Serenade (The Nightmusic Trilogy Book 1)

by Heather McKenzie

I struggled to pull air into my lungs, and then I scratched my name with his overly ornate pen on the lines he had indicated. I wished that my last name was anything other than Lowen and that my hands would stop shaking from overwhelming feeling of pure hatred I reserved for the man before me.

  “You have to know, Kaya,” he said and grinned, “that I do love you, and I have been making sure you are safe and properly educated, so that when the time comes, you and I can work side by side. I want that more than anything. You’re smart and your ability to see through a lie is a business partner’s dream—it’s like winning every jackpot in Vegas. Besides, your trust fund alone could bankroll the entire research facility for a lifetime and even build new ones. It would help so many people, and it’s what Lenore, your mother, truly wanted.”

  “Yeah, about that,” I said, searching my father’s face for a hint of truth, “who exactly is my birth mother?”

  “Some things are best left alone,” he said.

  “Just tell me, who named me Kaya? What was it that Anne was trying to tell me?”

  A single bead of sweat broke out on his brow and he wordlessly turned and headed for the door.

  “Leave it alone,” he warned, “or you could ruin everything.”

  I’d been sitting for hours on the edge of the bed while Oliver took up the corner of the room in a blue, velvet recliner pretending to not pay attention to me. He was freshly showered, his dark hair still damp and his skin clean and glowing. Radiohead songs were blaring from his earbuds but he was only half listening. He rightly assumed I was still upset about Anne, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell him the other reason; my life was worth billions of dollars.

  I realized, as I stared out the window as the end-of-summer colors swept the valley, that the small bit of love I had for my dad was now gone. The bars across my windows only cemented that fact. They were a glaring confirmation that I was not his child; I was his possession. I vowed to forever refer to him as Henry from this day forward; he didn’t deserve the title of Dad.

  When the sky became dark and there was nothing left to look at, I pulled the thick curtains covering my prison window shut. My legs were numb. My head hurt. And suddenly, I had to think about something else before sadness ate me alive and the walls caved in.

  “I’m going swimming,” I announced.

  I hadn’t said anything to Oliver for days besides ‘leave me alone’, so he practically fell out of his chair at my abrupt declaration. Standing, he looked at his watch. “No, it’s after seven, and…”

  Ignoring him, I grabbed a bathing suit out of my dresser and then stared him down, just hoping for an argument. But for the first time in ages, there wasn’t.

  The pool in daylight was incredible, but at night, it was amazing. Perched high on the cliff next to the second terrace, it was the smallest of the three at the estate. With the blue water shimmering beneath the stars, it was only possible to see a vast expanse of black past the ornamental garden surrounding the perimeter. The sound of the river rushing below and the feel of the cool air coming off the snowy, unseen peaks of the mountains allowed me to pretend to be anywhere. Anne used to bring me here when I was a kid and out-of-control bored. She’d sit on the ledge and nag while I pretended to be a mermaid. We’d spend hours out here at night under the moon, and now, when I dipped in my toes, I could clearly picture her face in the white-and-blue tiles and clouds of steam hovering over the water.

  I daydreamed I was far away from here, diving under and savoring the weightlessness of my body. I was so relieved to be alone, but when I came up for air, Oliver was taking off his shirt with the intention of joining me. He stood on the ledge next to the deep end, shivering slightly, with each muscle on his body prominently outlined as if airbrushed. He was so incredibly stunning I couldn’t peel my gaze away while he slowly crept into the water. Now, instead of daydreaming, all I could think about was how I had to stay away from him.

  After twenty minutes of the two of us swimming laps side by side, I stopped to rest my arms on the ledge of the pool and gently stretch out my legs. Oliver came up beside me and did the same. It was hard to keep my eyes looking straight ahead on the night sky instead of ogling his damp skin, but I figured I better keep them there as well as try to apologize.

  “I’m sorry about, well… the way I have acted the last few days,” I said softly so my voice wouldn’t echo across the pool, “I might have gone a little crazy.”

