by Riley Ashby
You wanted him to go, I reminded myself, but it was no use.
“I needed you here!” I screamed, completely breaking down.
I needed you three months ago.
“Vail, please. We need to talk calmly.”
I was losing control of the situation, but I couldn’t stop.
“I was heartbroken, and in pain, and I needed you here—”
Stop now. Don’t tell him.
“ —because I had to hold the hand of a woman I barely knew while I bled that asshole’s DNA out of me.”
There. Now it was out in the open. I had sworn that no one would know besides the doctor and the women who helped me through that night, but I couldn’t keep secrets from him. I never had.
His face turned white as he processed what I meant. “You can’t mean…”
That truth was out there now, and I pursed my lips as if I could call the words back. I hadn’t meant to tell him that, yet he’d managed to pry forth my secret just by being here.
I had to get away from him before he made me give up anything else.
Walking toward me, he reached for my arm, trying to give me the comfort I had craved weeks ago that he wasn’t here to deliver. I threw up my hand, and he stopped dead.
“It’s over now. I don’t want to talk about it with you or anyone else.”
“Vail … I didn’t know.”
“Obviously.” I couldn’t look at him. My stomach was jumping, urging me to get away. “You can go now, like you want. I don’t want to see you.”
“Vail, please.”
“Leave me alone. Stay on Ellery’s side of the house. I won’t bother you again.”
Even as I walked down the hallway with my back to him, I braced myself for his hand on my arm. For him to spin me around and take me in his arms, kiss my face, and hold me tight so that I could finally fall apart with him and maybe actually forgive him. But he let me walk away.
I didn’t look back.
In all the time I was in New York, I never expected her to react like this. I thought I would come back and things would be as they had always been. There had been other times when I got pulled away with little notice, cutting our vacations or weekends away short, and she always understood. I had consoled myself by thinking I was giving her time to heal without me hovering over her shoulder, and she would be ready when I came home.
I was the stupidest fucking person on the planet.
As she walked down the hall, I noted the way her straight back was as if she had a metal rod for a spine. She walked stiff, knees locked, doing everything in her power to look straight ahead. My excuse to her was that I thought she needed space? She needed someone to hold her as she fell apart, someone who would let her cry as long and as hard as she wanted every time the memories came rushing back and were too heavy to handle.
But it was exactly that knowledge—the thought of her bleeding in the bathroom with only Sophie for company, the image of her clutching my jacket while she slept because I wasn’t there to hold her—that held me back from following her.
“You’re a dumbass.” Tori’s voice drifted down from the stairs, and I started.
“How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough. It was easy to hear her, though. You should be glad Ellery went outside.”
“Shit.” How many people were going to be witness to my massive fuckups before I could correct them? “What are you even doing here?”
She walked the rest of the way down the stairs toward me, barefoot. Ellery would have a fit if he saw her. “Ellery had me move in, at least until he feels better about Vail. So at least a few years.” She smiled wryly. “What about you? Shouldn’t you be on the East Coast?”
“I took a leave of absence.” I ran a hand through my hair and cursed myself. My normal grooming routine had gone out the window, and my hair was mussed and ruffled more than I liked. I could practically feel the stubble on my chin growing with each passing moment, and I needed a good workout or six. “I told them I’d work on the case from here. I don’t want to go back until I have to.”
“I would say that Vail would be happy to hear that, but…” She gestured down the hall instead of finishing. “You should go apologize.”
“For what? I had to go back East to put him away. She understands that.” I couldn’t have left this part of the process to someone else, not when a mistake could mean that he walked free. Why was everyone giving me such a hard time about it?
She rolled her eyes. “You’re such a man.”
I wasn’t even going to dignify that with a response.
Turning away from Tori, I walked toward the foyer and the side of the house that held my room. “Put some shoes on, or Ellery will staple them to your feet.”
“I’d like to see him try.” She scoffed. Her feet padded against the carpet as she ran after me down the hall. God, why wouldn’t everyone leave me alone? “But seriously, Castel, get your head out of your ass. She needs you. You need each other. And you’re not teenagers anymore. Things have changed. You need to talk like adults.”
“I don’t remember asking for your goddamn opinion.”
“And I don’t remember caring whether you asked. I was the one who sat with her for the past six weeks. She looked for you all the time. If there ever was a time for you to act on your obvious mutual attraction, it’s now.”
“And who are you to tell me that?” I didn’t need this woman to give me advice on my love life. We barely knew each other. “She’s healing. She needs time to figure out who she is now that this has happened to her. She seems to be healing pretty well so far, so at least you got that part right.”
Her footsteps stopped behind me. “She didn’t tell you what happens at night, did she?”
After freezing in place, I turned around and walked back to Tori so swiftly she took a step back.
“What happens at night?”
That cocky look of hers had vanished. Her lips flattened into a line, and I wondered if she was contemplating not answering me.
“You don’t get to clam up now that you actually have something useful to say. What happens at night?”
She folded her arms over her chest and then looked over her shoulder in the direction Vail had gone. For a second, I thought she wouldn’t tell me, and I was going to have to wring it out of her.
