by Amelia Wilde
That I’ll make whatever she wants a reality.
She was happy last night. Happy with how things had gone with Cash. Which means there’s one other Constantine I need to get under control.
I can’t deal with Caroline directly for obvious reasons. So, in the way of powerful families since time immemorial, I have set up a meeting with her eldest son. Winston didn’t even put up a fight. He just scheduled the damn thing.
It feels very much like penance. Opening my heart to Haley is turning out to demand more pain than I thought possible.
Thomas parks in a structure near Halcyon and accompanies me into the glass building. All of my drivers are also skilled bodyguards, so he should be enough. I hate going to Constantine properties at the best of times. I don’t want to be here now. But showing up with a full team is off the table. Not if I want a compromise.
He stays with me outside Winston’s office. The bastard makes me wait three minutes past our appointment time, and then his secretary shows me in. Thomas posts himself at the door.
Perry stands near the corner of Winston’s desk. He has a black eye and a bruise on his cheek. “Hey, asshole,” he says. “I hope you’re in a better mood today.”
“Perry.” Winston doesn’t look thrilled to see me. He looks like he always looks. Clean cut. Cocky. And irritated. “I’ll talk to you after lunch.”
“I can’t wait.” A sarcastic tone. Perry snaps up a folder from Winston’s desk and leaves, walking around me in a wide arc. “Try to keep your hands to yourself,” he mutters to me.
Winston watches him go, then crosses his arms over his chest. I take the seat opposite him.
And wait.
After a minute he lets out an annoyed breath. “You wanted to meet with me, prick. Did you come to apologize for beating the shit out of my brothers? And in our own house.”
“If you want an apology, you’ll have to ask your mother.”
“What the fuck does that mean?”
“Listen.” This is already the most painful thing in my existence, bar none. I cannot go back and forth with Winston right now. “I know we hate each other. I know you’re pissed at me for beating up Keaton and Perry. But this shit with Haley has to stop.”
“She was sick. My mother was only trying to help, and you broke into her house like a fucking psychopath. Are you even taking care of her, or do you have her locked in a dungeon?”
“She wasn’t sick. Caroline sent one of her bulldogs to take Haley from my house. To fucking kidnap her. She didn’t intend to let her go.”
Winston scoffs. “Let her go where? She’s my cousin. She belongs with us. I don’t care what kind of deal you signed with Phillip. No Constantine belongs in a house with you.”
“This isn’t about the deal with Phillip.”
“Then what is it about?” He checks his watch. “I don’t have all day to listen to your bullshit complaints, Leo. Are you sad you didn’t get to fuck my cousin enough times to make up for some perceived slight? Get the fuck over it. You’re lucky we haven’t pressed charges.”
There’s no other way to explain it.
I’ve turned it over in my head a thousand times. There’s no other way to explain why Caroline is doing what she’s doing without going back to the beginning. Every muscle, every cell, resists taking out my phone. Opening the correct app. Pulling up the videos.
I’ve had them for eighteen years. I can’t stand to see them. I only look when I have to transfer the files. Fire ripples out from the scars and covers every inch of my skin. My own body trying to warn me. This is too far, too far, too far.
It’s also necessary. Winston and the rest of the Constantines invest heavily in reputation management. In building a narrative featuring them as the benevolent rulers of Bishop’s Landing and my family as the convenient evil foil.
What Caroline did goes against every story the Constantines tell about themselves. He’ll have to see it to believe it.
I turn the phone around and put it in the center of Winston’s desk. He stares at me over it, eyes narrowed.
“That’s what this is about.”
He picks up the phone gingerly and glances at the image on the screen. “What the fuck is this,” he says, his voice flat.
I don’t answer. I’m not going to describe what he’s about to see. I’m not sure I could.
Winston presses play, and his thumb searches for a button to make sure the volume’s down. It already is.