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  I contemplated telling him about the discussion I had with Henry—about the inheritance, but I had to come to terms with it first. “I know you’re just looking out for me, and I’m grateful for that.”

  “Listen, Kaya, everyone grieves in their own way. I know you’ll work it through, but you can always talk to me, all right?”

  “I know. I just had to, um, deal with things. But thanks for being there for me.”

  He’d barely left my side for even a second. Oliver made me crazy, but at least he actually cared.

  “You’re most welcome,” he replied, rubbing some pool water out of his eyes.

  I couldn’t help it—I admired the shape of his toned arms and snuck glances at the scars he’d earned by protecting me. Each one was a solid reminder of his dedication, his devotion, and how I owed him my life.

  I pried my eyes away.

  “Wow, the stars… the moon… they’re just so beautiful tonight,” I said as I looked up. In the distance, a wolf howled in agreement.

  “Hmmm, yeah… very beautiful…” he said, but instead of admiring the night, his eyes were centered on me. He leaned closer, too close, and he reached for my chin, tilting my face toward his. “Kaya, I care about you a lot,” he said bluntly.

  I wanted to laugh but the look on his face was dead serious.

  “I care about you too,” I said as politely as I could manage.

  “I’ve wanted to tell you for a long time,” he said, his knees now grazing mine. “When I thought I might lose you…” His voice grew quiet, and his fingers gently traced the scar on my neck, sending a jolt down my spine. “I realized how much I cared.”

  I anxiously looked toward the security cameras; were they watching? Was Old Carl sitting at his desk, shaking his head and zooming in as to not miss the action? Getting ready to send more guards, or worse yet, file a report to Henry?

  Then I noticed that the red lights, the teeny ones on the cameras that always glowed, weren’t glowing at all. In seventeen years, I’d never encountered this. Obviously, Oliver noticed too or he wouldn’t be acting so boldly. New Guy was parked in a lawn chair a foot from the ledge of the pool, and he seemed oblivious to everything except his phone. We were, for the most part, alone.

  Oliver’s nose was now inches from mine, and a shiver shook my entire body as he reached his hand around and nestled it onto the small of my back. He held me steady, and then carefully pulled me tightly to him. I could barely breathe—this was wrong. Our chests were touching in the water and the heat of his thighs against mine brought out a consuming desire to let my hands wander over his skin. My head was yelling no, yet I couldn’t convince my body to even try to move away.

  “Kaya, you need to know this,” Oliver said, gulping hard. “I’ll protect you and be there for you no matter what. Bodyguard, friend or otherwise… I’m yours. Forever and always.”

  The intensity of his words rattled my chest. They were real, they were honest, and nobody had ever said anything like that to me before. He had avoided the L-word, but it was implied nonetheless. Before I could stop myself, I nervously uttered the only thing that came to mind. “Oliver, you have—um—a great smile.”

  His face lit up. “And you… make me crazy.”

  With a hearty laugh, he picked me up effortlessly, lifted me over his head, and then launched me into the air like a cannonball.

  When I came up for air, I saw that the waves had splashed New Guy and his freshly lit smoke. Oliver was grinning ear to ear and dove away, disappearing into the d
epths of the deep end, while New Guy shook water off his phone and tossed the now-wet cigarette into the shrubs.

  “Could you guys be more careful? Man, I’ve only got four smokes left,” he said irritably.

  Oliver was swimming back to me, the moonlight reflecting off his back, and I knew I had to get away before I said or did anything more than I already had. So I yelled at New Guy for littering and hopped out of the pool. Throwing on my housecoat, I complained loudly about picking up his trash.

  I continued to pretend that I was very concerned about the garbage, effectively avoiding Oliver, and tiptoed across the freezing cement and into the garden. I pushed aside some thick cedar shrubs and found a slew of discarded cigarette butts behind them, the moonlight making the white tubes easy to spot. As I plucked them from between the railings in the old iron fence, I noticed what looked like a hinge with rivets and bubbly orange bits of rust on the thick part of the railing. About one foot up, there was another. Was this a gate? I had been in this place hundreds of times and never noticed one before.

