The bottom of the stairs led directly into the entryway, but to the left, below the wing where I lived, there was the living room. A fire place filled the partial wall separating it from an elegant dining room. The furniture appeared to be hand crafted wood and upholstered with white. In here, the floors were all smooth golden wood, and the colors were in earth tones. Everything was aimed towards the glass wall, forcing you to admire the view.
“Nice digs, right?” Rhys commented, and I whirled around to find him standing behind me, smiling. “Elora built this place ten years ago. She’s pretty proud of it.”
“I bet.” I looked around the room appreciatively. “She definitely has good taste.”
“Yeah,” Rhys shrugged. “You gotta be hungry, though. Come on. I’ll whip you up something in the kitchen.” He started walking out of the room, and I followed after him. “You’ll probably hate what I make, though. You’re into all that health food junk like everybody else, right?”
“I don’t know.” I had never thought of myself as a health nut, but the things I preferred tended to be organic and vegan. It had never been by choice, though. It was just the way it was. “I like natural things, I guess.”
He nodded knowingly as he led me past the ornate dining room into a massive kitchen. There were two professional grade stoves, two massive stainless steel fridges, a gigantic island in the center, and more cupboard space than I had my entire house. Rhys went over to the fridge and pulled out a bottle of Mountain Dew and a bottle of water.
“Water, right?” Rhys held it out to me, and I took it from him. “I’m really not the best cook, but you’ll have to settle for me. The chef is off today.”
“You have a chef?” I wasn’t sure if he was kidding or not, but in a place like this, they definitely had some kind of staff.
“Yeah, part-time.” Rhys took a drink from his Mountain Dew, then set it on the island and went to the other fridge to start rooting around. “Just weekends, but that’s because it’s usually when we entertain. I don’t know what Elora eats during the week, but I’m on a fend-for-yourself basis.”
I leaned on the island, drinking my water. I realized this kitchen reminded me of the one in our house in the Hamptons, the one Kim had attempted filicide in, but that one had been smaller. If she hadn’t left, this is probably how I would’ve been raised. In fact, I’m sure this is how she had been brought up. Her parents died when I was seven, but their house had been overly grand, like this one. They often made comments to Maggie about how she raised me and Matt, but Maggie had really attempted to raise us as a normal family, even though we weren’t.
Kim’s parents had obviously been incredibly loaded, and they only had her and another daughter, who I think had married some European playboy and lived in France or Spain or something. When they died, they had to have left money for Matt and I. And our father’s parents had died before I was born, and there had to be inheritance from that as well. The more I thought about, the more I started thinking that Maggie had way more money than she let on.
She and Matt had never talked about it, but we both most have a pretty large trust set up.
Maggie easily could’ve lived like this. A beautiful house somewhere with a nanny raising Matt and me. She could’ve had the best cars, and paid off every school that tried to expel me. As it was, she had never really fought any of my punishments because she thought they were fair and I needed to learn something. She could’ve just added a wing to a school, and sent me off there to work it out myself. Instead, she had made the choice that taking care of me herself was more important than spending money. Before she had custody of me, she had been working because she wanted to, not because she needed to.
She had made a choice that my own mother never would have.
“So you like shitake mushrooms, right?” Rhys was saying. He had been pulling things out of the fridge, but I had been too lost in thought to notice. His arms were overflowing with vegetables.
“Uh, yeah, I love mushrooms.” I straightened up and tried see what all he had, but for the most part, it looked like things I enjoyed.
“Excellent.” Rhys grinned at me and dropped his armload of food into the kitchen sink. “I’m going to make you the best stir fry you’ve ever tasted.”
He went about chopping things up, and I offered to help him, but he insisted that he could handle it. The whole time, he talked amicably about his new motorcycle he’d gotten last week. He’d taken it out for a spin just before he came in, and he mentioned all sorts of technical terms that I didn’t understand. I tried to keep up with it, but all I ever knew about motorcycles is that they went fast and I liked it.
