by Ashley Gee
“Watch your tone with me, kid.” West’s steely-eyed gaze makes it clear that he can only be pushed so far. “I don’t need your money, but if you don’t want my help, then feel free to let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”
It’s eight in the morning, the earliest that the doors of the courthouse open. I know that because I had waited outside for the past hour or so. Way too early for this shit. Not like I ever actually get sleep, but my mind never races the way it has for the last few hours, ever since I got the news that the only person standing between me and the poorhouse is Zaya fucking Milbourne.
“Okay, you’re right.” I’m not going to apologize, but West knows better than to expect that from me. “Tell me what I need to do.”
“Exactly what the agreement says: convince the girl to marry you and get her pregnant, ideally within a few months, but the contract gives you a year. Keep in mind, there only needs to be a confirmed pregnancy for the codicil to be fulfilled.”
I raise a mocking eyebrow. “Does that mean what I think it does?”
“Miscarriage,” West bites out. “My mother struggled with fertility issues, so the contract provides some allowances. Married by nineteen and pregnant at least once by age twenty, those are the requirements.”
I wouldn’t be able to think of a more ridiculous situation if I tried. “But why nineteen? I haven’t even graduated from high school yet. Marriage can’t wait for longer than the first semester of college?”
“Your Grandpa Abbott believed in marrying young. He met his wife when she was fifteen, and they had their first child only a year later. It’s something of a family tradition.”
Because the rich are allowed to have predilections that would be forbidden to anyone else.
“Except nobody forced you to get married when you were still in high school.”
“I’m an Abbott, not a Cortland. Your father wanted a piece of our pie, and he knew what that might require. I don’t know what else to tell you.”
It’s hard not to feel like someone is making a point of conspiring against me. Grandpa Abbott died when I was still a kid, but he had to have known the kind of chaos that would result from this stupid agreement.
This shouldn’t be legal.
The basic mechanics of it could be manageable. Getting married so young isn’t even really the problem — a quickie divorce after a few years should be relatively easy to brush under the rug. There are plenty of girls who’d be willing to visit a clinic, or at least take a settlement for child support and then be on their way.
It is the who that has become my major sticking point.
“What about this crap with the girl needing to be from a Founding family? The Abbotts aren’t Founding.”
“And that fact stuck in his craw until the day my father died.” West lets out a rueful laugh, as if the insane ramblings of a demented old man are somehow humorous. “I’m not saying you have to like it, but if you want your inheritance, then you know what you have to do. Marry a Founding girl and get her pregnant, then the two of you can quietly divorce as if it was just a short and forgotten chapter in your lives. You don’t even need custody of the baby to make this work.”
I want to rip out every hair on my damn head. This is the most frustration I’ve felt in my entire life. “The only Founding daughter even remotely appropriate is Zaya Milbourne. I’m not exactly her favorite person in the world.”
“Sounds like you’ve got some buttering up to do.”
I’ve spent the majority of the last five years making her life a living hell. There isn’t enough butter in the world to grease my way through Zaya’s defenses. The minute she finds out that the my future is in the palm of her hand, she’ll crush it into dust.
I grit my teeth. “Zaya hates me.”
And I hate her.
“A year will go by before you know it.” West’s smile is grim. “Better get started changing her mind, and soon.”
Eleven
I spend the entire drive into the valley trying to convince myself to turn around.
My Maserati convertible takes the hairpin turns of the cliff-side road at reckless speed. Driving too fast on a road that has killed its fair share of people is an objectively bad idea, but I sometimes visualize what it might be like to blow through one of the barriers and go soaring into empty air.
I have no interest in dying, but I’ve always wondering what it might be like to fly.
You occasionally have to risk your life to remind yourself that it’s still worth living. Some days, driving too fast works well enough.
Other days, it doesn’t.
Today is the sort of day when my thoughts turn violently dramatic. Insane thoughts that don’t have any business in the brain of a Cortland.
We have no use for weakness.
Those are the words my father would use if I ever shared anything with him aside from pleasantries and business discussions. I’ve spent enough years of my life being weak. There isn’t any more room for it, not when I have a kingdom to rule.
A wheelchair is still gathering dust somewhere in Cortland Manor, locked away in my old room which is off limits even to the servants. I keep it as a relic of a time that would otherwise be forgotten, because I won’t ever forget.
I’ve been born twice.
Once as an infant, innocent of sin and naive to the ways of the world.
Then I died. When they brought me back, I was reborn as something else.
Whatever it is that I’ve become.
But I’m not going to make any apologies, no one else ever has.
Driving into the Gulch is a visceral shock, especially when coming from the Bluffs. It’s like jumping into frigidly cold water on a summer day — adjusting to it is similar to physical pain. But being in the Gulch is something one never really gets accustomed to.
Poverty like this shouldn’t exist outside of charity infomercials, especially in a town with precious metals still buried in the dirt.
