by Geneva Lee
Gilt: Sin Never Sleeps
Geneva Lee
Contents
Copyright
Later
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Sneak Peek of All Fall Down
Sinner or Saint Sweepstakes
A Note From the Author
Also by Geneva Lee
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Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
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Gilt: Sin Never Sleeps/ Geneva Lee. — Electronic ed.
ISBN-13:978-1-945163-05-0
Created with Vellum
Later
Lies are so easy to tell, and sins are so hard to forgive. It’s odd how even something as simple as a coat of paint can be deceptive until viewed in the right light. I never knew what I preferred—a pretty lie or a sorry sinner—until now.
The room has been redone to have a sleek, modern appeal. Everything is white and minimal with clean lines and the most abstract of abstract art, but the stale scent of cigarette smoke still hangs in the room. It's proof that Vegas is a city out of time, or maybe just one unhinged from reality. If it weren't for the acrid smell assaulting my nostrils, the space might actually seem luxurious. No doubt the renovation had been a ploy to try to convince visitors the hotel is worth the hefty price tag.
Next month, I will have some serious explaining to do when my mom and Hans get my emergency credit card bill. But if this situation doesn’t count as a crisis, nothing ever will.
I sit on the edge of the bed and wait with my hands folded in my lap. Being nervous is strange. Of course, I’ve never called a service before. Until a few days ago, my only contact with call girls had been my shoes on the fliers littering the streets. Somehow it still feels inevitable. I'm in too deep not to follow the clues.
But this room, in this hotel, in this city could never hope to be more than a mirage. Because the one thing tourists never see is the truth. The bones of Las Vegas are rotten, weakened by greed and excess. Even in a fancy hotel room I can’t see past that fact.
A knock on the door startles me, and I stand, smoothing my dress as if I need to impress her. When I open the door, I'm met by familiar, if surprised eyes. The shock mirrored in them quickly shifts to anger.
Stepping to the side, I hold out my arm. “Won’t you come in?”
Chapter One
“Don’t forget your sunscreen,” Mom calls to me from across the patio. She eyes me watchfully from under the black brim of an oversized sun hat.
If only this were about sunscreen. I sigh and pick up the bottle of SPF 50 she sets out for me every morning. Slathering it on my legs, I’m careful to avoid the cuts that are still healing from the incident, as she calls it.
It’s only 10 a.m., but I’ve already reapplied twice. That’s Palm Springs for you. If you don’t melt in the sun, your sunscreen will. In some ways, the desert city is a lot like Vegas, particularly when it comes to their heat indexes. But what had once been the exclusive playground to Hollywood is now more of a retirement community.
There isn’t much to do here, which is why I like to visit. It’s a break from the frenetic hustle of Las Vegas. But given the circumstances of my early exodus to my mother’s house, she’s been constantly hovering. It’s like having a bodyguard without the perks of being a rock star. No sex, drugs, or rock-n-roll under her watch.
Lying back on the chaise, I shut my eyes tightly to the sun, which is creeping steadily toward the center of the sky. I can still feel its heat as its blazing light burns through my eyelids.
Palm Springs is my place to relax—at least it usually is. But Zen is in short supply these days. On the glass table next to me, my phone buzzes. I don’t have to look at the message to know who it’s from. There are only two people in the world who would bother to text me, and one of them used his one phone call weeks ago to reach someone else. I can’t exactly blame him. After he was arrested for assaulting my father, the police had held him while they continued to investigate his father’s murder. Without a law degree, I’m useless to Jameson West. It’s been even harder to be supportive since my mother whisked me from the hospital straight to California. Between my absence and my paranoia that he might be a murderer, I’m a shoo-in for girlfriend of the year.
My dad didn’t object to the rearrangement of custody, but he’d been avoiding me since our last father-daughter brawl. So I know the text is from neither of them, which only leaves Josie. Pushing myself up, I catch the strings of my bikini top and tie it tightly around my neck. I grab my sunglasses and my phone, but as soon as my feet hit the searing heat of the cement, Mom’s face appears from under her hat.
“Drink some water,” she advises.
“I will,” I promise, forcing myself not to sound too sarcastic. If she doesn’t ease up, I’ll make good on that promise by drowning myself. The weight of the water would be a lot less oppressive than her nagging.
She’s scared, a small voice in my head reminds me.
That makes two of us, another retorts.
Great. Now my inner monologues are fighting, too.
I pause near the sliding glass doors and for a second, the sound of shattering glass and the sharp sting of shards piercing through skin overtakes me. The memory overrides the present until I shake it off.
“Everything okay, Emma?” Mom asks.
I swallow before I nod. “Everything is fine, but I wanted to talk to you about something.”