  Placing the disgusting butts in my fleece pocket, I glanced behind me. Oliver was still swimming, and New Guy was drying off his phone; they weren’t paying attention to me. I reached around the rail and was surprised to find a handle. I gripped it hard and pushed. At first, nothing happened, so I put my shoulder against the metal for more leverage, and sure enough, it opened. No flashing lights or alarms went off so I pushed it all the way open, hoping Oliver didn’t hear the whining squeak of the rusty hinges. Carefully and tentatively, I stepped forward and found myself standing on the edge of the cliff looking down at the Bow River shimmering hundreds of feet below—one more step and I’d be fish food. But, I assumed that if I crawled along the fence, carefully, it would lead me into the next garden—the one bordering the north section of the estate. My guess was that this fence probably rounded a corner at some point and ended up squarely in the middle of the L-shaped building. That was an area that was boarded up and strictly off limits because Henry thought it was haunted. Now I realize that was just a story meant to keep me from wanting to investigate as a child. Completely empty and forgotten, it was a strictly forbidden place. I wasn’t allowed to set foot anywhere near it.

  Huh.

  “Kaya, what are you doing over there?” Oliver yelled.

  I nearly jumped out of my skin, startled by the sudden attention. For some reason, my discovery felt rather devious. Wheels started turning. Plans started forming. I wondered if this was a way out—a way to escape for an hour or two.

  “Kaya!” he yelled again.

  “Coming, I’m just getting some leaves for my scrapbook,” I replied, and then I pulled the gate shut, letting the shrubs fall back into place.

  I shivered uncontrollably on the long walk back to my room while Oliver lectured me about wandering off. It went in one ear and out the other. My discovery of the gate and the lingering feeling of how his body felt against mine in the pool pretty much obliterated my defense system. And that was bad, bad, bad.

  New Guy was on night duty and stationed in the hall, taking up his favorite spot on the leather couch. He’d just cracked a fresh can of coke when I stopped in front of him before going to my room. “I have a gift for you,” I said sweetly, and his eyes widened as I reached into my housecoat pocket. “I picked some nice things out of the shrubs.” I placed all his gross cigarette butts in his hand.

  “Ugh, so not cool!” he said, completely offended.

  “Neither is littering.”

  He sighed and shook his head. “Point taken.”

  I was expecting an argument, or swearing, or some sort of heated discussion, but instead, he calmly wiped off his hands and relaxed back into the leather sofa with his iPod. “Iron Maiden’s Piece of Mind,” he said loudly as the voice piping through his ear buds soared into the stratosphere, “the concert was amazing! Man, Kaya, you’d probably love this record.”

  Oliver found all of this extremely hilarious. I wasn’t sure if it was the suggestion that I would like rock music, or that ‘Princess Kaya’—a name he called me when I complained about getting my hands dirty—had been picking up garbage. I wanted to ask, but it was so rare to see him smile. He was laughing when I said goodnight and still giggling when he wandered off down the hall. He would be back on duty at midnight.

  I had six hours.

  I ordered Stephan a pot of tea and gave him his pain meds. Within an hour, he was sound asleep and snoring loud as a chainsaw. Using his cell phone, I arranged for a driver to meet me at the old lobby. I told greedy driver Dan—one of the estates oldest employees who was well known for being easily bribed—that there’d be a huge tip in it for him if he kept our outing a secret. In the past, he’d snuck Stephan and me pizza, but it cost us an arm and a leg. I took what cash I had and some jewelry, just in case the cash wasn’t enough, and wrapped my purse and shoes in a towel. Then, I put on the longest housecoat I had and snuck out into the hallway. New Guy was still stretched out on the sofa. He was casually blowing smoke out of the window and he bolted straight off the couch when he saw me—I caught him breaking a major house rule. Smoking was instant grounds for getting fired.

  His eyes widened in horror. “Uh, hey Kaya, uh… ma’am…” he stuttered and quickly dropped the lit cigarette into his pop can. He’d undone his ponytail and long golden locks flipped up around his shoulders—the feminine hairstyle was such a strange contrast to his unshaven cheeks and tattooed arms. I put my hand up to stop him as his face contorted in an effort to come up with some lame excuse.