But then she turned back to me, and she did. She told me everything.
“Absolutely not. You’re staying right here.”
I rubbed my fingers over tired eyes despite knowing I was only worsening the bags beneath them. I had been arguing with my brother for thirty minutes about my plan to move out of the house. I had hoped to simply walk in, announce my decision, and leave, but he beat me to the door and prevented me from running away. Sophie was sitting in one of the large armchairs near the chessboard, staring out the window with a scowl on her face. She had been silent throughout the entire exchange.
“You don’t have a say in this, Ellery. I need to get out on my own again.” I folded my arms across my chest, then changed my mind because that probably made me look like an angry teenager. I swore, sometimes he was still in parent mode with me. All he could see was the teenager he had to drive to the store to pick up pads and tampons, and give the sex talk to the first time he caught me making out with a boy. Now I was the girl who couldn’t take care of herself at a party, proving he was right to be so overprotective.
I pulled back my shoulders and tried to copy the power stance he liked to employ whenever he was making a point. “I am in control of myself. I choose where I live, and I choose to live away from here.”
“You’re not ready to go away. You jump at every shadow. You’re afraid of every stranger. No good will come of you living somewhere you don’t know anyone.”
“I’ll still be in the city. You can come visit me every day.”
“That’s not the point.” He roughed his hands through his hair, mussing it briefly before smoothing it again. Only that insouciant c
url flopped forward. “You won’t have Sophie, or Tori, or Castel. You won’t have the staff. You’ll have to learn your new surroundings. Every closet, every corner, every doorway.”
Giving up the fight, I folded my arms across my chest, not caring if it made me look petulant, and stalked over to the window where Sophie was sitting. He was right, and I hated it. Even in this house that was so familiar to me, I felt vulnerable and exposed. What would I feel like in a completely new place, somewhere with hidden spaces that I would have to discover on my own with no one to back me up? Floorboards that would creak unexpectedly or even a refrigerator light that wasn’t bright enough. But I couldn’t be here if Castel was as well, and I wasn’t about to explain that to my brother.
“Who would stay with you at night?”
I winced at that. Only one person could help me at night, and I didn’t want him anywhere near me.
“I can’t stay here, Ellery. You don’t understand.”
“What’s wrong, Vail? Tell me what’s going on with you, and we can fix it. Do you want Tori to come stay in your room permanently?”
Not her. Cas.
“That won’t solve the problem. It’s not like I’m lonely.”
Sophie stood, her bare feet hitting the carpeted floor in muffled steps as she moved quickly across the room and out the door. Ellery had relaxed his in-house dress code, at least with her. Apparently, a pregnant girlfriend was all it took to soften him up.
“Then what is it?” He took her place beside me in the now unoccupied chair and clasped my hand. When I looked down at him, his eyes spoke to me in that way they always had since we were children. When our father was raging and our mother cowering, when there wasn’t enough food to eat or I had been pushed over on the playground, he would take my hand like this, and I knew he understood my pain. He could decipher my emotions even when I couldn’t untangle them myself. He was trying to help me like that again, but I had shut him out. He didn’t know I was lying to him.
“Please tell me. I don’t know how to help you when you won’t talk to me.”
He didn’t know about the abortion. He didn’t know about what had happened after I was taken and before Chase owned me. He didn’t know any of those things, and I hoped to God he never would.
I took my hand back and folded my arms across my chest again, looking out into the yard. Luke was snoozing in a patch of sunlight; Leo and Max patrolled the garden with their noses to the ground. Maybe Sophie was going outside to join them.
“I can’t stay in this house. I just can’t. Please trust that I know what’s best for me.”
“You can go to the cottage.”
The rough voice from the doorway snapped both our heads in that direction. Castel stood straight just inside the office threshold. Sophie had slipped back into the room, brushing against him as she did, and took the seat opposite Ellery. She picked up a black bishop from the chessboard and moved it diagonally one square.
I stiffened. “That won’t work.”
“Why not?” Ellery’s gaze flipped back to me. “You know it, and it’s on the property. Someone could stay out there with you. And you’re a five-minute walk away. We could even send the dogs out there.”
I set my mouth in a line. It made sense because it was my space, after all. But I wasn’t sure it was far enough.
Castel made the decision for me before I had a chance to respond. “I’ll head out there and make sure everything is working. I’ll be back to get your bags.” Castel turned to go before we could say anything else.
“I can carry my own things,” I yelled at him, but he gave no indication of having heard me. I looked at Ellery. “What does he mean, make sure it’s working?”
He stood, buttoning his jacket, and walked back to his desk, where he promptly unbuttoned it again before sitting down. “When you left, I didn’t go out there anymore. I didn’t want to disturb anything or make you mad.” He wouldn’t look at me.
I sank onto the arm of the chair. His scowl was deeper than usual; his mouth twisted in pain. It must have hurt him too much to even think about it. When we were younger and someone gave me trouble, he would always seek out the perpetrator and demand an apology. If they refused, he repaid whatever had been done to me tenfold. It must be killing him that he could do neither in this case. There would be no physical punishment for Chase, at least not from Ellery.
“I wanted it to be right for you when you came back.”