Entering the Gulch is like stepping into an old photograph from the Great Depression: everything is grainy and more than a little sad. I don’t understand how people can stand to live here. Why don’t they head to a bigger town or even to place like Los Angeles where at least there are opportunities for something better?
But I say that, even as I know the situation is never that simple. Most of the people who live here have been around since the beginning, and the newer transplants have their own reasons for staying. The mines and field work were the biggest draws, but the population stayed the same even when that work dried up.
Some of the older folks, like Zaya’s grandfather, act like accepting the inevitable is the same as admitting defeat. They still remember the good old days and swear up and down they’ll swing round again.
I say you should know when to cut your losses before things get worse.
But It’s hard to tear a tree out by the roots, even if the ground around it is barren and dead.
That said, if Old Man Milbourne had left when he had the chance, then he probably would have tried to take his granddaughter with him.
I’m not going to let that happen.
That girl has a penance to pay, and this is the only place it can happen. This only ends where it began, and she knows it. The past is a debt to the future, and her bill is about to come due.
Even if she becomes Mrs. Vincent Cortland.
Even if it destroys us both.
I know where to find Zaya, just like I know everything else about her. Years of useless study and obsessive interest. I’ve known since the day we met that she would either destroy my life or save it. She already did the first one, I’m interested to see if she manages the second.
There is no way she’ll agree to marry me willingly, and I still haven’t decided if I’ll try to force her. For someone who everyone thinks folds like a house of cards, Zaya Milbourne has a core of steel hiding underneath that silent exterior.
She was abandoned by a mother who had her way too young.
It doesn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out that getting pregnant before the end of high school would be absolutely out of the question for her.
Anyone else I would just offer money.
I know from experience she’ll just throw it back in my face.
But I like to think I can be charming when I want it to be. Everyone can be manipulated, you just need to know what buttons to push.
Everyone has a trigger, even someone as stubborn as Zaya.
Her stubbornness might be one of the few things worth liking about her. The girl never backs down from a challenge, even when it would be in her own best interests to keep her head down. The last few years are more than proof of that.
I would have given her voice back a long time ago if she had been willing to tell me what I need to know.
Our past is a concern for another time, I remind myself. Right now, I need something from her, and our history doesn’t factor into it at all.
For this much money, I’m willing to forget about almost anything.
At least for a little while.
Smooth roadway turns cracked and jagged with potholes large enough to sink a lawnmower, which is how I know I’m almost to the boundary of the Gulch. Despite my desire for haste, I slow down to a snail’s pace around the broken pieces of asphalt in the road, because I’m not reckless enough to risk blowing a tire in this neighborhood. My Maserati would be missing rims with a ripped out radio before I finished the call with roadside assistance.
This place is a cesspit full of scavengers and the dregs of society.
My luxury car catches more than one curious glance as I roll down the street, random assholes obviously scoping out what they think is an easy target. A group of hood guys on the corner, dressed in slouched jeans and gang colors, seem particularly interested. But I turn my head and boldly meet their gazes at a stop sign, daring them to try something. Once they realize who is sitting in the driver’s seat, they immediately look away.
They need to remember who the fuck I am.
Even the gangbangers and petty thieves in the Gulch are smart enough to realize that messing with me isn’t worth the fire my family would rain down on them.
I still watch them in the rearview mirror when I pull away from the light. There isn’t a good reason to start a fight with odds this bad, but I’m not going to let anyone make me look like a punk. I’m not afraid of a fight, but I am alone.
What would they think if they knew I’m less than a year from being penniless, no better than the losers stocking shelves or laying roofing tiles? The power of the Cortland name is almost entirely based on the money backing it up. If we don’t own this town, then who the fuck are we?
I stopped questioning the seemingly unlimited power of my name a long time ago. People treated me like I held the power of life and death in the palm of my hand early on, and so I acted like I believed it. Eventually, it became a cycle that no longer had a beginning or an end.
Which came first: the golden goose, or the asshole with a silver spoon in his mouth?
When people act like you’re the center of the universe, that belief becomes indistinguishable from the truth.
They treat you like you’re important, so you are.
Which came first: the chicken, the egg, or my inflated sense of self-worth?
So I started saying jump, just to see how high they would all go. And you know what they say about absolute power…
It’s pretty fucking awesome most of the time.
Also empty.
Secretly, I’ve always wondered when everyone will finally figure out that I’m not much more than a paper tiger. The emperor has no clothes and a slightly above average sized dick.
Okay, probably significantly above average, but still.
Zaya is the only one who saw through me from the very beginning. A lot of emotions crossed her face when she first looked at me, but fear wasn’t one of them. Whatever exists between us is beyond something as simple as fear, and it only makes me want to drive her further into the ground.
Even when we were kids, I knew God had put Zaya Milbourne in my life to test me. I’m only now realizing that it might be a test I fail.
