Unbind (Sub Rosa Series Book 1)

by Lynch, Sarah Michelle

  I saw something else, too. The arrangement of the flowers was done so that if you placed a mirror down the centre, you’d see exactly the same thing displayed on each side. It was a mirror image of itself, all the roses equal—if you envisaged a line running down the centre. There was nothing to distinguish these beauties then—this dozen roses, I counted—sitting here pretty.

  This wasn’t just a painting but a work of trickery which some master had created. Unbind had mathematical substance as well as artistry.

  Tears streamed from my eyes. No loveless, bereft soul could have crafted this.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” someone said, but it wasn’t Claire or Dirk.

  Still, I knew that voice.

  “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.” I took out a hanky and wiped my eyes, my nose.

  “You can leave us.”

  I determined Claire and Dirk leave the room behind us, their footsteps echoing as they walked downstairs.

  Claudia stood at my side. I glanced sideways and saw her in a pink, Chanel suit edged with the classic black trim. Her hands gloveless, her fingers straight. The act, dropped.

  “He painted it when he was 14. I remember,” Claudia looked vaguely winsome as she paused, “I woke up one morning and there it was. Fourteen, Chloe.”

  I turned slowly to look at her head-on. I felt my lip wobble as I murmured, “I knew I could see him in it. I knew it was his.”

  She struggled to smile but there was a softness in her eyes. “It was just after he got in touch with my sister. He thought he’d upset me. He didn’t know that Jenny was lost to me already and that I’d made my peace with that. She never understood me and I couldn’t blame her. After all, I’d gone off and lived a different life to her. I went my way, she hers. Like so many siblings, you reacquaint like strangers. I knew that if she came to Sub Rosa, she’d try to save me. Try to tell me that she was right… that Philippe was a bad apple. You know. That old chestnut. Of course I realised I’d fallen in love with the wrong man but I didn’t need her to tell me that. I also didn’t want her here. You see I feared what he was capable of. He kept us locked in this house because he had lots of people chasing him. If she’d come in and threatened him, he might have killed her. Or so I imagined. I was wrong to put ideas in Caius’s head but I was in love with a ghost… the ghost of my sister, my one true love. A lost love I missed dreadfully. He was the only one I could talk to sometimes, you see. So, to stop the youngster chasing his auntie… we made up some cruel story about Jennifer sending me roses. Roses I hated. Cai, the sensitive soul he is, painted this in response.”

  Claudia held her hand out and motioned at the creation’s overall effect. She continued, “He spied on me, I guess. He snuck around, hid behind corners… we all knew he did. I once told him that I yearned to paint the roses, but I struggled. He didn’t realise that for me, they represented a time before I became driven by my darker nature. As true artists… we must remain true to our feelings at the time, not look back on fond memories with askew nostalgia. I always set out to paint the roses. I made a song and dance of it so that Philippe and the others felt sure I would implode if I didn’t get the chance to paint. Yet the roses never manifested.” Her face fell, and she flicked her eyes back to Unbind. “Worse things did make their way onto canvas. Dark creations from my deepest depths. Pictures I had to paint but had to be destroyed afterwards. Surely, they’d have caused a storm out there in the art world, but I didn’t want my son to see what his mother was like inside. Abused. Traumatised. Wronged. Broken and pretty much, darn right sick.”

  She walked closer to the fireplace and stroked the painting, sighing. “There is much more to this tale, Chloe. Shall we go down and have a brandy? You look like you could do with one.”

  I was totally bloody freaked out if I were honest. Who was this woman? I babbled, “Sure, yeah, sure.”

  Why not. I mean, it wasn’t like she had humiliated me not so long ago…

  I nodded slowly and she gestured we leave the room. I walked the staircase numb, totally bamboozled. Surely, revelations on an epic scale were a hair’s breadth away.

  DOWNSTAIRS in the drawing room, we sat in that fateful window seat, the dull lights of two tall lamps either side of us, a decanter nearby. Outside a storm lashed the windows.

