by Amelia Wilde
He does.
No matter how many times Caroline says he hurt you for the fun of it. That’s what he’s like. That’s what he does. He’s heartless.
It’s not true. All my concentration goes to answering her silently. You’re lying. You’re lying. You’re lying. I concentrate so hard that I go along with putting on the deep blue dress I chose without thinking. I sit at the bathroom counter and let Caroline curl my hair. I let her put a necklace around my neck and I slip my feet into the shoes she gives me and I only come to my senses when she leads me to the door.
“Where are we going?”
Caroline smiles. It’s close to the truth. It looks real enough on her face, but I doubt she’s happy because she thinks I’ll enjoy this. “I set up a date for you. It’s time to ease back into the world, don’t you think?”
I don’t. But I also don’t have any choice. So I follow her down the hall. Caroline’s house has a guest wing with everything you could possibly need, including, I guess, a dining room with a round table set with candles on one end of the room. There’s a sofa on the other with a matching end table. It’s dark outside. I can’t see a thing past the reflection in the pane.
“Hello, Caroline. Hello, Haley.”
Rick Joseph Jr., the man who wants nothing more than to be a Constantine, stands in the doorway in a turtleneck and slacks with a giant bouquet of red roses in his hands.
“Come in, come in.” Caroline sweeps over to him and kisses him on both cheeks, then tugs him into the room. “These are beautiful. Look, Haley.”
“Beautiful,” I echo as she brings them to the table and puts them into a vase. She had an empty vase here. Waiting for the roses. “Hi, Rick.”
My temples throb with how awkward and strange this is. What is Caroline thinking? A date with Rick?
Rick comes over to me and bends to kiss my cheek. It’s all I can do not to jerk backward. He’s not a bad guy, but I don’t want him, and I don’t think he particularly wants me. It’s obvious now more than ever. He’ll do anything to get in with Caroline. Once upon a time, he even tried to get in with me. He gave me a ride to my car when I needed to go talk to Leo.
Maybe I could talk to him.
“How are you? Are you headed back to school after the holidays?” Rick directs the question at me, but his eyes slide to Caroline.
“Oh, Haley’s taking a little break from school,” Caroline answers while she ushers us to the table. I feel like a marionette on her strings. “It was all a bit much for her. She’s here for a little rest. A little vacation.” She laughs, and Rick laughs too. I manage the beginning of a smile.
Caroline pats my arm, and I take it for the prompt it is. “How is—” Oh, god, all I want is to get out of here. “How’s your business?”
Rick’s eyes light up. “Oh, it’s great. It’s great, Haley. We’re having the best quarter ever. I know you love books more than anything else, but if you wanted, I could bring you to the office and show you around.”
He’s so eager that it’s almost sweet. A former version of me might have gone to his office to see—what? Computers? Spreadsheets?
“I’m so sorry,” Caroline says from behind me. “I have to take this call.” I didn’t hear a phone, but Rick’s eyes go above my head and he nods, the movement so subtle I could’ve imagined it. Maybe I do imagine it. She comes around beside my chair, takes my face in her hands, and kisses my forehead. “Have a good time, you two.”
At that moment, one of the Constantine staff members comes in with our plates on a tray. More soup. I think of Leo, his face a picture of pain. It’s my fucking favorite soup.
This is not his favorite soup.
Caroline slips out. The man in his uniform leaves us with the soup. And Rick looks across the table at me, his expression pleased but cautious.
I pick up the spoon. Put it back down again. I’m too impatient. But I need to get out. “Rick.” The doorway’s empty. I have to tell him now, and quietly. “You have to help me. I’m being held against my will.”
Chapter Three
Haley
Rick’s eyebrows go up. His mouth drops open. He blinks in a triple flutter of his eyelashes, almost comically stunned, and oh, thank God. He believes me.
He finishes putting his napkin in his lap and glances down. Away from me. “Oh, Haley,” he says. I’m ready to stand up and walk out of here with him. Run out of here, if he’ll take me where I need to go. But then he looks back up at me with his green eyes, the eyes he can never change to Constantine blue, and they’re filled with pity.