“What are you making in here?” Finn came into the kitchen, sounding vaguely disgusted. His hair was damp from a recent shower, and he smelled like the grass after a rain, only sweeter. He walked past me without even a glance in my direction and went over to where Rhys had thrown everything into a wok on the stove.
“Stir fry!” Rhys proclaimed.
“Really?” Finn leaned over his shoulder and peered down at the ingredients in the pan. Rhys moved to the side a little so Finn could reach in and grab something out of it. He sniffed it, then popped it into his mouth.
“Well, it’s not terrible.”
“Stop my beating heart!” Rhys put his hand over his heart and feigned astonishment. “Has my food passed the test of the hardest food critic in the land?”
“No. I just said it wasn’t terrible.” Finn shook his head at Rhys’s dramatics and went to the fridge to get a bottle of water. “And I’m certain that Elora is a much harsher food critic than I’ll ever be.”
“That’s probably true, but she’s never let me cook for her,” Rhys admitted, shaking the wok to stir up the vegetables more.
“You really shouldn’t let him cook for you,” Finn advised, looking at me for the first time. “He gave me food poisoning once.”
“You cannot get food poisoning from an orange!” Rhys protested and looked back at him. “It’s just not possible! And even if you can, I just handed you the orange. I didn’t even have a chance to contaminate it!”
“I don’t know.” Finn shrugged. A smile was creeping up, and I could tell he was amused by how much Rhys was getting worked up.
“You don’t even eat the part I touched! You peeled it and threw the skin away!” Rhys sounded exasperated. He wasn’t paying attention to the wok as he struggled to convince us of his innocence, and a flame licked up from the food.
“Food’s on fire,” Finn nodded to the stove.
“Dammit!” Rhys got a glass of water and splashed it in the stir fry, and I was starting to question how good this was going to taste when he was done with it.
“See?” Finn looked at me, and I smiled. “Did you sleep okay?”
“Yeah, I slept great,” I nodded.
“Good.” He was standing next to me, looking as if he wanted to say something but thought better of it. He just nodded and walked out of the kitchen.
When Rhys finished cooking, his food was only moderately edible, but I picked at it anyway. He pulled stools up to the island, explaining that he only ate in the dining room when it was absolutely required. He soaked his food in some kind of sauce, but it didn’t smell at all appetizing. He downed his Mountain Dew with fervor, but I just sipped at my water.
“So what do you think?” Rhys nodded at the plate of food I was trying to eat.
“It’s pretty good,” I lied. He had obviously worked hard on it, and his blue eyes showed how proud he was of it, so I couldn’t let him down. To prove my point, I took a bite and smiled.
“Good. You guys are hard to cook for,” Rhys admitted sourly and took a mouthful of his own food. “I don’t know how you can eat this plain, though.”
“I don’t know how you can eat it with sauce.” I wrinkled my nose at the smell of it.
“To each his own, I guess,” Rhys laughed lightly. When he looked down at his plate, his sandy hair fell into his eyes, and he brushed it a
way.
“So… you know Finn pretty well?” I asked carefully, stabbing my fork into a mushroom.
Their banter earlier had left me curious. Finn seemed to genuinely enjoy Rhys, even if he didn’t approve of his cooking, and I had never seen Finn enjoy anybody. Patrick, he had kind of liked, but I think that had been more of a means of getting closer to me. He openly looked down on Matt, and while he respected and obeyed Elora, I didn’t think he really liked her.
“I guess.” Rhys shrugged like he hadn’t really thought about it. “He’s just around a lot.”
“Like how often?” I pressed as casually as I could.
“I don’t know.” He took a bite and thought for a minute. “It’s hard to say. Storks move around a lot.”
“Storks?”
“Yeah, trackers,” Rhys smiled sheepishly. “You know how you tell little kids that a stork brings the babies? Well, trackers bring the babies here. So we call them storks. Not to their faces, though. They don’t like it that much.”