  “I make no apologies for my drinking Chloe, dear. However, it turns out a gastric band comes in handy for things other than obesity.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  She went onto explain, “Well, Cai kept giving me the damn run-around. I needed to be whip smart. I weaned myself down beforehand. It was harder than anything else I’ve ever done before in my life.”

  I smiled and sipped a tiny amount of brandy, which wasn’t my favourite liquor if I was being honest. “My sister is an addict. Coke. Pills. Alcohol.”

  “Hmm. Alcohol is the worst.” She was so casual and open all of a sudden. Her defences down, her guard sloping. “It speaks to you, you see. Tells you all sorts of things you want to hear. Just nothing truthful.”

  “I gather. Amanda’s clean now. So could you be if you wanted to be?”

  “Yes, if I wanted to,” she nodded. “I won’t claim I’m not an addict because I am but what else have I got?”

  She looked down at her chest, gripping the tumbler she held like it was a sad, necessary companion.

  “Cai, you’ve got Cai,” I stated. “He loves you, you know?”

  She chuckled merrily, sipping a drip or two too. “That’s funny. I just came from his apartment before I came here. Seeing as though he hasn’t been out in days, somebody had to check up on him.”

  “Agh, no. What has he been eating, then?” I shook my head, my tone falling casually in line with hers.

  “Oh, he orders in still. Good god, that boy likes his food more than me. No, he’s feeding but not cutting his hair or his beard. He’s painting, the damn sod. Painting. I caught him punching that bag like a mad dog between stints at the easel. He’s got a collection brewing… you should see it all!”

  We laughed together and it was like we’d known each other years. She knew him as well as I did and that we had that in common was beautiful.

  “Oh, I love him so much.”

  I smiled, swiped a tear back, and sighed. My Cai, my handsome man.

  “He wants to make me angry but I can’t be angry anymore. I’ve seen what he’s painting… it’s why I had to come here when Claire said you’d turned up.”

  My chest clutched. What was he painting? “Tell me?”

  She turned and smiled, laughing as she told me, “You.”

  “Why, me?” I cocked a brow. “In fact, why did you treat me so badly?”

  She shot me an apologetic look, her mouth twitching. “It’s a simple enough tale, you know.”

  “Klaus?” I asked.

  “Yes, but we’ll get to him,” she remembered grimly. She looked for somewhere to start and began talking in that oratorical way of hers again. “This all really began with Philippe. He said that he loved me and I believed him. Until I got pregnant and he started questioning the money Chester had—the money that surely should have come to me. I told him no, it wasn’t mine… but the next male heir’s. I saw snapshots of the real man then, when he realised there was no money to rob. Not for a long time. He revealed his true self the first time he tried to take me against my will. I was aware that day, not daydreaming as I once had done, and I didn’t want sex because I was pregnant and fat.”

  “That was really how it all began?” I wasn’t sure of this portion of the tale’s resonance.

  “Yes. It became a totally sexless union after he believed I was insane,” she sniggered, “oh it is easy to put a man off that way… very easy. After all, mental illness itself is not attractive. I should know. In my early twenties I was finally… and properly… treated for DID, quite successfully too I might add. There were about ten or 11 people in here,” she pointed at her skull, “all of them, different. I met some of them, until
we had to say goodbye. The hardest to say goodbye to was a version of Jennifer I had become quite fond of. The splice between us was so paper-thin it was almost transparent. She was the strongest alter and the only one I remember vividly. We were sisters so close at one time, it wasn’t as if we were two people. When I switched to her, the benefit was that I couldn’t remember how I was acting even though through her, I was doing all the things I hated. Like having sex, most notably with Klaus’s father Willem, even though he didn’t initially realise it wasn’t me he was having sex with. It was a terrible time, you know?