Not shock. Not determination.
Pity.
Rick takes a deep breath. “Caroline told me you were disturbed.”
“What?” I don’t know why it comes as a surprise, but it does.
“Yeah.” He frowns, as if it was hard for him to hear. “She told me about your little delusions.” He makes air quotes with his fingers around delusions, and my stomach sinks again. Caroline’s told her lies to Rick, just like I feared she would. Rick will only be the beginning. “Listen, Haley. Your family wants to help you get better. Caroline’s trying to help you get better.”
“No.”
“She is.”
“She’s not. I want to go back to Leo’s.” This is too far to go with Rick. Too much to admit. “You could take me to my dad’s. But I need to talk to Leo.”
Rick shakes his head. “I’ve heard that before, and now look at you.”
A shadow darkens the doorway and my whole heart leaps. Leo—it has to be Leo. Please, let it be him.
It’s not. It’s a guard in a dark uniform with a gun holstered on his hip. Rick nods to him and stands up.
“Are you leaving?” I want him to get the hell out of here, and I don’t want him to go. Rick fell for Caroline’s lies but he’s better than Caroline. Anyone is better than Caroline. I’m already alone in this, alone in this place and trapped and helpless, and I will sit here and listen to him talk about his business if it means she’s not in here.
“I’m not leaving.” He’s using a weird tone. I think it’s supposed to be soothing, but it makes me feel even more cornered. “Let’s sit together on the sofa.”
“We’re supposed to be having dinner.”
Rick puts out his hand to me. I keep mine in my lap. “It doesn’t have to be hard. Okay? It can be easy.”
What is he talking about? None of this is easy. But now there’s an armed guard at the door watching our every move, and I don’t want to eat soup, so I put my hand in Rick’s. I let him help me up and take me to the sofa on the other side of the room.
“Here. Sit right here, and I’ll sit next to you.”
He narrates this for me while he guides me down onto the cushions, his touch soft. I’d almost call it tentative if he didn’t seem like he’d planned this. Rick settles into the next spot over just like he said he would.
And then he puts his arm around me.
My body freezes at the contact. I’ve been touched too much already, by Caroline and her bulldog, and I hate it. But Rick runs his hand over my arm. It’s adjacent to the way Leo ran his hand up and down my arm when we got back to his house after the hospital, only it’s wrong. Rick’s rhythm is off. It doesn’t match me the way Leo did.
“I know,” Rick soothes. “She said you’d have a hard time with this. We can go slow. It’ll be good, in the end. You won’t regret it.”
“Won’t regret what?”
“We just have to spend some time together, Hales. It’s part of your recovery.”
What the fuck? I want to scream the question at him, over and over until he answers. I wish I was the kind of person who screamed and fought. One of the many problems, though, is that he’s not doing anything terrible. He’s just touching my arm. His body is too close. I don’t want him there. But he’s not hurting me. Not really.
Rick draws me in and my breaths come shallower. It’s not the first time we’ve been close. I’ve been on a few dates with him, and he plays the p
art of the gentleman. Once, when it rained, he tucked me to his side like this so we could both stay under his umbrella.
Now that I’ve been with Leo, I can’t stand it.
We sit like this for long enough that the soup has to be cold.
No one comes back in.
The guard stands silently at the door.
“Okay,” Rick says, and then he reaches for my chin. His grip is even softer than Caroline’s. Even more gentle. He turns my face to his and looks into my eyes. “There. See? Not so bad.”
“What’s not so bad?” I sound breathless and horrified because I am. My pulse bangs in my ears and it’s not the pleasant high of Leo’s restrained violence, it’s my body trying to save me. From Rick. Who hasn’t done—
He kisses me.
High on one cheek, then the other, and then his mouth meets mine.
It’s such a soft kiss. Disgustingly soft. His lips are wrong. His face is wrong.
I can’t move.
