Not all of it, of course. That would have been a fairy-tale ending, and despite my occasional whispered wish, this wasn’t a fairy tale. But that wink of his reminded me of how I stood up to him when I had nothing.
I remembered when he confronted me in that restaurant on the first day that we met. I ended up spilling my guts to him, but I had enough strength to manage to convince him to give me a job.
I remembered walking into the Institute of Arts with no idea what I’d agreed to do. I was in over my head practically every single day, but I didn’t sink and drown. I struggled, and I learned to swim, and I proved that I had the skills necessary to succeed. I put together this entire party! I could convince myself that I was important, and it didn’t matter what my mother tried to guilt me into believing!
I’d known that, before this moment, but it never quite clicked with me. Maybe I just never fully believed in myself, or I’d built her up to be a bigger, scarier spectre in my mind than she truly was. But suddenly, as Sawyer winked at me, that interruption gave me the chance to fill my lungs and take what felt like the first breath of clean, fresh air after an eternity of drowning.
“No!”
The intensity of the word seemed to surprise my mother almost as much as it surprised myself. Thankfully, she was still a little off balance from Sawyer’s collision, and I managed to be the first to recover.
“No!” I repeated, a little softer but with the same strength behind the word. “No, I’m not going to let you drag me back!”
My mother blinked at me, and this time it was her mouth that moved for a second or two before she could find the words. “What are you talking about?” she hissed, somewhere between fury and complete disbelief.
“I’m talking about you! Our family! All of it! I’m done!” I knew that the guests were listening with interest, most of them not even bothering to disguise how obviously they were eavesdropping, but I didn’t care. “I’m not going to let you bully me and drag me away and convince me to be part of your life, to go along with everything that you do just to boost your own standing! I’m tired of being a prop for you, and I’m not going to let you do it to me any longer!”
I wish that she would have backed down – but I knew, as her face tightened further, that it wouldn’t be the case.
“How dare you,” she forced out through gritted teeth, staring up at me. Had I always been taller than her? Or had it come recently, and I never noticed because of how I bowed and scraped before her, trying to keep her from getting mad at me? “How dare you belittle all that I’ve done to raise you! Your dear father, rest his soul, what would he think if he saw how you were acting?”
“My ‘dear father’ was an abusive drunk,” I told her. “And I hope he’s looking up at me now and shouting out insults, knowing that they won’t do anything, that he couldn’t break me like he broke you!”
“I will cut you off,” she threatened, switching to her next tactic when shame didn’t work. “Is that what you want? All that you’ve had, all your life, you think that just came from nowhere? I had to work so hard to put food on the table, keep a roof over your head, and you’re just going to walk away? Don’t expect to come crawling back and have me give you a single penny!”
“I don’t want it!” I insisted, halfway to shouting. “And you didn’t work! You just laid on your ass and clung to every penny, giving out little bits of money here and there when you pretended to help the poor, or the children, or whatever other cause was popular at the moment, when all you were helping was yourself! I don’t want any of your money, and I’d rather be poor than have to spend any of it on myself! You didn’t do work, so now I have to learn how to do it on my own!”
Constance Melton looked around at the gathered crowd, her contemporaries. “This?” she snarled, her lip curled back in disgust. “This isn’t work. This is charity.”
“No,” I fired back. “You just think of it as charity because you don’t do any work at all! You just trade secrets and lies and extortions. That’s not work. That’s… that’s villainy!”
That last comment drew a gasp from the crowd, and my mother recoiled back from me as though she’d been stung. “How dare you?” she forced out, the anger in her voice replaced mostly by shock. I knew, however, that it wouldn’t last, and the fury was about to come rushing back in full force.
As she recoiled, however, Eastman stepped up to stand next to me. “I think that’s enough,” he said in his calm, strong tone.
In most cases, that would have been enough – if he had been dealing with anyone else. I didn’t doubt that plenty of criminals probably considered simply surrendering when they heard his strong, confident voice.
My mother, however, wasn’t one of those people. Through the years of growing up under her wing, I’d learned that there were three things that made her fly off the handle into a frenzy of fury:
Being talked down to by a chauvinistic man who thought that she belonged in the kitchen;
Slow service from a sommelier at a restaurant;
And having a strong, confident, handsome winner of a man try to tell her to calm down.
For a second, my mother’s eyes widened until I could see the white all around her eyeball, her pupils practically vibrating back and forth. She stared at Eastman, as if struggling to believe that someone like him could even dare to step forward and defend me.
“No!” she got out, a single word full of all the frustration that, for once in her life, the world wasn’t bending to her wishes and letting her get away with whatever she wanted.
And then, my mother crossed the line.
Constance Melton hadn’t lost an argument in years. When she wanted something to go her way, it did – and now that things were falling apart for the first time in years, she couldn’t fathom it. She panicked and made a rash decision, in the heat of the moment, to fight rather than to flee.
She stepped forward once again – and I saw her hand swinging towards me, ring-laden fingers curled into a fist, coming closer and closer to my face.
Chapter Twenty
* * *
Time seemed to slow down as I saw my mother’s fist coming towards my face, about to strike me.
