by M. O’Keefe
“Good girl,” she said as I gasped and wiped my face.
“In any case,” she refilled our glasses. “I’m sorry for your loss. I always thought the senator seemed like a good guy.”
“He wasn’t,” I said without thinking. The vodka and her boldness making a mess of me. Immediately I regretted giving her that information.
“No?” She smiled at me. Like a snake. “In what way?”
“In every way,” I said.
“Isn’t that interesting? Though, probably not so much for you. How long were you married?”
“Two years. But we’re not here to talk—”
“You had two miscarriages? Sorry. That’s not easy.”
“How do you know that?” The first miscarriage was pretty public. The second one not so much.
“You think I’m going to show up without knowing who I’m meeting?” she asked like I was stupid, and maybe I was. Because I knew nothing about her.
“You’re Eden Morelli?” I asked, trying to somehow get on the offensive in this strange conversation.
“In the flesh.” She did a flourish with her hand. The diamonds on her fingers flashing in the low light.
“Who . . . who is that guy?” I asked, turning to look at the bodyguard at the door. Watching us with his dead eyes.
“Jacob?” she said. “You don’t need to worry about him. Former military.” Eden leaned in conspiratorially. “Secret ops. After the last Morelli Constantine dustup, I got myself the best bodyguard available on the dark web.”
Every single word in that sentence was terrifying.
“I’m not . . . a threat . . . to you,” I said, because I was scared of Jacob. And Eden, frankly. “I just wanted some information.”
Eden flipped her dark hair over her shoulder, her green eyes glittering. “Like you don’t know information is the most dangerous threat there is.” She lifted her glass again. “One more. Your sister was right about you.”
“What did she say?”
“That you used to be fun. Now you act like you’re allergic.”
“I’m not allergic,” I said, wounded. “Just out of practice.”
“Well, I’m a hell of a coach, let’s go.”
With the last shot of vodka warming me up from the inside, I picked up my glass and took a sip, which seemed to be enough for Eden Morelli.
“Your sister said you wanted some dirt on one of Caroline’s employees?”
“Yeah. A guy named Ronan.”
“You know. You’re pretty tight with the Constantines, seems that maybe just asking Caroline might be easier.”
“That’s not a good idea,” I said, trying to keep it vague, but it felt like I was spilling my guts about everything. This woman was watching me so carefully it was like she could see the things I wasn’t saying. “I don’t even know his last name.”
“Byrne,” she said. Ronan Byrne. Yeah. That felt . . . right.
“You know him?”
“Only by reputation and what I’ve been able to find out. Which isn’t much.”
“What is his reputation?” I asked.
“Well, no one would ever confuse him for a good guy.”
I did. That night at my engagement. And perhaps . . . perhaps at the fundraiser. Before he said all those things to me. Before he pushed me away like I was trash. Before he made me feel like trash.
“Well, his childhood is a whole Charles Dickens thing. Mom wasn’t around. Dad was in and out the army and jail. Died when he was about ten. Ronan grew up in a protestant boarding school. He has more hospital records than anything else.”
“Hospital?”
“Someone liked beating the shit out of him.”
I took a sip of vodka, the glass cold against my lips as that information sunk in.
“How did Caroline find him?”
Eden shrugged. “The Constantines have had their fingers in the oil drilling off the coast of the UK for a couple of decades. She could have met him at any point.”
“But why is he here? Now?”
“A good junkyard dog can be hard to find,” Eden said, tilting her head back towards Jacob by the door. I flinched at her language. “Too real for you, Poppy?” She said my name with all the p sounds.
“Ronan’s not a bodyguard,” I said. I really didn’t think he was. Caroline still had the same armed guards she always had. With the earpieces and the triangle formation around her.
No, Ronan was something else. Something closer. Something more trusted. He had an office outside her door. He was in her home on the weekend.
“And why would he come here?” I was thinking out loud. That night I met him. He’d been beaten up and slightly baffled. He didn’t know why he was there. At that party. In the States.
I haven’t been invited in yet.
“Money talks,” Eden said. “And some guys like having a reason to be . . . unleashed. The Constantines and Morellis don’t have much in common, but they can offer a certain kind of person a . . . certain kind of pleasure.”
That whole sentence made my skin crawl. But part of it rang me like a bell. The truth could be so undeniable.
“How do you know Zilla?” I asked. Behind Eden, Jacob’s head snapped our way, and something awful curled in my stomach. Oh, Zilla. What have you been up to?
My sister wanted to be unleashed. That was what her manic side craved. A lawless state where she was judge, jury, and executioner. And something sparked in Jacob’s dead eyes at the mention of my sister’s name.
“Zilla and I go way back,” Eden said. She drained the last of the vodka and stood up, the fur coat slipping off her shoulder. And that was suddenly the end of the conversation. “I’m sorry that’s all I know. Ronan Byrne is a bit of a ghost.” And if she was drunk from the half a bottle Grey Goose she’d just shot down, she didn’t show it. “So? About my payment?”
“How much?” I asked, reaching for my bag. Zilla had not mentioned payment, but nothing was free. I knew that better than most.
“Oh honey. Money is so Constantine. The Morellis deal in something else entirely.”