The air stops dead in my lungs. I don’t want to breathe, to smell him, to kiss him back. I don’t kiss him back, but that doesn’t stop Rick. He darts his tongue out to brush against my lower lip and my arms lock to my sides. It’s so unhelpful. God, I’m as useless as I was when Leo was shot. It’s that bad.
I start counting heartbeats. If I can get through this kiss, he’ll let me go back to dinner.
The kiss doesn’t end. It keeps going, and going, Rick insisting. It’s the most gentle insistence. A person could almost mistake it for being nice.
It’s not nice.
Rick turns me to face him, angling me the way he wants, and I’m a puppet. I am actually a fucking puppet. Something must tip him off that I don’t want this, don’t like it, that I hate it, because he stops kissing me. “It’s fine,” he says softly. “You’re doing great.”
“What are you talking about?” I get the words out just before his mouth closes on mine again. This time he’s less gentle about it. Not by much. It’s only a lapse of a few seconds and he’s back to that horrible soft kiss.
Rick puts his hand on my leg, just above my knee. He slowly, steadily, opens my legs.
And I understand what’s happening.
The sharp understanding pushes me out of my head. Shoves me out. I can’t stay in my own mind anymore so I fly up to the ceiling and look down on us from a dizzying tilt. There’s me, on Caroline’s couch in a blue dress that’s been pushed up almost to my hips. There’s Rick, with one hand on my face and the other moving on my thigh. Even pressure. Even strokes. I feel it from far away.
And I watch as his hand moves up.
Rick kisses me while he inches his hand toward my waist. I feel that, too, but in a peripheral sort of way. I can’t tolerate the sensation of it. Can’t tolerate how wrong he is and how violating it is. Up here on the ceiling it doesn’t seem so bad.
Maybe it’s not so bad.
No.
It is very, very bad, and this is what Caroline’s game has been all day. To put me off-balance. To put me in a state of mind where I might accept this. And I’m looking down the barrel of an endless string of days like this, where she’ll repeat lies until they sound like the truth and bring Rick in for “dates” and put a guard at the door to—
Rick presses his thumb against my inner thigh, a soft brush of the curve just before my leg meets my hip, and leans in so I can’t close my legs.
His hand drops to his belt buckle.
I fall straight down into myself. It’s like plummeting through a frozen surface from a height. The ice cracks. It’s frigid shock. And I snap like a dropped plate.
“What are you doing? Stop. Stop.” It turns into a shout on the way out of my mouth at the same time my numb limbs come back to life. I wrench myself off the sofa and away from him, turning my ankle on one of my shoes in the process. I barely feel it.
He’s on his feet right away, reaching for me. “Haley. Haley. I’m helping you. This is what we’re supposed to do.”
“What’s the guard for, Rick?” I can’t stop yelling at him. It borders on a scream, but I don’t want to scream yet. I have to—I have to save the scream for when it’s really bad, when it’s all gone to hell. “What’s the guard for? Is he going to shoot me if I don’t have sex with you?”
“He’s not going to shoot anyone. The guard’s here to make sure—”
“To make sure that I go along with this? I’m not going along with this. I’m not going along with this. You can’t do this to me.” There’s nowhere to go, and I’m so tired, and I need Leo to be here. I wasn’t going to shout. I wasn’t going to cry. But I burst into ugly sobs anyway.
Rick folds his arms around me before I can run. I push at him. He holds on tight. “Stop.” Can’t catch my breath. “Don’t touch me. Get your hands off me.”
“Haley.” Caroline flies in past the guard. “Let her go,” she says to Rick, and I catch the look between them and it’s proof, it is proof of just how much they’ve orchestrated this. Rick releases me into Caroline’s arms, and I could keep shouting, I could be sick, because they planned this. They planned for her to be the one to comfort me. I see what’s coming. All the nights they’ve planned. Line them up. Knock them down.
He’ll rape me, but he’ll do it gently. Caroline will be there to pick up the pieces. Caroline gave him permission in the first place.