I walked to the bookcase, blinking back tears. I hadn’t had much time to think about it, but Cas had managed to remind me earlier today that my disappearance had been hard on them all. None of them would ever compare their loneliness to what I went through, but it also didn’t diminish the pain that had built up over the weeks of wondering where I was. They must not have even known I was alive. And as much as I hated how much time Ellery spent with those sleazy businessmen with questionable interests, his connections had brought me home in the end. He hated associating with them, but he had and would continue to do so if it meant he had his finger on the pulse of whatever threats there might be to my safety. Now that he had Sophie and a baby on the way, he would probably be even more insufferable. If that baby was a girl, she was never going to be let out of his sight. And I knew it wasn’t because of any sort of misguided chivalry or misogynistic sense of ownership, but because he loved us. And he wanted to know that we were safe, more so now than ever.
Fine. I’d go to the cottage. I’d do what he asked if it meant giving him a little peace of mind.
“No bodyguard. I want to be there alone.”
He sighed. “You can have Castel or Tori. I don’t like the idea of you without someone to call on.”
I walked back and flopped into the chair. “Give me this, Ellery. I’m staying on the property, so let me have privacy.”
We were quiet for a long minute. Sophie was staring at me intently but looked away when I tried to meet her eyes. She must have gone to get Castel when she ran away, sensing that Ellery and I were at an impasse. I hadn’t given her enough credit for how perceptive she was.
“Fine,” Ellery relented. “But you need to check in. And I’ll send Castel out there if you don’t.”
“I’ll go visit every day,” Sophie told him, then looked at me, “if that’s all right with you.”
I leaned forward, reaching across the chessboard, and took her hand. “Of course. That would be wonderful.” I sat back. “And it’s not like I’m never going to come here, either.”
“Dinner at least once a week.”
I nodded. “You don’t have to convince me of that. I never really learned to cook, thanks to you.”
He scoffed. “That’s partly Castel’s fault too.”
I blushed, remembering the summer we spent at his home. His chefs were so possessive of the kitchen that I wasn’t even allowed to make oatmeal. I got quite the scolding my first morning there.
“And I’m not going to apologize for hitting the big time and bringing you to live in my gorgeous house with every luxury you could imagine and staff to attend to your every need.” He tried to scold, but his tone had changed. Whatever had just happened had passed, and we were okay again.
“I’m not complaining!” I threw my hands in the air. Sophie sat back in her chair, smiling.
“Me neither,” she said. “Especially now that I don’t have to wear those damn heels everywhere.”
“Yes, thank you for getting knocked up so that Ellery would relax that ridiculous in-house dress code of his.”
Ellery scowled, but she laughed.
I lounged with them for the afternoon, forgetting my anxiety and grief, and spending some time getting to know my brother again. I admired the way Sophie knew how to tease him and when to back off. Sometimes I would catch him giving her a look, and she would fall silent with a strange smile on her face.
How had they come to know each other so intimately in these few short weeks? I had spent ten years chasing a man who didn’t want to be caught, and he w
as like a stranger. And now, when he finally decided he wanted to be close to me, I harbored a secret that I could never reveal to anyone.
When I saw Castel walking back toward the house, carrying a bulging trash bag in one hand, I excused myself back to the room. I wasn’t interested in talking to him.
When I got back to my room, a single pink camellia was in a vase on my nightstand. I touched the soft petals, then picked up the note tucked under one corner.
I was wrong.
I crumpled it in one hand, then immediately smoothed it back along my palm. These were his words. His handwriting. And he had left it for me, admitting something, knowing I wouldn’t want to talk to him about that subject again. Before I could think twice, I slipped it into my pocket.
“What do you think?”
I was back in middle school, the little kid who had picked out a Christmas gift for the pretty girl in class and was hoping she’d like it more than everyone else’s. Vail stood in front of me, unfolding the soft pink sheet and looking up at the definitely illegal hooks that I had put in the ceiling in an arc around her bed. The sheet was covered in a floral print, and a thick fabric that wouldn’t show even a silhouette when she had her reading light on at night. It was technically two pieces, so that she could pull the barrier apart and tie them back. It would allow her to completely hide herself when she wanted privacy, but still open herself up to the rest of the room—small as it was—when we were all hanging out together.
“I mean, I guess it doesn’t seem like a lot, but I thought it would be nice for you to have a better place to change your clothes or shut us out if we get too annoying. And this way you can stay up and read at night without worrying about us, and vice versa, because it’ll block the light.”
She wasn’t saying anything, just looking at the fabric. Had I somehow messed up by doing this? Maybe she thought it meant that I wanted to see less of her. That was part of the truth. It was important that we not get too close, no closer than friends or pseudo-siblings. But it was also hard to ignore how often she would isolate herself from us by facing the wall and turning up the music on her headphones so loud I could hear it from my bed. She had been sharing this tiny room with two teenage boys for months, and it was wearing on all of us. She wrinkled her nose whenever she came into the room and saw dirty boxers tossed in the middle of the floor. More than once, I had walked in on her spraying air freshener heavily around the room. She needed to have some space of her own, even if it was only an illusion.