  “Hey, don’t worry about it,” I said, and his eyebrows arched. I realized his gross smoking habit and my desire to escape could be mutually beneficial. “How about we give each other a bit of a break with the whole rules thing for tonight?” I said deviously.

  He eyed me curiously. “What are you proposing?”

  “Well, I’m going to go to the pool… again… to meet Oliver. We felt like swimming some more—alone. You should probably stay here and watch over Stephan, but make sure to keep it really quiet so he can sleep. I’ll only be gone a few hours.”

  “Meeting Oliver eh?” he said, straightening up with a mischievous glint in his eyes.

  “And it’s already been cleared with the security office,” I lied.

  He pulled a fresh smoke from his pack. I lit it for him.

  “I think we have an understanding,” he said, blowing rings of smoke out the window, “just don’t be too long.”

  Well, that was easy.

  The second hall guard’s extreme drowsiness and crumpled tissue collection suggested he’d had a little too much cold medicine. He didn’t need much convincing. The next two guards questioned why I was alone, so I pulled out the girl card: female issues. Having to change bathing suits because of that time of the month— instant hall pass.

  I used Stephan’s security code to unlock the pool door and breathed a sigh of relief when it opened. Even though cameras were back on, it was colder now, and steam hung in the air above the water like a thick cloud. I knew from being in the security room as a kid that this greatly obstructed the view.

  I stashed my robe and towel under the bench, put on my shoes, and quickly made my way through the shrubs to the gate. It swung open with a gentle shove, and I stepped through—mindful that a crisp breeze could push me to my death—and then I carefully turned around to hold on to the iron bars. Was I crazy? Was this something I really had to do?

  A resounding yes reverberated in every corner of my mind.

  I slowly crept along the edge of the fence, deciding not to look down or behind me. The earth under my feet was becoming narrower the farther I went, and soon I was on my tip toes, dancing on barely an inch of ground and praying none of the rails I was clinging to were loose. My hands had become numb from the cold, and just when I thought I might have to turn back, the fence rounded a corner and I was safely standing in the long-forgotten courtyard. I made my way through patches of overgrown rose bushes that tried to c
law at me with every step. Dead flowers pointed eerily toward the ground and were so creepy I began to question my sanity; if anything happened to me, no one would even know where to look.

  Once through the garden, I faced the side of the massive stone-walled building that stretched four stories over my head with dark windows that looked like squinting eyes. The rotting boards covering the closest basement window came off with a light pull, and I shone the light from my cell phone into what looked to have been an office. I put my legs through the window, jumped down, and landed on a desk, hoping an animal that was nothing more than a mouse scurried away. Following the exit signs through the carpeted hallways, thick with dust and too many locked doors to count, I made my way to the secondary lobby.

  It was creepier than the dead garden.

  Moonlight shone through the massive windows, lighting up the marble room where portraits of the frozen faces of relatives past and present hung from the walls. The eyes depicted in each of the paintings appeared as if they were staring down, guarding the hotel. Not one of them was smiling. I shouldn’t have been shocked to see my mother’s face among them—looking nothing like my own—but the sight still took my breath away. At least the haunting guilt of not feeling any emotion for her was gone. In my heart of hearts, as I stared up at her stone-faced expression, I knew we weren’t related.

  The outbound lobby doors were impossible to open with thick plywood nailed across them in large sheets, but the small valet parking door was easy to unlock. I slid the deadbolt to the side and headed toward the limo that waited at the bottom of the steps. I knew Dan wouldn’t let me down; he was a good old boy from down South—as he loved to say—and he’d do anything to fund a gambling addiction that was legendary among the other drivers.

  “Heyo, Ms. Kaya,” he said, winking and tipping his driving hat respectfully.

  “Hello, Dan,” I replied as confidently as I could, quickly climbing into the back of the car. My heart was racing so fast I thought I might pass out. I half expected the world to come crashing down as I put a hefty wad of bills in his outstretched hand. “Please take me to The Derrick Bar; it’s a few blocks from the hospital.”