It was something new – perhaps that was why I felt so unprepared for it, why I didn’t even think to try and dodge or move out of the way. Neither did I lift my hands or make any sort of move to defend myself. My mother had heaped verbal and emotional abuse on me for many years, most of my life, but she’d never physically attacked me before. Her words had always cut deeper than any sort of slap of punch that she could deal to me.
So all I did was watch as that fist came towards me. I couldn’t hold onto a single thought in my head, except for mild concern that this would probably screw up my face and makeup, and it would be tough for me to finish off the rest of the gala’s organizing and make sure everything wrapped up properly. Like a frightened rabbit, I stared into the large, raised diamond on her ring finger as it gleamed with reflected light.
The fist swung in, closer and closer, until it was less than a foot from breaking my skin-
-and then suddenly, something silver flashed in front of my face, and a loud clang slammed into my ears and shocked me out of my fugue and back to reality.
I shook my head, took a small step back – my first move since my mother tried to hit me. It took me a moment to make sense of the scene.
Sawyer had come to my rescue.
He must have grabbed one of the empty serving trays from the waiters. He’d held it by an edge and lifted it up sideways in front of my face like a shield – and then, either unwilling or unable to stop her forward motion, Constance had slammed her closed fist into it. Hard.
My mother staggered back a couple of steps as she tried to work out what had happened. Her fist opened up, her fingers twitching with the residual force of the impact. One of her fingers, her pointer, didn’t look quite right, but I couldn’t see it clearly with how she waved it around.
“What? You – you
assaulted me!” she finally got out, her eyes bulging out of her face as she stared up at Sawyer.
He shrugged, looking supremely unconcerned. “Pardon me, ma’am,” he said, as if this was an everyday occurrence for him. “Seems like you just tried to punch someone, as I coincidentally happened to be passing through holding this serving tray I’m returning to the kitchen. No idea how that could be seen as assault.”
I saw Sawyer glance at Eastman, and I felt a momentary bloom of concern. Would the FBI agent go along with this obvious lie? Yes, Sawyer acted to defend me, but there was no reason why my mother couldn’t press charges for assault – and if I knew her, she’d immediately do so. To her, the law was just another arrow in her quiver to use against opponents.
Eastman caught my eye. Somehow, without a word, he understood my concerns. “Bad luck, that,” he said in the most noncommittal voice I’d ever heard from him as he stepped forward. “Ma’am, is your hand okay? It looks like you might have injured yourself.”
He stepped forward, reaching out to take a look at Constance’s hand, but my mother swatted him away. I saw her eyes squeeze shut and she hissed in pain from the motion, but stubbornly refused to let him help.
“No!” she cried out again. This time, however, I heard a note of something else in her voice, a tone I’d never heard before. She sounded almost piteous, and as I looked at her, my entire view of my mother shifted.
Up until now, I’d seen her as an unstoppable force, a cold and imperious ice queen who could topple anyone. But now, as she clutched at her hand and glared daggers at everyone around her, most of whom only wanted to help, I didn’t see an ice queen. I saw a broken woman, alone and scared, unable to care for anyone but herself and incapable of perceiving why others might ever want to help her.
This wasn’t a woman for me to fear. This was a woman who needed help. She wasn’t a violent, powerful grizzly bear. She was a feral cat, hissing and scared, afraid of everything.
How had I ever been scared of her? What could she truly do to me? Nothing, I realized – unless I let her do those things.
Rudy stepped forward, and I wondered where he’d been the entire time. “Paramedics are on their way,” he said, as if delivering the most important news of the year. He looked over at Constance’s hand, and shuddered dramatically. “Oh, that looks awful. I’m so sorry this happened!”
Did he think that this accident just magically happened out of nowhere? I suspected, perhaps a bit cynically, that Rudy had seen exactly how my mother managed to injure her hand, but he didn’t want to acknowledge it. It probably wouldn’t play well in his internal narrative, as he tried to court all these celebrities and wealthy upper-crust individuals into donating more money to the Institute.
Looking around at the faces, my cynicism pointed out that he probably would end up receiving more donations than expected, thanks to this stunt. If there’s one thing I knew that wealthy, supposedly classy people enjoyed, it’s a bit of blood sport. They loved seeing that savagery come out, even as they protested how appalling it all was.
At least he had a good sense of when he needed to intervene, I considered, as Rudy managed to accomplish, with soothing words and gentle tongue clucking, what no one else had managed up to this point – to calm my mother down. He stepped forward, managed to get one hand on her elbow and the other cradling her wrist, and led her away from the interested crowd.
Sawyer, Eastman, and I watched her go. “I think,” Sawyer said as he observed my mother’s retreating backside, “that my work here is done. Let me be off, to see to my part of the gala.”
Eastman glanced over at me, raising his eyebrows slightly, as Sawyer departed. “Security,” I reminded him.
“Ah, right. Putting the fox in charge of the henhouse,” he said, but there wasn’t any strength to his words. Instead, he moved quickly to slip his arm around me, looking down at me with a strange expression. It took me a moment to place it, although I’d been seeing it more and more on his face lately.
