by Ashley Gee
The kind of story with evil queens and desperate princesses locked in towers.
But I didn’t know it would be like this.
Giant paintings of white men lined the massive stairwell, each one more imposing than the last. I couldn’t help but feel like they were all glaring down at me like some dark interloper who didn’t belong.
Mama pushed me forward when I would have otherwise stayed rooted to the spot.
“Go on, now,” she urged, sharp voice echoing off the sky-high ceiling.
Zion was supposed to come with us, but he had refused. No amount of wheedling or threats could make my brother do anything he didn’t want to do. But Mama gave into it instead of fighting him and let him stay at home to play in the street with his friends.
“At least he won’t be making any trouble for me here,” she’d said. “You know I need this job.”
But she said it affectionately, as if his intransigence were something she valued. And maybe it was. The indulgent tone she used on him was never directed at me. It always seemed like the more I gave into what she wanted, the more things it occurred to her to ask of me.
I was always the quiet one, the agreeable one, the one who didn’t argue.
Even when on the inside, I raged.
It wasn’t lost on me just how much she needed this job. She thought I didn’t see the bills spread out over the kitchen table, stamped with the words PAST DUE in bold red letters. I heard the whispered arguments between her and Grandpa at night when I was supposed to be asleep, about how long each one could go unpaid before the city came out to turn off the water or the heat.
She thought I was too young to understand, but I wasn’t.
That was why I didn’t bother to ask her why she was so insistent we come with her today. Or just me, since she let Zion stay at home.
Dodging responsibility had always been easy for him.
My plain shoes were silent on the marble floor, the soles so worn down I might as well have been barefoot. She hustled me through the house and toward the back, but my widened eyes took in every detail of this place that felt more like a museum than a home.
Ten bedrooms with en suite bathrooms. Oversized kitchen. Infrared sauna and saltwater infinity pool. Five-car garage filled with luxury imports. A full-size bowling alley in the basement next to the wine cellar. All of it tucked into a cozy 25,000 square feet of space.
Mama would list the accoutrements like a mantra, describing in detail all the spaces with a voice that sounded awed. I understood that taking care of this place was back-breaking work, and not just because she told me so at every possible opportunity.
But that first time, I followed her through the house feeling a bit like a lamb led to slaughter. Even if I didn’t understand where that feeling had come from.
I wondered how many people must live here, given the abundance of space. As we turned the corner, I expected there to be a veritable army waiting for us, because this house seemed big enough to comfortably house an entire football team. But every room we passed was empty, each hallway cold and full of only silence.
Mama led me through the kitchen, past a counter laid out with trays of food that made my mouth water, and through a sliding glass door that opened out into manicured gardens. But she didn’t give me a chance to appreciate the view of perfectly symmetrical hedges and neatly groomed flower beds, pulling me by my elbow down the path and away from the house.
Cortland Manor was built on the edge of a sheer cliff, and nothing compared to its views of the sea. The best spot was on the far side of the gardens where a small table had been laid out with fine china, perfectly sized for childlike fingers, set before a pair of wrought iron chairs painted white.
A boy sat at the stone table, glaring off into the distance where waves crashed against the rocky shore. I couldn’t see the exact expression on his face, but unwelcome radiated from the tense set of his shoulders and the way he shifted away as we approached.
“Vincent? This is my daughter, Zaya. Remember, I told you about her.” Mama’s voice was hesitant, which surprised me. She never spoke to anyone else with this sort of respectful hesitation, this reverence. “Your mother thought it might be nice for you to play together.”
“Giselle isn’t my mother.”
The whispered words were harsh and clipped, but Mama had already turned away to rush back toward the house.
My first thought was that his voice sounded so much older than he looked.
In fact, I’d assumed on first glance that he had to be significantly younger than me. His angular body was small with thin shoulders, but the gaze that narrowed on my face was heavy with the knowledge of a hundred years.
I approached the table, but didn’t try to sit down. For some reason, it felt like I needed to wait for his permission.
Some indication that I was welcome.
But he didn’t do what any normal boy of his breeding would and stand up to pull back a chair for me. Instead, he glared with obvious derision in his gaze.
“Why are you here?” he asked, voice caustic.
“To play.” The words weren’t even sarcasm, I just found myself repeating what Mama had said although I didn’t have any idea what she’d meant. This boy definitely didn’t seem like the playing type, and I really wasn’t either. Plus, there didn’t seem to be any toys or games around. “Whatever that means.”
“I don’t play with the help.” The look he cast over me was cold, judgmental. “You should just go back in the house and clean something.”
His words were obviously meant to be insulting, but I recognized that they lacked a certain amount of heat. He was saying what he thought was necessary to get me to leave.
Why did he want so badly to be left alone?
“What are you doing out here?” I asked, surveying the table. It was laden with plates of cakes, cookies, and little sandwiches with a creamy filling I didn’t recognize. There was an elaborate tea set, but the cup beside him was full and untouched. My stomach rumbled, but I knew better than to eat anything without asking. Mama had been very clear about that. “Just sitting?”
