty miles an hour, and the impact rattled my teeth in my head as the passenger side door of our car was crumpled and rearranged as it attempted to wed itself to the other car. Metal screeked as Wolf jerked the car back and we slid in smoothly behind the Jetta once more as an SUV barreled past us in the opposite lane, spewing snow against our windows.