Concern – and something else, something I couldn’t quite recognize. Warmth? Caring? Attraction?
“I’m sorry,” he said after a minute.
I blinked up at him. “You’re sorry? What are you sorry about?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know, really. Just for everything you’ve been through, on behalf of the world. You shouldn’t have had to deal with all of that.” He glanced away, and I felt him shiver slightly. “Growing up with her… I don’t think I would have turned out as normal as you did.”
“You’re calling me normal?” I challenged.
That finally got at least a soft chuckle out of him. “No, Alice. Definitely anything but normal. As is being around you.”
I smiled, leaned in closer to him. My head rested against his chest, soaked in some of his comforting warmth and calmed me. “She wasn’t always this bad,” I admitted. “When my father was still around, when I was little… back then, I think she was still happy, sometimes. But that sort of drained away over the years, and by the time I realized how bad everything had gotten, I didn’t know how I could fix any of it.”
“I don’t think it’s on you to fix,” he said, his arm tightening on me.
“I know,” I said. “But it still feels like I need to try.”
“Even now?”
“Maybe especially now.” I turned to face him a little, looking up at his strong jawline. When I’d first met Eastman, had I really thought that he wasn’t attractive? Maybe I hadn’t seen his inner strength and determination. “I always thought that my mother was so scary, that no one could stand up to her. But now, she just seems lonely and sad, full of anger that has nowhere to go.”
“She still shouldn’t take it out on you.” He brought his other arm up as well, looping it around my neck to pull me a little closer. I didn’t complain at all. It felt nice. “I didn’t protect you.”
“I didn’t ask you to.” I remembered the clang as my mother’s fist, laden with all that jewelry, collided with the serving tray Sawyer seemed to almost magically produce from nowhere. “Sawyer certainly stepped up to the plate, though.”
“She’ll probably press assault charges,” Eastman warned.
I shrugged. “Somehow, I don’t think they’ll stick. Sawyer doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who ever gets dragged into lawsuits.”
“True. And your mother may have trouble finding credible witnesses.”
I smiled, gave him a squeeze. “You’re saying that you, the big honest FBI agent, didn’t happen to witness any of what happened?”
He looked down at me, smiling just as widely as me. “Afraid I blinked, and completely missed it all. And since I didn’t get a clear view, I wouldn’t want to give any testimony, especially considering my past with Darren Sawyer. My judgement could be very clouded, and I’d hate to falsely accuse a man.”
Hah. Darren Sawyer wasn’t innocent of anything, but I still felt the same as Eastman. Sawyer wasn’t my knight in shining armor; maybe more like my knight in dirty, battered, tarnished armor, but with a strong heart of gold beating beneath that dented breastplate.
Both of our laughs slowly died off, leaving the two of us standing there, in each other’s arms, looking up at each other. By this point, most of the crowd had lost interest, now that my shrieking mother had been led away. They’d dissipated, leaving us in a little bubble of privacy.
My eyes rolled down his face, from his own glinting blue irises to his strong nose, to his mouth. At first, I’d thought that his mouth could only wear a disapproving frown, that he had almost no lips at all. But more and more, I’d seen him loosen up, laugh and joke with me when I teased out his sense of humor.
And now he was holding me very closely, dressed to kill in his tuxedo. I took a deep breath, felt my chest rise against him, pressing out against the fabric of the black dress.
Briefly, I saw his eyebrows knit together slightly as a troubling thought crossed his mind. “What?” I asked.
He shook his head at me. “
Just thinking of all the trouble I could get in here.”
“What, for not intervening when my mother tried to hit me?”
“No,” he said. “For doing this next bit.”
Doing what?
Before I could ask, he crossed the last couple inches between us. His lips met mine, and to my amazement, they were soft and gentle, not forcing himself on me. They offered a question.
I eagerly acquiesced, tightening my arms around his neck to pull myself closer, up on my tiptoes. I opened my mouth, inviting him in, and he accepted my invitation.
I opened my eyes, wanting to see him – and then, with a click, every light in the Institute went out, plunging us into darkness.
Chapter Twenty-One
* * *
Just as we started really getting into the kiss, the power company had to ruin it all by killing every light in the building.
Eastman broke the kiss, although he didn’t let yet me out of his arms – something I noticed and appreciated greatly. “Something’s going on,” he muttered, and I felt the light breeze of his head turning, looking around in the darkness.
“Maybe it’s just a power outage,” I suggested. My mind was very distracted, insisting that this was the perfect chance to sneak in a few more kisses.
“No. This has Sawyer’s fingerprints all over it. He’s making his move.”
Eastman released me, although I heard him mutter a quiet little “sorry” as he did so. There was a rustle as he reached into his pockets, and a second later, a circle of light appeared on the floor. I had to blink several times at its relative brightness, the only light in the darkness.
A second later, other lights began joining it, as guests fished out cell phones and turned them on. We heard the murmur of others as they began speculating on what had happened.
Standing next to me, I saw Eastman lift his finger to his ear. “Team, report. Come in. Damn!” he cursed. “He must have also cut the radio system.”
“How could he do that?”
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