“What are you doing here?” he snapped. “I told you to leave.”
“I’m not very good at following instructions.” Without waiting for an invitation that would clearly never come, I plopped down across from him at the metal table. Wrought iron dug into my backside, and I couldn’t help but wonder why a family with so much money would buy a chair this uncomfortable.
“Hungry?” he asked, cold gaze passing over the spread of food. All of it was balanced on the serving platter in the same towering configuration it must have been in when it emerged from the kitchen. Not even one bite of it had been touched. He waited until I reached for one of the glistening cakes filled with buttercream. “Although you should know it’s all poison.”
I pulled my hand back as if I’d been burned, staring into his pinched and expressionless face. It was impossible to know if he was telling the truth. But the rumbling in my stomach wasn’t something easy to ignore. As I stared into his cool blue eyes, the color of a crashing wave under storm-darkened skies, I picked up the sugary confection and brought it to my lips. Our eyes held as I took a large bite.
It tasted like burnt sugar and rich possibility.
A smile touched his lips, so brief I would have missed it if I hadn’t been so rudely staring. But he didn’t seem bothered by my inability to look away. If anything, just the opposite.
His face fascinated me in a way that I was too young to understand. It was all sharp angles and lines that seemed drawn by a too heavy hand. He was beautiful, but desolate at the same time. Cheeks hollowed beneath the dark circles under his eyes and his lips pinched painfully tight, even as he glared across the table at me.
I’d never seen anger like this in someone I had only just met. It should have made me want to run as fast as I could in the opposite direction. But instead it drew me in.
That was the first warning I ignored.
&nbs
p; We sat in silence for longer than should have been comfortable, assessing each other like two combatants meeting across the battlefield. I told myself it was a battle I could win, even if I wasn’t sure that was true.
“My brother and I like to play tag,” I told him, finally breaking the long silence. Mama had told me to stay out here with this boy until she finished her work, and that was what I would do. But I wouldn’t sit here in silence for hours and hours on end. “Do you like that game?”
His assessing gaze roved over me, but his expression gave absolutely nothing away. “Only if it’s downhill.”
It was only then that I looked down to see he wasn’t sitting in one of the pretty wrought-iron chairs, but a different one. Dark metal spokes poking out from beneath the tablecloth.
He was in a wheelchair.
With an angry jerk of his arm, he wrenched the chair back so I could get a good view of what had been hidden beneath the long tablecloth. A blanket laid over his lap, but it was obvious at a glance that his legs were thin, muscles wasted from disuse.
When my gaze again rose to his face, his eyes were full of challenge. He dared me to pity him, to feel sorry for the boy that had to farm for playmates from among the help.
“Can you walk at all?” I asked.
He jerked his chair back to the table, hiding the gleaming metal of the wheels from my view. “Some days are better than others.”
“Is today a good day or a bad day?”
A grimace curled his lip. “Every day is a bad day.”
Inexplicably, I wanted that smile to come back to his face. I wanted to make him feel better, even though I knew he didn’t deserve it. It was an urge that made no rational sense, but felt as natural as breathing.
“So is that a no on playing tag? I’ll give you a rolling start.”
That surprised a laugh out of him that transformed his face into something so lovely it was heartbreaking. But then the now familiar mask descended back over his features. “You’re funny. But you know, if I tell my step-mother what you said, she’ll fire your dumb mother and then it’s back to the slums for you.”
He was trying to make me angry on purpose, even if I didn’t know why. If I let him accomplish it, this would never happen again.
“Tell her then. And you don’t have to be rude.” My voice was placid with only the barest trace of steel that I liked to imagine ran down my spine, even when I knew no one else could see it. “My family has been here as long as yours has.”
“Longer. The Milbournes were first.”
My head snapped up in surprise. “How do you know that?”
We didn’t go to the Founder’s Day celebrations anymore, and none of the other families had paid us any attention in years. The dusty little elementary school in the Gulch that I attended was different from the fancy one for the kids living in the nicer part of town. Deception only had one high school, so kids from both sides of town mixed there, but not any earlier.
“We’ve met once before, when we were little,” he told me, studying my face as if he tried to reconcile whatever differences he saw. “You don’t remember?”
I would have remembered a boy in a wheelchair. I would have remembered a boy with intense eyes and an angry smile. I would have remembered him.
“You’re thinking about someone else.”
“There aren’t many girls around here that look like you.” His gaze lingered on the riot of curly hair that my mother had struggled and failed to tame, then dropped to the skin of my arms that always tanned deep in the summer, no matter how much sunscreen she slathered on me. “I remember.”
Vague recollections of my last Founder’s Day sifted through my mind, but the memories were hard to recall. It had been years, and anyone I’d met that day existed in a very different world from me.
“No flowers?” An empty vase sat in the middle of the table. I stared at it for a long moment, wondering why someone would lay out a spread like this but neglect to arrange the flowers. My gaze fixed on the porcelain, white with veins of gray running through it like a piece of marble.
“Giselle planted those oleanders. Pick some.”
