by Moriah Jovan
His voice broke. “He was.”
And Randy, the three-year-old he’d carried in his other arm, had died of smoke inhalation. Giselle tried not to choke up herself.
“I don’t want to see that. Every time I do, I feel pain, but that sounds stupid when I say it out loud because I didn’t go through it. You did.”
She said nothing for a while as she looked, inspected, touched. He tensed everywhere she put her hands, and she knew he held himself together only by the barest of threads. She wasn’t doing much better.
“When I look at your body,” she whispered, “I see strength, protection, safety. I see a man who nearly died to save his family, who not only survived that but took on and conquered everyone who was responsible for it. This,” she said as she wrapped both hands around his upper arm where muscles lay underneath the scars and her fingers didn’t wrap but halfway around. “I see the beautiful stonework outside, the flower beds you’ve built for me, the fountain you put in one of those beds just because I fell in love with it—the one that took two men to put in the truck when you bought it for me.”
She walked around his body and ran a finger down his spine, then splayed her hands out along his lower back, and he dropped his head back as he released a pent-up breath.
“So what else, what else.” She slid her hands around his body until she felt his cock and cradled it. “There’s this,” she whispered, massaging him, but he stepped out of her arms and turned.
“Okay, no. Keep talking.”
“Why?” she asked, bemused. “What happened?”
He took a deep breath. “A man came to see me today. He’d been burned in a flash fire. He came to me because of my fire, not in spite of it or coincidentally. He had the same medical team I’d had and they insisted he contact me. I looked at him and I— I didn’t want to look at him,” he said low. “And I’m ashamed of my reaction to him; how could I, of all people, want to look away?”
Giselle thought about that while she studied him and felt his urgent distress. “Okay. You know when I said that I don’t want to see your scars because I feel pain?”
“Yes.”
“I really do. That’s why I want to not see. It hurts to see someone else in pain, especially someone you love. But for you, it’s worse. You already know what that’s like and you reacted to him more strongly than you would have if you had not gone through that yourself. I’ll bet what you actually felt was physical pain and you wanted to look away so your body would stop hurting. It’s not revulsion; it’s empathy. What do I see when I look at you? I see a warrior god.”
He grasped her upper arms and looked at her for a long time, searching her face for—what? She didn’t know. Then he gathered her to him, wrapped his arms around her as if he would never let go, and rasped, “Thank you, Wife.”
She snuggled into his embrace, so glad he had trusted her with that, and said, “You talk about your dad, about how his kindness and gentleness was the first thing people felt, how you think you don’t do that. You don’t. You make people feel safe. Cared for. Protected.
“The day I sought you out at the courthouse, I heard the pain in your voice when you gave your closing; it was your client’s pain. It was genuine. I remember how you held her while she cried into your chest. You weren’t her lawyer; you were her rock, her strength. She felt safe and comfortable. Protected. Was she ever afraid of you?”
He swallowed. “No,” he admitted after a moment. “She looked straight at me when I first met with her and she never flinched.”
“Don’t think that just because your kindness doesn’t manifest the way your dad’s did that you aren’t just as kind. Bryce,” she murmured, “could your father have pulled three children out of a burning house while being on fire?”
His eyes widened and he stared at her. “No,” he whispered. “He would have figured the odds and accepted it as the Lord’s will and died, let them die.”
“And you chose to fight the odds because of who you are. I wish you could see how people react to you. Nobody else sees or feels your anger; they only feel peace and warmth. Either you hide your anger for others’ benefit or you aren’t angry at all when you’re with other people.”
“What does that say about how I am with you and the pack, the tribe?”
“We’re your kindred spirits, Bryce. We are savages. We know you for who you are and we love you for it, not in spite of it and you embrace us and our savagery.” She paused, then said slowly, “You came home to us.”
He swallowed and his face tightened with emotion, tears he didn’t want to shed, wouldn’t shed.
“I think it’s time to start drawing up plans for that foundation of yours.”
“Ours,” he rumbled. Giselle smiled at the immediacy of his response, for it must have weighed heavy on his mind for some time.
“Ours.”
* * * * *
58: RIDE OF THE VALKYRIES
Knox dropped a thick file on the documents that littered the conference room table, right in front of Sebastian’s face. Then he dropped a banker’s box full of more files a little farther down the table.
“I don’t know what kind of a link between OKH and HRP you’re looking for, but in all of this, there is no link that can be found. It’s, ah, interesting, but nothing to do with OKH.”
Vaguely disappointed, Sebastian drew a deep breath and opened the file. “I know there’s something going on there,” he muttered. “I can feel it in my gut.” Then he looked up at Knox. “Do you know that CEOland thinks you and I are at war over OKH?”
“Well. We are. Kinda.”
“Yeah, pushing it off on the other doesn’t count. Eilis told me that’s the impression everyone’s got. She was surprised when I told her it was us versus Fen.”