It makes me cry harder. That’s the only solution I have, really. To cry so hard that Caroline takes me back to my room. I don’t struggle against the tears. They feel like my only weapon, and they’re not enough.
I don’t want her hands on me, anywhere near me, but there’s no way for me to get out of the dress with my hands shaking like this. She’s the one who slips a nightshirt over my head and pulls back the covers. She’s the one who pats my hair once my head is on the pillow. She’s the one who turns out the light.
I hear her talking in a low voice outside the door as soon as it’s shut. I bet there’s a guard out there. I bet he’ll stay all night.
“Please,” I whisper to no one. To Leo. “Please come get me.”
Chapter Four
Leo
The dining room. It’s the place where I watched Haley’s face light up at the sight of her Jane Eyre. Now it’s crowded with people who don’t fucking belong here.
Four representatives from the teams who were supposed to be guarding the grounds.
Six more people Gerard brought in.
All of them talk at once.
In the middle of this crowd from hell, I’m on fire. Worse than fire. The pain in my back has reached my ankles. The back of my skull. It’s like being cut with a knife—long, thin stripes of agony that come over and over and over until I can’t tell them apart. My head howls with it. My body has been screaming with it since Eva shook me awake in the night.
Eva told me the news. Gerard tells me she insisted on being the one. I’ll never forget it. At the same moment I became aware of the cold sheet—I was just touching Haley’s face—Eva said, “Haley’s gone. Caroline’s bulldog took her.”
The next moment, I became a column of flame and rage.
I am that column now.
There is a fine line between the performance of fury and letting it sink into the bone, and I’m standing on it. One step and I could let go. I could stop holding it back. I could become the snarling creature who bared his teeth at my father until all his attention was on me.
Gerard won’t shut the fuck up. “—move away from the house. I don’t feel confident in—”
“Confident?” I snap at him. “I don’t want your fucking confidence. I’m not waiting for you to feel secure. We’re getting her back. There’s your certainty. It’s happening.”
“Leo.” Eva’s been at my side since she woke me up. She stood in the doorway to my closet and watched me yank a shirt over my head. All my muscles ache. I should be resting. That’s what Carina said, and what Eva repeated, and I will be damned if I’m going to rest with Haley gone. “You need to calm down. Tak
e a breath. We can go to your office.”
“No,” I thunder at her. “Fuck no. I’m not going to calm the fuck down.”
My voice echoes in the room. Conversation comes to a startling halt. My temper is getting away from me. Just a little. Just enough to scare Eva. But I can’t shut it off any more than I can shut off the shrieking pain all down my spine.
Someone from the household staff steps to my side, silent, keeping his eyes off mine. He has a case in his hands, the top held open so I can see the knives inside. I choose one and slip it into the Kevlar sheath on my belt.
Eva watches this with her bottom lip between her teeth. She bites down so hard the flesh is white. Nervous. She’s nervous about what I’m going to do.
I take her face in my hands. It’s too gentle a motion, too careful, and it’s because we’re so close to that line. I would love so much to let the beast take over, and I can’t do it yet. So I take exquisite care with every fucking movement.
I kiss my sister on the forehead, then put both hands on her shoulders to move her aside.
And then I’m going. Striding out of the room. There are more people outside the dining room. More guards. One steps into my path. “Mr. Morelli, it’s not secure outside—”
I have his jacket in my fists before he’s ready. No one is ever ready for me when I’m like this, when I’m on the verge of chaos. He’s a strong man but I’m stronger. I am fucking furious.
It boils and burns, every muscle acidic with it. One step, two, and I have him slammed against the wall. The roar of rage is louder than his skull meeting plaster. My teeth grit together so hard they crack. “It’s not secure anywhere, you fucking fool. You let that bastard take her.”
The rage settles inside me, deeper, deeper, until there’s nothing left of me—of Leo Morelli. I’m the Beast of Bishop’s Landing now.
He struggles against the wall. “Everyone who was on shift at that time has been removed from the property. They’ll be sequestered until the investigation is over.”