She stepped forward, far too close. We’d shifted while talking, and I’d turned towards her. Suddenly, she was between my thighs. Her bare skin pressed up against my jeans. I could smell the vodka. The Jardin d’Amalfi she wore. A cigarette she might have smoked before coming in. Her eyes were dilated, and I wondered what else was in her system outside the vodka.
“What do you want?” I asked. “If not money.”
“Lots of things,” she said, and her finger lightly touched the side of my face. I could not mistake her intent.
“I won’t . . . have sex with you.”
“Well, that’s too bad. You were growing on me.” She stepped back, tugged her fur coat up around her body. “We’ll do this the old-fashioned way, I guess. You owe me one.”
“One what?”
“Favor.” She picked her purse up from the bar. “Relax. I’m not going to ask you to kill anyone. Probably.” She winked and turned for the door. “But if you want my advice, stay away from Ronan Byrne. The ones who have spent their life fighting don’t know when to stop.”
A favor? I thought in the car on the way back from Red Hook to Bishop’s Landing. What in the world could I offer a person like Eden Morelli? I didn’t know anything. I had no political secrets. And I didn’t know anything about the Constantines that she didn’t know. What if she wanted me to spy?
Well, she would be disappointed, in the end.
Theo pulled up to the front of the house, and I opened the door before he got there to open it for me. Stepping out of the car, I caught his rather stunned expression.
“I think I’d like to learn how to drive,” I said. For the brief period of time between my father’s death and the evaporation of all our money and resources and my marriage to the senator, I rode a bike around campus or took Ubers.
Not being able to drive had kept me captive, in a way. Relying on Theo, when if I’d been able to drive, maybe I wo
uld have made a break for it on my own.
No. I wouldn’t have.
But driving would be part of my new independence.
“Ma’am?” Theo said.
“Will you teach me?” I asked, and the poor guy blanched, looking around like he had to check with someone before saying anything. And maybe it was the vodka, or maybe it was brushing up against Eden Morelli who so clearly lived her life on her own terms, but I was done living my life like the senator was still alive.
I wasn’t a paper doll. Not anymore.
“The senator is dead. He doesn’t decide what happens in this house anymore.”
Theo blinked like I’d said something he wasn’t expecting. Well, he’d better get used to it. I was just starting to be unexpected.
“I can teach you,” Theo said.
“Good.” I walked past him into my dark house.
I opened the front door and punched in the code to the alarm to make it stop beeping. In the dark, I walked down the hallway past the rooms I never used and was never going to, the sitting room and the study with the fireplace that had not seen a fire once in the two years I lived here. In the kitchen, I got a glass of water and drank it down.
Did Eden Morelli really hit on me? Did that actually happen?
Laughing, I filled up my empty glass and took it up the stairs to my bedroom. My bedroom was all white, as per the senator’s request. Floors, ceiling, linens. The furniture was mahogany and dark in the shadows.
I hated all white.
I should change it.
“I should move,” I said out loud.
“And go where, Princess?”
I screamed, dropped the glass and fumbled for the light, but he crept out of the shadows before I could turn it on.
“Leave it,” Ronan said. “This is a conversation better suited to the dark.”
11
Heart pounding, the vodka in my stomach churning, I ran.
I made it down the hallway to the top of the stairs before he grabbed my hand, yanking me to a halt so fast it wrenched my shoulder.
“What the hell are you doing in my house?” I cried, trying to get my hand free, but his grip was iron. And I knew when I couldn’t win against a man’s strength. So I stopped fighting and waited for him to relax.
“I’m here to get some questions answered,” he said, turning back to the bedroom, pulling me behind him like a fish.
Yeah, I wasn’t going back into that bedroom with him. I started fighting again. If I could get downstairs to the alarm—
“Stop it, Poppy,” he growled and grabbed me by the waist and hauled me back into the bedroom. He threw me down on the bed, and I scrambled off, standing on the other side of it. In front of me was the king-size bed, Ronan, and a dozen yards between me and the door.
Behind me were French doors and a balcony. If I was careful and did everything just right when I jumped, I would land in the pool.
“Thinking of jumping out that window?” he asked. “I wouldn’t. It would be a shame to end this night scraping your broken body off the deck.”
“What do you want?” I asked, taking a step backwards towards the door.
“To talk some sense into you.”
“In my bedroom?”
“Calm down, Poppy. I’m not going to hurt you.”
I made some kind of scoffing whimpering noise in my throat and took another tiny step back.
“You don’t believe me?” He circled the bed, and there was no place for me to go but back against the wall. “You think I already hurt you?”
He made it sound like I was a child. Like I had no idea all the ways he could give me pain.
“Stop.” I put up my hand, as if I could fend him off.
He grabbed me by the elbows, yanking me up on my toes. “How am I supposed to keep you safe when you do something as stupid as go talk to the Morellis?”
The moonlight caught him across the face, and I’d never seen him so angry.
“Keep me safe?” I laughed, which was probably risky considering his anger. But I was beyond giving a shit. Those words didn’t even make sense coming from him.
“What did you talk to Eden Morelli about?” he asked.
“How do you even know I did?”