She abandons Oprah’s latest book club pick and turns to face me. “Yes?”
“It’s just…I promised Dad that I would be around this summer…” I begin, leaving out that I no longer feel obliged to keep that promise—not after I’d been the unintended recipient of his fist. I self-consciously stroke the yellow remnants of the bruise he’d given me. He might have been aiming for Jameson, but he got me. Conveniently for him, no one questioned where the injury on my stomach came from after the accident that night. “So I think I need to head back to Belle Mère.”
Her lips purse as if my words taste funny, and she shakes her head slowly. “I don’t think that’s a good idea. With everything going on there–”
“That’s exactly why I need to go back,” I interrupt. She had to know this was coming. I’ve never stayed at her r
esort in Palm Springs longer than two weeks. As of today, I’ve been here almost a month. “I’ve been here a lot longer than usual.”
“And you spent the first week on narcotics,” she reminds me.
“I’m fine now.” I cross my tan arms over my chest, my golden skin serving as further proof that I’ve spent enough time lounging poolside.
“And you haven’t outstayed your welcome,” she says as if that’s the reason I’d feel obliged to go.
“Look, Josie needs me. The shop needs me—” I stop myself before I add Jameson to that list. Mom doesn’t need to know that he is also pulling me home, not after what happened at his house. Honestly, I’m not even certain he wants me to return to Belle Mère.
And my Mom may not want to admit it, but the strange events plaguing my small community concern her. It doesn’t take a degree in psychology to know she’s choosing to avoid the reality of the situation.
She pulls off her hat and wipes sweat from her damp forehead, then turns the full intensity of her gaze on me. Meeting her cold, emerald eyes is like staring into a mirror. “Hans and I have been talking. We think it would be best if you transfer here for your senior year.”
“Here?” I ask in disbelief. “What happened to ‘I need to worry about college’? Does Palm Springs even have—”
“Here as in California. There are plenty of options in Los Angeles,” she stops me.
“Los Angeles?” I explode. “No way. You might not like it, but I have a life back in Belle Mère.”
“A life you almost lost,” she says flatly.
“It was an accident,” I remind her, even as a shiver ripples up my spine. I’d been too freaked out to tell her the truth, so I’d gone along with the story that Monroe West had concocted about that night. Leighton had been drunk, and when she stumbled, she took me with her, falling through a plate-glass window a few feet to the patio below. I’m certain it was easier to buy off the cops to overlook the underage drinking and partying than it would’ve been to undermine an investigation into something more sinister. No one has questioned the story, even though Leighton is still in a coma.
But I can’t deny the truth to myself: we’d been pushed. Mom didn’t know that. Theoretically, Monroe didn’t either, even though she’d conveniently fed a story to the paramedics.
“Accidents aren’t always innocent,” Mom says. The shiver running through me turns into a full chill that settles deeply in my bones. She isn’t talking about me and what happened at the West penthouse. She’s talking about Becca.
“I’m going to be fine,” I promise her softly. I only hope I can make good on that claim.
“We’ll talk about this later.” She picks her book back up and returns her attention to the dog-eared page. I’ve been dismissed, but I’m not free to go.
“When are you coming home?” Josie asks as soon as FaceTime connects. Half of her head is covered in Bantu knots while the rest of her hair is recklessly curly. Josie, like her hair, is a study in contrasts. Both prim and responsible with a wild streak that carves a bigger path through her personality with each passing year. I plop onto my bed with my computer.
“Hello to you, too.” The glare of afternoon sun makes it hard to see the screen, so I shimmy toward the headboard.
“It’s a serious question, Em. I need you to come home. I need your help.”
Her panic raises my eyebrows. Josie Deckard doesn’t need anything—at least not from me. She could use a little validation or maybe a call from her absentee father, but she certainly isn’t the type to ask for help.
“What’s going on?” If she isn’t having a melodramatic moment, I might be forced to make good on the threat I made to my mom to leave Palm Springs sooner rather than later.
“There’s just a lot of stuff going on,” she says. “Leighton is still in the coma, and they’ve hauled in half of Belle Mère for questioning in the West murder.”
“At least they’re still looking for suspects,” I interject. It doesn’t take an advanced degree in forensics and criminology to see that the FBI has already pinned Nathaniel West’s murder on his son. It isn’t something I want to consider, because I need to believe that Jameson West is innocent. I told him I believed he was, and I did believe it at the time. Also, because he’s my boyfriend. Or was my boyfriend. I’m not entirely sure about that now. I rub absently at the still healing cuts covering my forearm. Jameson couldn’t have been the one to push Leighton and me through that window, which helps his case with me. If someone wanted to shut us up that badly, they were probably hiding something. However, I’d never gotten the full story from Leighton about who she was protecting. I’d overheard her telling Monroe that she wouldn’t tell anyone about him. I assumed she was talking about Jameson, but the only thing she managed to tell me that she was protecting Jonas. Then someone shoved both of us through a plate-glass window. No one can claim the Wests don’t throw killer parties.