  “Dr. Stahl treated me for a good couple of years and the paintings during that time were out-there, really, yet that one outlet got me through it. I had Willem to thank for showing me I had that ability. However, all I was left with at the end of my therapy was the real me… the rebel. The artist. The woman who wouldn’t be controlled or contained… who cried out for variety. I learned to like myself, even. Pity I didn’t love Willem, a man 20 years my senior who worshipped the ground I walked on, who would have walked hot coals for me… gone to hell and back for me. Which he did, by the way, oh he did. Yet I couldn’t see myself to love him. I didn’t think I had it in me to love until the day Philippe stepped into my life and wrapped his dark eyes, his large hands, and his vile manner right around my heart. All that therapy and then I met him… and rediscovered some sides of myself I didn’t like.”

  She took a moment to catch her breath while I waited.

  “I truly believed his intentions honourable. In truth, he was contemptible, though he was just as beautiful as Cai. He made me believe he would cut a scar in the sky just to help me see through the darkness and out into the light. In the beginning he brought me roses and sang me songs and wrote poetry and danced me in the moonlight. He made love to me for days on end, kissing every part of my body. Content with a simple life, I was happy enough to live off the spoils of our orchards on this estate but he had other ideas. The gleam of courtship dispensed, he showed his true colours. I foolishly told him some of the horrible things I had overcome. However, it gave him fuel later down the line when he said that to conquer my fears, I should face them. So he planted me in closets and shed other women’s clothes, blood and inhibitions, all while I watched. Every time it happened, I felt proven right… I wasn’t worth loving after all. In fact, it was better that way. I lost my libido after having Cai, not that I had much to start with. I guess perhaps some part of me loved the monster in Philippe. Craved it, even. His rotten core made me feel less bleak. If ever I felt black inside, I just had to look at him and see that it wasn’t my fault. He’d knocked me up on purpose, always claiming he used protection—except for the one time he didn’t. I never wanted a child. I wasn’t equipped… in my mind… to be a mother. I knew it. I wasn’t capable. I was born to paint and I couldn’t even do that right, the horrors of my mind always creeping up on me.”

  I had a thought. “Have any survived?”

  “None. On reflection… I had Claire burn the last one, around five years ago.”

  “Tell me everything else,” I encouraged her, and then she did.

  IN her convoluted way, Claudia told me how she found Unbind. It was a morning in the year 2000, just an ordinary September day. Her birthday. She was always the first awake. She usually drank a Bloody Mary around dawn to settle her nerves before shuffling back to bed. She caught Cai scurrying out of her workroom and panicked, wondering what he had been up to. He’d done the painting and attached a note, ‘Happy birthday Mom.’ She was totally astonished. Until she realised something. So before Philippe found it, she had Dirk wallpaper over it with the some horrid paper he found in the town, just whatever he could manage before Philippe woke at noon and began stomping round the house.

  Cai had tried to do something kind. Paint the picture his mother so often struggled to. However, Unbind put fear into Claudia… of what the future held for such a talent.

  Jennifer’s death was a tragedy and Claudia felt hopeless after a routine post-mortem revealed her sister to be three months pregnant when she took her own life. Dental records were called into question but it was assumed the suicide victim had merely had work done to improve previously documented bad teeth—which Claudia was forced to have corrected when she assumed Jennifer’s identity. Claudia paid off the pathologist, asking the details of pregnancy be kept under wraps to protect the 14 year old son ‘Claudia’ had left behind.

  Claudia assumed the life of her sister, only intending to take advantage of this for how ever long it took to find Philippe and finally have rid of him. It became that she actually liked working. Some other curious advantage was that she was no longer a disappointment to her son.

  Claudia had once been set to end it all. Having seen Cai’s painting, she couldn’t bear to see the truth. She knew her beautiful, brilliant son must have witnessed some terrible things in that house. Her son, a brilliant artist already, was only going to get better. She couldn’t live with herself… she’d forgotten he missed nothing. She feared for him, too. Suspected Philippe would try to capitalise on this if he could. Force his son to paint, then sell them to some backstreet sellers in Queens or somewhere, perhaps get 50 bucks for something worth a thousand times more. Claudia just knew she had to protect Cai.

  After she became Jennifer, she used her connections—namely a new member of her security team, former bounty hunter Holden Price—to track Philippe and march him right back to Mexico, where he was dealt with accordingly. Having murdered six cartel members and countless others to secure his escape from that country, it need not be speculated on how he met his end.