Knox pulled out a chair and sat. “I find that odd. Why would she think that when I gave her to you?”
“She had to rearrange her assumptions PDQ, but then she didn’t know where to put them. The minute I told her that you and I are allied against Fen, it was like the sun came up. She couldn’t wait to agree to the IPO.”
Knox didn’t respond and Sebastian began to read the information in front of him. Pages and pages of social services reports documenting a life of foster care. “Interesting indeed,” Sebastian murmured before he got into the meat of it.
*
The child continues to display an unwillingness to cooperate with current family; suspect abuse. Spot check 4/13.
Child taken to ER for spiral fracture of ulna. Placed with different family.
*
Sebastian sat, his mind numbed with the very first two paragraphs he’d read. He wiped his mouth, wondering if he wanted to continue reading.
*
Child bonding with foster mother and father but application for adoption denied at child’s request.
Application for emancipation of a minor approved.
*
“She was an emancipated minor at fifteen,” Sebastian murmured.
“Yes. Did you notice what’s redacted?”
No, he hadn’t noticed and he flipped through the pages. “She had her last name changed when she was emancipated.”
“Yes, and I can’t find out what it was.”
Sebastian pursed his lips and went back to reading.
*
Child placed with Klewezewski family 6/30. Child requests transfer to Reyes family. Transfer 7/4.
Child taken to ER, spontaneous abortion.
*
Sebastian checked the date, her recorded birth date, and sucked in a breath. He felt a pain behind his sternum that he didn’t recognize. “Eleven years old,” he whispered. “Fuck.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t do this,” Sebastian said and began to close the file, but Knox’s fist slammed down onto the pile of paper and he rose up over the table.
“You will,” he snarled, and Sebastian pulled away from him. “Don’t make her tell you this. You will read it and I’ll stay here until you do
. Reading it can in no way compare to the fact that Eilis Whoever-Logan has suffered through it. Read it, feel whatever pain you’re capable of feeling, then maybe you can begin to understand what the rest of the population feels.”
“What the fuck does that mean?!”
“You avoid pain like the plague, that’s what the fuck that means. You take shots at me for going off the rails, always doing things the hard way. You take shots at Giselle for shit-canning a temple marriage after waiting so long. You take shots at Bryce for shit-canning his entire life to fuck a woman he knew less than a day, poking at us because we’re hypocrites and you’re not. Shit, no, you’re not a hypocrite. You decided you didn’t believe anything so you could go do whatever the fuck you wanted to do without being accountable to anybody.”
Sebastian just stared at Knox, wondering where the Chouteau County prosecutor had suddenly come from. “Where is this coming from?” Sebastian asked. “What have I done?”
“How long has it been since you talked to Eilis?”
“March, but I’ve emailed—”
“No. The beginning of February, when you got pissed at her and ditched her in New York in an auction house where you’d just made her sell off all her most prized possessions.”
Sebastian swallowed.
“And then you cooked up that bullshit Ford stunt and humiliated her. Ford saw her in March. Giselle told you what to do, told you to go back to being who you were before you took your issues with Ford out on Eilis. And did you do what she told you to do? No. Eilis hasn’t seen you once in five months and she’s sitting up there at HRP soldiering on alone with a weekly email that’s copied to me. What she really needs is the same coddling you give everybody you fix. But no. You must love her, because you’re treating her like shit.”
Sebastian stared at him in pained wonder. “You think I’m a complete bastard.”
“Yes, I do.” He waved a hand toward the documents he’d brought. “I did what you asked, got these records. So I finish reading all this bullshit this morning and go see her, take her to lunch, maybe talk to her about it if she wants, ask her her birth name, see how she’s doing, if there’s anything I can do for her, and I find what? The trustee I assigned has all but abandoned her and mind you, she didn’t tell me this. Her new CFO—”
“Conrad Fessy,” Sebastian whispered.
“Yeah, him. He asks me when you’re coming back because you haven’t been there since Eilis got back from her vacation. And she was as calm, cool, and collected as she always is. Shit, she could give Epictetus lessons.”
Sebastian blanched.
“And you know what? Before today, I never really noticed that you haven’t had a whole lot of pain or failure in your life.”
He opened his mouth.
“If you say your mission, I’ll put your head through the fucking table.”
He snapped it shut again and watched Knox, his cousin, his brother, in a rage Sebastian had never seen directed toward family.
“Giselle’s already gone through this with you, but apparently you didn’t get it, so here I am after I had to threaten her with a subpoena to get a full accounting of what went down with Ford. You’re a fucking coward, Sebastian. You’ve always been a coward, starting when you bailed on your mission because it was hard and you had no control and you had to follow someone else’s rules and you were afraid of failure.”