“It’s more than that,” Josie interrupts my thoughts. “Do you have your phone?”
I hold it up, and she breathes a heavy sigh that is definitely not one of relief.
“I sent you a message on Instagram,” she says.
“Snap a pic of your lunch to share with me? Did you pin some bikini-ready, summer workouts, too?” I ask dryly as I slide past the lock screen on my phone.
In my Instagram messages, I find her note. Clinking on the link she sent, I’m taken to an account I’ve never seen before. But even though I don’t recognize the username—TheDealer— the photos are full of people I know.
“Check out the fifth one down,” Josie says in a quiet voice. My eyes flicker back to the computer screen, only to find her own eyes clenched shut. When I reach the photo, it takes a moment for me to see past the blurriness of the picture. It had clearly been taken from some distance. Someone else might not recognize the girl with the wild mop of curls and the petite figure, but I know my best friend when I see her. I don’t know the man she’s with, though.
“What is this?” I ask in confusion.
“That’s Tom,” she says. “Or maybe Aaron, I don’t remember. It’s not important.”
“It’s important enough that you called me freaking out in the middle of the afternoon to beg me to come home. Who is this guy, Josie?”
“Who do you think?” she asks in measured syllables.
“Oh.” Realization dawns on me. Despite how often she ditches me to hook up with random men, I haven’t seen her in action until now. “Did you and he ...”
I suddenly wish that I was playing Madlibs, so I could finish that sentence with something innocent or benign. Did you and he save a kitten? Did you and he play miniature golf? Instead, my mind fills in the blank with visions of rendezvouses that would make E. L. James blush.
“Yes,” she answers pointedly, putting me out of my misery.
“How did someone take a picture?” I ask. While Josie might be working through a daddy complex, she’s not stupid. A stream of selfies will destroy her life as much as it will this man’s. She doesn’t take pics of her hook-ups, and she doesn’t allow them to either.
“Look closer,” she whispers. I scroll through the feed and realize it isn’t your typical narcissistic teen feed. No selfies. No documenting every minute detail of a single day. All the pictures on this account are of other people—other people we know. Each one is an odd mix of photojournalism and surveillance camera.
“Do you know who took these?” I ask her.
I can’t stop looking. It’s almost addictive, and I catch myself wondering if I’ll make an appearance. The photos are captioned with initials and a location, but nothing else.
“My mom is going to kill me,” Josie moans, ignoring my question.
“How is she even going to see these? Your mom’s not really social media savvy.”
I don’t admit that I understand what has her so freaked out. Just the existence of that photo reveals a side of Josie that she keeps under wraps. If this whole feed is full of photos of our
Belle Mère cohorts, more than a few people might have already seen it.
“Where did you even find out about this?” I try a different tactic to get the information out of her.
“The account followed me,” she says. She pauses as if struggling with whether or not to tell me the next bit. “They’re following Monroe, Hugo, and Jameson, too.”
“Jameson,” I repeat. My heart sinks into my stomach. What photos of him might be on display?
“Are you talking to him yet?” Josie asks.
I shake my head, relieved that there’s something more pressing to focus on. “So they’re following all of you, but that doesn’t mean—”
“Emma,” Josie interrupts me. “They’re following your account, too.”
I put my phone on the desk uncertain I want to unearth my own incriminating moments captured with someone else’s camera. “Why would someone do this?”
“To ruin my life,” Josie informs me immediately. She’s put some thought into this, obviously.
“It’s only a photo—” I begin, but she cuts me off.
“That’s easy for you to say,” Josie shrieks. “If my mom sees these pictures, I’ll be enrolled in the Bellevue Girls Academy for the summer session with no parole in sight.”
“This isn’t Hamlet,” I stop her, wishing I had a few hundred Xanax on hand. Josie is clearly on the verge of a nervous breakdown while I’ve been avoiding reality in Palm Springs. “Your mom’s not going to send you to a nunnery.”
Josie falls backward, disappearing from sight momentarily. The screen goes black, and I squash the panic that rises in my chest. Then she blurs back into focus. I spot her familiar polka dot comforter, and a pillow clutched to her chest. When she finally speaks, her voice is small. “You only see the nice side of my mother.”
“At least your mother has a nice side,” I grumble. “My mom went nuclear when I told her I was thinking about leaving Palm Springs. It’s going to take some serious ego massaging to calm her down if I go.” I leave out that she wants me to stay in California permanently. Right now isn’t the time to deliver more bad news.