“I see.” I wondered what kind of nickname they had for people like me, but I didn’t think that now was the best time to ask. “So they move around a lot?”
“Well, yeah. They’re gone tracking a lot, and Finn is in pretty high demand because he’s so good at it,” Rhys explained. “His parents were some of the best, I guess. And then when they come back, a lot of them stay with some of the more prestigious families. Finn’s been here off and on for like the past five years or so. But when he’s not here, somebody else usually is.”
“So he’s like a bodyguard?”
“Yeah, something like that,” Rhys nodded.
“But what do they need bodyguards for?” I thought back to the rod iron gate and security guards that had allowed our entrance into Förening in the first place. When I had looked around the entryway, I remembered seeing a fancy alarm system by the front door. This all seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go to for a small community hidden in the bluffs.
“She’s the Queen. It’s just standard procedure,” Rhys answered evasively, and he purposely stared down at his plate. He tried to erase his anxiety before I noticed and forced a smile at me. “So how does it feel being a Princess?”
“Honestly? Not as awesome as I thought it would be,” I replied, and he laughed heartily at that.
Rhys kind of straightened up the kitchen after we finished eating, but he explained the maid would be in tomorrow at ten to take care of the rest of it.
He gave me a brief tour of the house, showing me all the ridiculous antiquities that had been passed down from generation to generation. There was room that only had pictures of previous Kings and Queens. When I asked where a picture of my father was, Rhys just shook his head and said he didn’t know anything about it.
Eventually, we parted ways. He cited some homework he had to get done, and he had to get to bed because he had school in the morning. I wandered around the house a bit more, but I never saw either Finn or Elora. I played around with the stuff in my room, but I quickly tired of it. Feeling restless and bored, I tried to get some sleep, but I had slept too late in the afternoon.
On top of all that, I felt incredibly homesick. I longed for the familiar comfort of my regular sized house with all my ordinary things. For Maggie’s suppers that she worked so hard on, and the way she always sang when she did the dishes. If I were at home, Matt would be sitting in the living room, reading a book under the glow of the lamp light. He’d be telling me to get to bed, and I’d be trying to convince him that we should stay up all night and watch The Gladiator again. I didn’t really like the movie that much, but Matt loved the architecture, so he would sometimes cave.
Right now, he was probably sitting in the kitchen, staring at the phone.
Or driving around. He had probably tracked down Patrick and threatened injury on him. Maggie was probably crying her eyes out, and I know Matt blamed himself for it. If he hadn’t let me go see Mom, I’d still be there. Or at least that’s what he thought, and it really wasn’t that far from the truth. But he hadn’t actually let me go see her. I’d made it so he didn’t have a choice.
My actual mother was somewhere in this house, or I assumed she was, anyway. She had abandoned me with a family that she knew nothing about except that they were loaded, and she knew there was a risk that my mother could kill me. It happens sometimes. That’s what she said. When I came back, after all these years away from me, she hadn’t hugged me, or even been that happy to see me.
I didn’t want to be here anymore. I threw off my covers and changed out of their chintzy pajamas into my regular old clothes I had packed in my bag.
Leaving behind everything they had given me, I crept quietly down the stairs. In a way, I felt bad for leaving them like that. Well, I felt bad for leaving Finn and Rhys without saying good-bye, but Rhys would understand. Finn might not, but maybe I didn’t care what he thought anymore. Hopefully, he stopped tracking me and had tuned into Elora so he wouldn’t notice I was leaving. That would be a damper in my plans.
Once I got outside, I realized I had no way to get home and no idea how to get there. The cold night air rested heavily on me, and I knew I had to figure something out. I looked around, but I didn’t have to look far. Rhys had left his motorcycle sitting out in the driveway. Thanks to my grand theft auto a couple years back, I knew how to drive one. I looped my arms through my backpack, and popped the bike in neutral so I could coast it to end of the driveway. Just as I suspected, Rhys was the kind of guy who left his keys in the ignition. Luck was on my side tonight.