“But Mitch—”
“Yeah. Mitch Hollander. Couldn’t hack the mission because it was full of stupid pricks who shouldn’t have been there. Not his fault. Came home early. Got mocked, laughed at, called weak. Accused of fucking around. Couldn’t get a date for shit because he wasn’t a ‘returned missionary.’ Lucky to find a girl to marry him at all. I went to BYU so I could find a wife. Ask me how many nice LDS girls ever went out with me—a guy who didn’t go on a mission at all. That would be a big fat zero and I came home single when I thought I’d be coming home married with kid.
“So Mitch did what? Went back to Pennsylvania and built the country’s biggest fucking steel mill and put the entire fucking industry back on its feet single-handedly. Then he absorbed Jep Industries to save the industry all over again. While his wife was dying, while his kids were little, while he’s a bishop. Pain, Sebastian. Pain and adversity and failure build people. You have never known that and you have no patience with or empathy for people who have—especially the people you love.”
Sebastian didn’t know if he would be able to catch his next breath. Knox stared at him with a mixture of rage, deep hurt, and contempt.
“You didn’t paint Giselle to help her when she thought she had no hope with Bryce. You painted her to make your name rise another notch—‘going into his symbolic period,’ my ass—and she doesn’t know that. She thinks you were being sensitive and altruistic to her pain. Not only that, but you don’t even know why she consented to be painted nude in the first place.
“There is no honor in remaining detached from life, from its hardships and its pain. The only reason you’ve been able to do it is because you’ve always had money, always had power, always had leverage. I want you to understand pain and failure—even if it’s vicarious. Eilis has spilled her soul to Giselle and don’t you dare make her do it again. If you love this woman, and you might, insofar as you are capable of feeling that kind of love, read it. If you don’t love her, then okay, just say so and I’ll release you from her receivership and appoint Blackwood because she trusts him.”
Sebastian’s eyes widened and his gut tightened. “You’ve already talked to him.”
“I have and he’s willing to do that for her. I’ve been thinking about this for a while now, thought if Jack was her trustee, that would free you up to pursue a relationship with her. If all you wanted was to fuck her, I probably could’ve lived with that if you’d waited until you were finished, but you humiliated her and now I just want to protect her from you.”
There was that stabbing in Sebastian’s chest again. He didn’t know what it was or which direction it was coming from. Eilis—what he’d done to Eilis—Mitch, Knox, Giselle, Kenard. He watched the Chouteau County prosecutor sit back down calmly and fold his arms across his chest and prop his feet up on the chair next to him, as if he hadn’t just ripped him to shreds.
When Knox saw he still stared, he curled his lip and slammed his fist on the table again and bellowed, “READ!” with an expression Sebastian had only seen once. In a courtroom. Questioning a serial killer.
So Sebastian read. And he sank into darkness, a darkness he had never known.
*
Child (age 5) taken to ER. Broken collarbone
Child (age 13) taken to ER. Spontaneous abortion
Child (age 14) taken to ER. Spontaneous abortion
Child (age 9) taken to ER. Cigarette burns
Child (age 12) taken to ER. Prescription drug overdose. Suspect suicide attempt. Admission to psychiatric unit. Update: Suicide attempt ruled out; suspect poisoning
Child (age 7) reported doing well in school, but withdrawn
Spot check on Reyes family. Child (age 15) laughing and eating with family
*
Sebastian couldn’t breathe. He couldn’t contain whatever it was that was happening to him and finally, he shoved his hands through his hair and stood, bellowing something he didn’t understand. He picked up a chair and swung it through one of the frosted glass walls, shattering it.
“That’s right,” Knox sneered. “You go ahead and throw your little tantrum. You have the luxury of being able to replace whatever you destroy. Sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. Keep reading.”
Sebastian’s chest heaved with anger and something else that hurt. Really, really hurt. Eilis’s past, her suffering. His family’s contempt. The fact that everything Knox said was true.
He sat and continued to read. High school transcripts. Straight As. College transcripts. Penn Valley Community College, a business vo-tech school, three different small and very un-prestigious urban liberal ar
ts colleges. Straight As. Bloch School of Business. Straight As. MBA.
Married and divorced once. No mention of any more pregnancies or children.
Court transcripts from Knox’s prosecution of David Webster.
*
KH: Mrs. Webster, did you know what your husband was doing to your company?
EW: Yes.
KH: When did you find out?
EW: Two weeks after he moved in with me.
KH: How did you find out?
EW: I found a tiny scrap of paper on the floor by the dresser and I picked it up.
KH: What was on the paper?
EW: The combination to my office safe.
KH: Had you ever given him that combination?
EW: No. I’d never given it to anyone.
KH: How did he get it?
EW: I don’t know.
KH: What was in your office safe?
EW: The key to the safe deposit box where I kept the access to the cash reserves.
KH: Didn’t you ever check the statements?
EW: No. I thought they were untouchable so I let David reconcile those statements and I didn’t ask to see them.
KH: What was your first thought when you saw that small scrap of paper?
EW: That he’d been in my safe. That he had access to everything. That there was only one reason he’d want to be in my safe.