Part of my mind shears off and goes somewhere else while Winston watches. I know what’s in each of the videos. They were taken from the vantage point of my backpack from school, propped on a chair.
He’ll be able to see me and the bed. For the first twenty seconds, that’s all there is.
“Leo, tell me what the fuck I’m looking at.”
At twenty-one seconds, Caroline steps into the frame. Winston’s face pales. His teeth lock together. He wants to turn it off. His wrist flicks as if to set the phone down. He keeps watching. By forty seconds, I’m on my back on the bed, Caroline on top. The sex was always that way.
This is the longest ninety-two seconds of my life.
When it’s over, Winston looks at me, my phone in his hands.
“Is there more?” His inflection stays steady. Stays flat. He must know by now that there is more. His eyes glint with an emotion I can’t name, but his expression remains stoic.
“Swipe and find out.”
He does and stabs his thumb into the center to make it play.
Same angle. Same day. Different scene. Caroline with a whip in her hand. Welts appearing on my back. Welt turning to cuts, turning to rivulets of blood. Toward the end of this video, a moment arrives when she thinks she might have killed me. I’ve stopped moving. Stopped responding to the blows. Caroline purses her lips. She looks beautiful, even like that. A beautiful coiled snake. And then she draws back her arm and opens another wound.
“How old?” How old am I in the videos, he means. He does not want to ask this question.
“Fourteen.”
Winston curses. “How many are there?”
“Three.”
“I’ve seen enough.” It’s too late for him now. It’s been too late since he pressed play on the very first video. If he’d have thrown me out, if he’d refused the meeting, he wouldn’t have to know this. “How much to keep this quiet?”
“Keep going.”
He glares at me.
I glare back.
The last video is objectively the worst. Winston grits his teeth and presses play.
I’ve only ever looked at the first few seconds of this video and the last few seconds to make sure it’s intact. I’ll never watch the rest, except in my memory.
Except when I can’t keep it buried.
In the story I tell about that day, if I tell it at all, I leave this part out. That was the story I told Eva. That Caroline whipped me, and then she sent me out onto the sidewalk to get home or die trying. It’s close to the truth. She did whip me. And she did send me away. I left out her name, and I left out one other part.
The video shows what happened after the whipping. And before she let me go.
In one way, the content is substantially similar to the other two. There is the bed. There is me. There is Caroline.
She’s even in the same position she was in by the halfway point of that first video. Straddling me with an imperious expression.
The difference is the blood on the sheets from the wounds on my back.
That, and the screaming behind gritted teeth.
Winston makes it fifteen seconds before he drops the phone, stands up, and paces to the window. I stand up too. Put the phone in my pocket.
And wait.
It takes time to process a scene like the one I’ve just shown to Winston. My whole chest is a minefield. It’s going to explode. Watching him watch those videos made them all play again, in full, in my mind. It doesn’t matter how hard I’ve tried to forget. It’s like taking a blowtorch to
my soul. I never imagined I’d tell someone else, much less a Constantine. But I’d do anything for Haley. Even this.
Winston turns to face me, his hands in his pockets. “You didn’t care about that building.”
He’s talking about a building I bought just to fuck with him. He made up a whole scheme to force me into selling it back, which of course I did. Winston fancies himself the king of New York City real estate. It’s a vulnerability that’s easy to exploit.
“No. I didn’t.”
“And you didn’t care about Ash.”
Ash, his girlfriend. I made a bit of trouble for them via posting a few videos on the Internet. I had them all taken down, wiped completely, after the game was finished. It was a bullshit thing to do, but I didn’t care who got hurt. Back then, I hadn’t met Haley Constantine. “No.”
“That was a fucking message. To her.” He means Caroline. “To show her what you could do.”
“Yes.”
No more waiting. No more delaying. The moment of penance has arrived. I feel it like a rushing wind against my scarred back. I have not come to bring peace. Not to Winston. I have come to lay down my fucking sword.