I followed his gaze to the nearby shrubs that were a riot of color, pretty pinks and deep purples. The flowers were lightly scented, their aroma drifting on the wind in a way I didn’t notice until I paid attention to it.
There was a sort of challenge in his gaze that I didn’t understand. But I decided to rise to the occasion. Literally. Pushing up from the table, I went to the beautiful shrub, so large it was more like a tree. I reached forward to pick one of the blooms, and a shock of pain made me give a surprised gasp.
When I pulled back my hand, there was a streak of red across my palm.
I’d been cut.
“You’ve probably never seen oleander with thorns.” Vin had managed to silently roll his chair behind me, so close that if I reached out he’d be close enough to touch. “There used to be roses here a long time ago. The flowers died, but the thorns are still there. Oleander just grows over them. Our gardeners won’t pick them without shears.” His voice was mocking. “Did I forget to mention that?”
My gaze moved to the laden table with its empty vase and then back to the broken boy who seemed determined to reject me before I could do it to him first.
Without understanding the impulse that drove me, my injured hand gripped the closest stem that wrapped around a thorny branch. My gaze focused on the beautiful flower, even as thorns dug hard into my skin, the pain enough that I never would have tolerated it if I wasn’t trying to prove a point.
Eyes burning and vision blurred, I returned to the table and placed the single flower in the vase. A streak of blood remained on the porcelain as I pulled my hand away.
When I turned back to face him, there were tears in my eyes that I refused to let fall. My gaze returned to his expressionless face as I bunched the fabric of my skirt in my hand to stop the flow of blood.
“There.”
He didn’t say anything as he rolled the chair back to the table. But his gaze lingered on my injured hand as some unknown emotion moved behind his eyes.
When I came back the next day, there were two plates on the table.
Mama brought me to Cortland Manor every day for the rest of the summer.
Usually, Vin and I spent time together in the garden with its deceptively beautiful flowers. Sometimes we talked about things that didn’t really matter, but sometimes we simply sat in companionable silence.
And every day I picked a thorny oleander and placed it in the vase, no matter how much it hurt.
Twenty-Four
Weakness of any kind is an unacceptable condition.
Maybe it was all the years I spent so weak that I could barely stand, but nowadays I get off on pushing my body to the limits of what it’s capable of.
I get off on pushing everything to its limits.
But tonight, I’m distracted.
Iain drives a right hook toward my face that I don’t dodge fast enough. Pain explodes on the side of my head and sets my ears ringing.
The pain focuses me, lets me see everything around me with startling clarity. When Iain takes what he thinks is a moment of weakness to get inside my guard, I’m ready for him. My arms wrap around his neck and bring his head down as I drive my knee into his cheek.
His ass hits the mat hard, and he lets out a low groan of pain.
“Okay, enough,” he insists as I reach out a hand to help him up. “You’re in some kind of mood today. Is it blue balls?”
“Never.” I smirk. “Both my hands work just fine.”
It’s a repeat of the same thing Zaya said to me, which only makes me think of her.
Just a few more hours. As soon as West lets me know that the license and contract are ready to go, there won’t be anything else standing in my way.
“Always keep it classy, Cortland.”
My eyebrow quirks. “I might be a married man in a few hours. Not getting any is supposed to come with
the territory.”
Like always, Iain sees right through the thing I say to all the shit I’m not saying.
He probably knew what was up when I invited him to the deserted school gym for a few impromptu rounds. It’s amazing how well a few solid hits to the head can clear out the cobwebs.
I’ve dabbled in almost every martial art under the sun in the last few years, but Iain is the only sparring partner I’ve ever had who will do his best to kill me when I ask him to. Every so often we sneak into the school gym after hours to beat the shit out of each other in privacy. Basketball and wrestling are over for the season, so the only people using it after school right now are guys on the volleyball team. Those pussies are easy to chase away.
Every so often, we’ll bring in other guys but Iain will always drop everything for a match. He is the only one who likes fighting as much as I do.
And unlike Elliot or Cal, he doesn’t get wound up about bruising his pretty face.
Giselle calls it barbaric on the occasions she catches sight of me with a broken nose or blackened eyes. My dad just shakes his head before his fleeting attention moves on to something else. Emma is the only one who ever bothers to ask how the other guy looks.
The answer: always worse.
Iain’s face is expressionless as he unwinds the tape from around his bleeding knuckles. “If you’re sure that’s what you want.”
“I want my inheritance,” I deadpan. “That’s all this is about.”
If I say it enough times, that might make it true.
“And what does the girl desperate to escape the slums think about an impending teenage pregnancy.”
The real trick to being a good fighter is accepting the pain, maybe even looking forward to it just a little bit. The guy who flinches when he should brace himself and blocks when he should lunge has already lost.
I’m not afraid to take a few hits if it gets me where I need to be.
“I’ll let you know when the topic comes up.”
A brief expression of surprise crosses Iain’s face before it returns to the perpetual mask of disinterest. “You really haven’t told her yet? That’s interesting.”