  Then Claudia explained what I had already somewhat figured out myself.

  $50,000,000 was incomparable to the talent Cai carried within him. She explained how her position of power could protect him, but how she feared—deeply feared—he’d been left scarred by his early years. He bared his fists too often. She didn’t know any other way to handle him other than to get heavy-handed herself… controlling his money, his work… his love life.

  She explained that she felt entirely convinced he still thought of her as Jennifer and she actually preferred it that way. It was better. She couldn’t be the mother he deserved, but she could just about manage the title of aunt.

  Claudia admitted she paid someone to visit the Surrey mansion her grandfather once owned. Fortunately the rose still grew there. She relayed how everyone has a price, and anything can be gotten, for the right price. So anyway, cuts of the rose were taken and placed on my desk in London. In a panic, Cai called his mother after he saw the rose had returned and the pair debated it could be Philippe, back from the dead, seeking vengeance or money. After all, Cai thought he had destroyed the rose and it stood to reason that Philippe was the only one who knew how to grow it. Cai just didn’t know that the rose had other origins. He didn’t know his father was really already dead. Claudia succeeded in scaring him off me. Reminding him of a sorry memory—a gift he had once given his mother which was coldly rebuked. Somehow she knew, he was more serious about me than any other girl he’d spent time with. That frightened her. After all, the secrets they kept were dangerous. Namely that she was Klaus’s mother. The world is small and in the end, we always gravitate toward those we understand, those who understand us.

  There were certain words of Claudia’s that stuck in my mind. Well, these few ones in particular…

  “Chloe, I tested you yet you didn’t give up on him, neither did he give up on you. Not only that, you had plenty of opportunity to release our secrets but you didn’t. I took a risk on you after I realised your influence was good for Cai, even though you stood to undo our mysteries. My power is great yet as you found within only days of meeting Cai, a number of parties out there—namely Klaus—have sought to expose the whys and wherefores of our dramas. My position, the money… it all makes for a great story. You must understand that Cai is more treasure than anything else in the world. His soul is deep… his heart deeper. For years I have felt ter
rified for him and of what lies out there in the world. If he were to make a wife of someone, I had to know she was worthy. Not after money, status, reputation, a job with me… or just his body… but something more. I underestimated you greatly and I didn’t see how I would be forced to rethink my own way of life… my whole life in fact. You see, one day I was determined to end it. Yet I didn’t. Tragedy forced me to live which in itself is ironic. Yet in living, in staying alive, I discovered parts of myself I never realised I owned. Capabilities that shone when I was given a second chance. A second chance, dear. Life has its ways and it gave you to Cai and you… after all these years… you unlocked him again. Gave him hope. Stoked that hope and kept it alive for him. I didn’t see that the power of true love is totally inestimable. I forgot what I couldn’t see was right in front of me… that all along… Cai was my saviour. My second chance, all along. He gave me back everything I thought I’d lost and I wasn’t willing to part with him easily. We exist in a frivolous world of lies, secrets and deceit. I know my life is built on intricate webs, on power that could be ripped from me tomorrow, or even today, but it’s not been too much hardship to be lauded and given free rein over a number of talented people. Amongst the chaos, we must learn to fly our own way. Just as long as loyalty exists amongst us few, nothing might unbind us.

  “I am talking about the bind that cannot be broken, even though sometimes, you desperately try to. Yet you can’t. A true love is sharper when unexpected, more bittersweet when put on trial, more poignant in its infancy… it hurts because it demands, tests us because it’s truthful, shakes us because we fray in its presence… yet it will never be broken. I know what I am and what I can be but it’s just my way of testing the waters. Tugging the surface for the real matter beneath. Flesh and bone, is nothing. The real parts of us are hidden, concealed, beneath layers. Those are the pieces we don’t easily part with, yet remind me why my own mind forged a method of dispersing itself… to corners I didn’t have to connect with. I don’t mind admitting I wanted you to fail… yet you more than proved yourself worthy of my son.”