And so I open my mouth and tell him. All of my organs, out in front of him. What it was like to find myself in over my head at fourteen. The whipping. The revenge games. What it was like to drown in my own blood. What it was like to burn in the fever afterward.
Everything I can bring myself to say.
“She took Haley,” I say, my voice hard as a diamond. “Now she’s announcing an engagement and sending that asshole to press conferences to accuse me of kidnapping. It’s hurting Haley. I need it to be over.”
Winston studies me for a long time.
“Is that the price for you to keep your mouth shut? Me, calling off my mother?” He knows as well as I do that videos like the ones I have won’t ever go away.
For the first time ever in front of Winston Constantine, I drop the Morelli mask and level him with a look that’s entirely me. “It’s not a bargaining chip. I’m not threatening to release the videos. Do you think for a fucking second I could live with that?”
“You released videos of me and Ash. We had to live with it.”
“You weren’t raping her in those videos.”
The eldest Constantine son looks away. “If you’re not going to release them, then why the fuck did you show me?”
“Would you have taken my word for it?”
“No.”
“That’s why.”
Winston puts a hand to his forehead and releases a heavy sigh. He’s a calculating bastard. And now he’s having to recalculate his entire life. I don’t expect it will change his view of me, and I don’t care if it does. All I care about is Haley. All I care about is giving her what she wants, which is a life free of Caroline’s bullshit. Even if it means carving into my flesh and bone to do it.
“You want this finished,” Winston says finally. “Does that mean you’re going to stop, too?”
I give Winston an incredulous look. “I’ve wanted this to be finished since I was fourteen. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.”
A long pause. I survive painful heartbeat after painful heartbeat. I survive another trip through my memories. I survive another burst of searing pain across my back.
“Fuck.” Winston takes in a deep breath and gives the window one last glance. “I can’t make any guarantees. But I’ll talk to her. I’ll find a way. This has to stop.”
“Good.”
There’s nothing else to say. He doesn’t want me here. I don’t want to be here. I’ve made my penance. “Leo,” he says as I reach the door. Push it open.
I look back at him.
“I’m sorry.” Winston stands by the window, a look of genuine concern on his face. Not for me. It’s for his mother, and his family, and their reputation. It might not collapse if I released these videos, but it would be damaged.
“It was a long time ago,” I tell him.
He doesn’t say anything else.
One more minute, and we’re out of Halcyon. Thomas shuts the door to the SUV behind me and jogs around to the driver’s seat. He keeps his eyes firmly on the road. I’m the only one to witness how badly my hands are shaking. I can’t hold my phone.
Now that the meeting is over, now that we’re away from that fucking building, my body has recognized the size of the threat. A delayed response to reliving what Caroline did and to the act of showing another person. I never have before. My lungs constrict and my heart tests the boundaries of my rib cage, looking for a way out. I have a flash fever. Rising fast.
“Pull over.”
Thomas doesn’t hesitate. He pulls directly to the curb. I have just enough time to get to an alley before I’m sick on the ground.
Chapter Twenty
Haley
Leo’s house is quiet the morning after my party, but it’s a good quiet. The quiet of a space that was very recently bursting at the seams with joy. Everyone but Daphne left with drivers at the end of the night. I’ve taken a long, long shower and dressed in soft clothes. I’m sore from the party. I don’t know if it’s from the heels or the dancing or my nerves.
I go downstairs to look for Leo and find Gerard waiting in the foyer instead. “Good morning, Haley. How was your party?”
“It was amazing.” There’s a tense set to his posture. Gerard’s eyes go back to Leo’s large double doors. “Is Leo in the dining room?”
There are usually three places I can find him if he’s not in the bedroom when I wake up. His office, the den, or the dining room. Sometimes I find him reading at the table with a cup of coffee at his place. The first day I was here, I found him just that way. His plate in front of him, and his book. He’d abandoned the book in favor of making me take all my clothes off and come all over his fingers. I told myself it was awful, and cruel, and humiliating, but in reality it was over for me. I was never going to be the same after that. I was never going to want anyone else. I just didn’t know it yet.