The parking lot of the Gas and Sip is barely worthy of the name, and I wince in sympathy with my car’s suspension as I crawl over the broken pavement. The lot is to the side of the building and its windows face the street, so there isn’t a place to park where I can still see my car from inside. I just have to take the risk that it will still be here when I get back.
If it’s not, I’ll just buy another before my inheritance becomes a figment of my imagination.
Zaya needs to come to the negotiating table, I remind myself. She has to put our past aside and deal with me, which means I have to reign in my tendency to turn malevolent whenever I see her face. This should be easy.
My hatred for her doesn’t compare to half a billion dollars.
Her form is just barely visible through the steel bars that cover the dirty pane of glass at the front of the store. Like always, she is behind the counter, although I have to wonder how a girl who doesn’t speak handles a job in customer service.
The orange smock she wears over her sweatshirt makes her look like a carrot that has just been pulled out of the ground, especially with the wild mop of dark hair flying loose around her head. The florescent polyester should make her look ridiculous, but I can’t stop the way my body always reacts to the sight of her, whether she is dressed in her finest or drooling in her sleep.
I’m hard as a rock.
A smile twists her lips. Her smiles are rare, like a ray of sunshine breaking through storm clouds. Usually I’d feel an urge to wipe it off her face, but it isn’t directed at me. My gaze moves to the other side of the counter and takes in the object of her obvious regard.
Jake Tully.
I tell myself to count to ten and calm down before I do something to sabotage my plan before it even starts.
One Mississipi.
This guy has been in town long enough to understand the rules of this game, but he clearly still needs a violent reminder.
Two Mississippi.
A nice guy who doesn’t have a decade’s worth of baggage, like a weed growing in a garden that doesn’t belong to him.
Three Mississippi.
And he makes her smile. The only smiles I ever see are the ones she gives other people when she thinks I’m not watching.
Four Mississippi.
My gaze shifts away from their faces as the fuckboy hands her a crisp twenty, their fingers touching for way longer than necessary.
A haze settles over my vision, casting everything in red.
Fucking ten.
The door is already slamming open in front of me, before I’ve even realized I’m moving. They don’t seem to notice me, which just ratchets my rage higher.
I should have known playing it cool wouldn’t be an option.
Twelve
Two days a week, I work as a cashier at the Gas and Sip on Main Street. Even though it barely qualifies as a convenience store, the Gas and Sip is the only place to get food in the Gulch that isn’t served under golden arches or out of a truck that stinks of pork and barbecue sauce. There is a fancy grocery store in the nicer part of town close to the Bluffs, full of organic produce and bulk foods that shoppers can measure out themselves. No one from the Gulch ever shops there, because not only is the store overpriced, but none of the bus routes go there. Even if you have a car, it takes half a tank of gas to make it up the steep roads of the valley
I walk to work, just like I walk most places, past broken storefronts and houses with boarded up windows. Low-hanging fog always descends on the valley in the afternoons, making everything seem like it has been painted in grayscale. Sometimes, the fog is thick enough that I can’t see someone coming straight toward me until their almost on top of me. I used to imagine myself as the heroine of some Gothic romance, pages from being spirited away to something better than her dreary and broken e
xistence.
Then I remind myself how often those stories end in tragedy.
Anti-heroes are completely overrated. I’ve met my Heathcliff, and I need to stay as far away from him as possible.
Wind whips through my hair and casts a chill over my skin. The air smells like coming rain, and I pray it will hold off until I reach the Gas and Sip. It’s one thing to end up soaked on my way home, but I really don’t want to spend my entire shift at work soaking wet and shivering behind the counter like a drowned rat.
The sky is obscured by the fog, but I look up anyway. I imagine I can distinguish the outline of the tall ridge that marks the edge of the Bluffs, even though I know it’s impossible to see from here. If I could see the clouds, I know they’d be the threatening gray of my mood, oppressive and a signal of what might be coming next.
Cortland Manor would be just there, at the furthest point of the cliffs as if thrusting itself forward into the universe. Their private road is long and winding, dangerous even in good weather. My mother used to take the turns so slowly it was a wonder we didn’t go rolling backwards, but that didn’t stop me from gripping the door with both hands, imagining the catastrophic fate if we slipped just an inch off the paved road where sheer cliff awaited.
But thoughts of the manor only lead to reminders of its most notorious occupant.
Vin is the last thing I should be thinking about. He can torture me all he wants at school, but I refuse to let his shadow follow me everywhere else I go.
I pass a house, one of the few still occupied on this block. A bunch of guys I recognize from school are sitting on lawn chairs in the scrubby front lawn that is more dirt than grass. Empty beer cans litter the ground and will probably stay there until someone desperate for cash picks them up to recycle.
One guy, it’s hard to see who it is from the sidewalk, raises the can in his hand like a greeting but immediately lowers it when he catches sight of my face. Once he recognizes me, whatever adolescent mating ritual he had planned is abruptly curtailed. He knows better than to so much as catcall me.