The bike sped easily through the winding streets of Förening, and I barely even noticed the houses sleeping in the trees. There was the iron gate at the end of the road to contend with, but when I got to it, it was just as I thought. They opened up as soon as they saw me approaching. They didn’t care who left; they only checked when you came in.
Once I was out of town, I topped out the bike and almost lost control a few times, but it felt worth it. I stopped at the first gas station I saw and bought a map. It was actually fairly easy to get back. It was mostly highway, and once I got to town, I’d be able to figure it out from there. I drove as fast as I could the whole way there, afraid that Finn or somebody would notice I was missing and chase after me. Even if it meant that I never got to see Finn again, I didn’t want to go back.
I might never see Finn again. That took a painful minute to sink in, and I actually started to slow the bike down. Then I reminded myself that he had no interest in me, and he’d be leaving shortly to track someone else. And even if he didn’t, I would barely see him. Since he was no longer tracking me, he would no longer be interacting with me. Fighting back tears, I pushed the bike harder and couldn’t wait to get back.
The sky had that eerie blue glow of very early morning when I pulled up in front of my house. I hadn’t even turned off the motorcycle before Matt threw open the front door and came jogging down the porch. Last time I had come home with a stolen motorcycle, he had freaked out on me and started yelling. This time, it was different. Even in the dim light, I could see how stricken he was. He threw his arms around me and held me so tightly to him, I couldn’t breathe. I didn’t care, though. I hugged him just as hard, and over his shoulder, I saw Maggie running out of the house, crying. I buried my face in his shoulder, breathing in his familiar scent and relishing the protection of his arms.
After a whirlwind few days, I was finally home.
12
The joy of being home lasted about ten minutes. There was hugging and crying, and that was nice. Then there was Maggie yelling at me. It was a little shocking that she was the one that went to anger first, but Matt looked too exhausted to be mad. Maggie chased me into the house, yelling shrilly about how they had thought I was dead or murdered, and I was tempted to point out that those were pretty much the same things. I sat on the couch and let her go on and on, knowing that I really deserved it. I may have left for a good reason, even though I wasn’t that sure of it anymore, I d
efinitely hadn’t left in the right way.
Sneaking out in the middle of the night when I know that their lives revolve around me wasn’t the nicest thing I had ever done.
All the while, Maggie walked back and forth in front of me. Tissues were still wadded up in her hand, and her eyes were red from all the crying she had been doing. Matt stood off to the side, leaning against the fireplace, watching me with this drawn expression on his face. He never said a word. I only mumbled yes or no when it was appropriate, but it was mostly just Maggie talking.
“I just can’t believe you would do this!” Maggie had started winding down, and she stood in front of me, one hand on her hip and stared at me. “I mean, of all the stupid things you’ve done over the years, you’ve never done anything like this. You never ran away. What on earth possessed you to do something like this?”
“I don’t know,” I shrugged.
“Were you mad at us? Did we do something wrong?” Maggie was almost pleading with me, that sad, desperate look in her eyes. I had messed up, and she was wondering what she had done wrong.
“No, of course not.” I swallowed hard and shook my head. “It wasn’t anything you did.”
“Then why?” Maggie demanded. “Where did you go?”
“I went with Finn,” I said quietly. On the drive here, I had been trying to think of a good line to feed them, but I thought the easiest, most believable thing would be to just blame it on a boy. I actually had gone with Finn, and Matt already didn’t trust him, so that was the best way to go.
Maggie and Matt exchanged a look. That’s what he had been afraid of.
Maggie turned to look back at me, but Matt just stared out the window. She had tried a haphazard sex talk with me a few years ago, but neither of them were really prepared for me to grow up. When she looked back at me, she took a deep breath.
Switched Page 14