“No. He’ll be arriving back at the house in about five minutes.”
“Back at the house? Where did he go?” Worry clenches my stomach in a fist. Leo didn’t say a word about leaving. The last time he invited me for a walk, he turned out to be very, very sick. “Is everything all right?”
“He had a meeting in the city. Everything is secure. We’ve had no problems on the grounds.”
Secure is not the same thing as all right.
I go to the dining room to wait for him.
The space has been transformed back into its usual arrangement. All that’s left from my party are the gold hangings on the ceiling. He made that perfect night for me, and then he went to the city without telling me. I don’t know whether to be pissed off or afraid or both. The house feels like a cavern without him. It feels like a popped balloon. Someone has put his book back on the table. It’s a battered paperback. I recognize it. It’s a story about building a cathedral.
Voices in the foyer. Footsteps in the hall. And Leo appears in the doorway.
I’ve come into the room many times while he’s backlit by the window. He has the most cutting profile, the most beautiful profile I’ve ever seen. The light always catches on the planes of him, casting shadows that take my breath away.
It’s a different view from his seat. That first day when I came into this room, I almost stopped breathing at the sunlight on his cheekbones. He would have seen me, lit in a soft glow. He’s standing in it now. What I didn’t know on that day was how it showed everything. It’s the kind of light that makes hiding impossible.
This is his house. He’s choosing to let me see him this way. In his pristine black clothes. They were made for him. To highlight his body, yes. To show off the lean muscle on his tall frame and his perfect thighs and strong shoulders. But they were also made to protect him from as much pain as possible.
I don’t think it’s working.
He’s wrung out, his dark eyes haunted. Leo stands up th
e tallest when his pain is bad. There’s another level beyond that, though. There is. He hasn’t admitted it to me out loud, but I can tell by looking at him that we’re almost there now. A pressure in my chest expands. I want answers. I don’t want to ask for them. Not because I’m afraid of the answers, but because I don’t want to hurt him. Not any more than this meeting already has.
Leo looks at me for a long, long time. Until I can feel him struggling. Until the silence seems heavier by the second. His eyes go to his book, and then back to me. “Are you ready for breakfast?”
“Are you?”
His hands come up and he covers his face. Runs them right over his eyes and down. It’s over in a split second and it’s probably nothing. Except it’s not a gesture Leo makes. It’s not something I’ve ever seen him do. And not with trembling hands. “I’m not hungry.”
“What if we just—” I cross the room and take his hand. Leo squeezes mine and brings it to his mouth. Grazes his teeth over my knuckles. “Sometimes, if I was having a really shitty day, my sister would send me upstairs to start over. So I’d get in bed and take a nap and wake up again, and then it would be better. Or at least bearable.”
He lets out a breath. “I’m fucking terrible at napping.”
“Then let’s not nap.”
Leo pushes me back against the doorframe then. He drops his head and kisses my jawline, kisses my neck, kisses my mouth. He puts both hands on my face, and the shaking disappears. Like I’m the only solid thing in the room. In his life. He feels like the only solid thing in mine. “Upstairs,” he says against my skin, and then he picks me up and takes me there himself.
* * *
The day passes. The night. The next morning. Leo doesn’t tell me about his meeting, and I don’t ask, but I know he’s thinking about it. I keep catching him staring off into nothing. I go to him every time. I can’t resist it. He’ll tell me when it’s time, when he can, but until then—
Until then, I can kiss his cheek. Drag my nails down the back of his neck and make him shiver. Beg him to take me to bed.
It’s nightfall, and I’ve been reading in the den. Daphne sits on the opposite chair, her legs over the arm, staring at the ceiling while she bickers with Leo about her room. “I just want you to have an opinion about it.”