“There are a thousand wires crisscrossing between the Morellis and the Constantines, and you tripped half of them reaching out to Eden. Who, just to be clear, is not to be taken lightly. She’s as bad as they get. Feral, like. Vicious.”
“And what are you?”
“Oh, Princess, I think I’ve been very good to you.” The low purr of his voice thrummed between us. Making the memory of his hands between my legs tangible and real.
It was time for this to be over. I pushed at his chest, but he didn’t budge. If anything, he pulled me closer. My toes barely touching the floor. But I didn’t wince. Or beg. I gave him nothing.
“Am I hurting you?” he breathed.
“You know you are.”
“This is nothing compared to what could be done to you.”
“You think I don’t know?” I spat at him. “You think there’s one inch of pain you can show me that I don’t know by heart?”
His eyes were dark in the shadows, all the color leached from his body. He was black and white and grey. But when he smiled, he gleamed.
“There you are,” he said. God, this man. He was only happy when I was spitting at him.
“What do you want?” I asked. “What do I need to do to get you out of here?”
The grandfather clock in the hallway clicked forward a minute, so loud in the quiet between us.
“What would you do?” His voice was soft.
“Not what you’re thinking.”
“You don’t have the slightest idea what I’m thinking.”
I rolled my eyes at him. Something that once got me smacked so hard I had to go to the dentist. “Trust me, Ronan. You’re not as original as you think you are.”
That made him tip back his head and howl with laughter, and then he stepped away, slowly letting go of my body which I let sag against the wall while I caught my breath. Pretending to be brave. Strong. It took a lot of effort. Far more effort than cowering and hiding. But I was done cowering and hiding.
He pulled a chair that usually sat beside the dresser forward to sit directly across from me. “What are you doing?”
“Sitting down. You’re going to answer a few questions for me.”
“I’m not going to do shit for you.”
“Swear to god, Poppy. You’re making this harder than you need to.”
“Good.”
In the shadows I watched him look up at the ceiling, a hard sigh. A throbbing heartbeat in his throat. “You called the fucking Morellis,” he said. “If you’re foolish enough to think that nothing bad was going to come of it, you’re wrong. I’m here. I’m the bad that comes of it, Poppy. You’ll be answering some questions.”
“Fine,” I said. Because he wasn’t wrong. The only place for me to sit was the bed, and that wasn’t going to happen. So, I stayed on my feet but didn’t lean against the wall. I was getting tiny little points in tiny little ways. “Ask your questions.”
“Why did you go to the Morellis?”
“To get information.”
“On Caroline?”
That made me blink. “No. Why would I want information on Caroline?”
“The senator?” He began tapping the arm of the chair with his middle finger. A small sign of impatience.
“No. I know everything I need to know about the senator.”
“The foundation?” The foundation? I felt a strange chill. What didn’t I know about the foundation?
“You,” I said, tired of the guessing. “I went to the Morellis to get information about you.”
His finger stopped tapping on the chair.
“What did you want to know about me?” he asked, his voice terrifyingly careful.
“Who you are? Where you came from? Why Caroline trusts you so much? So fast?�
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“You didn’t need to go to a Morelli for that,” he said.
“Well, you weren’t telling me anything.”
“Because I’m no one,” he said.
“You keep saying that, but Caroline found you in Ireland and brought you back here for something.”
“I have skills—”
“Eden called you a junkyard dog.”
His head snapped back at that as if the words hit a nerve. “She would know, I guess.”
“Is that what you are?”
“No,” he said. “It’s what I was. Caroline found me and gave me a chance to be something else. I took it. That’s all, Poppy. That’s the story of me.”
“Who put you in the hospital when you were young?”
He stood up from the chair in one fluid rush. Stalked me across the room, and I scuttled like a crab along the wall heading for that French door.
My heartbeat pounded in my ears, and I was aware that this man had a line and with that question it was probably somewhere behind me.
He smacked his hand against the wall beside my head, and I flinched at the sound. Expecting it to be my face that he hit. I slowly opened my eyes to find him watching me. So unreadable. A million miles deep.
“How bad do you want to know?” he asked. He stepped up against me, the hand I’d held out was useless against him. He pushed it back against me with his chest. His skin was hot under his fine shirt.
“I . . . don’t,” I said. My bravery gone. I was a paper doll. Crumpled when pressed.
“Oh, what a liar you are.”
“Okay, you wanted to scare me? You wanted to warn me? Great. You did it. I’ll stay away from Eden Morelli.” I thought briefly of that favor I owed her, but I wasn’t going to tell him about that. Or Jacob.
I wasn’t going to tell him anything, anymore. I pushed against him, but he didn’t budge. It was just the heat of his body. Against my hand. Against me. The longer he stayed there, unmoving, his heart beating against my hand, I started to wonder if this was a different game.
I looked up at him, the memories of his body pushing mine against that door, an unwelcome heat in my brain. In my body.
The hand I had pressed against his chest, shifted. Stroked. Over the firm curve of his chest, I brushed the bead of his nipple with my pinky, and his body trembled. Trembled. I did it again. Harder. I used just a little, the edge of my nail, and he licked his lip.