“That,” he said, “wasn’t very nice. Considering everything I’ve done for you.”
“Maybe then. But now—”
“But what, princess?”
“But now you—you despise me.” Nina’s chin quivered as she spoke, and she hated how much just acknowledging the fact upset her. “You’ve made that clear since the baby arrived. Neither of us mean anything to you. Aside from that…I think the ten million dollars you’ve taken from me and my family is pretty enough payment.”
Calvin flared. Nina shook her head. She had never wanted this to be painful or hurtful.
Control, Nina, she could practically hear her grandmother intoning. Always maintain control.
“Calvin,” she tried again once she had flattened her tone. “Please. Let’s not pretend this was ever something it wasn’t. We were an arrangement from the beginning. You kindly offered me a way to keep my family’s name intact. I provided a means for you to get this”—Nina waved her hand around the mess on the desk—“whatever this is, started. Let’s call it even and move on. Just so you know, I requested my lawyer double the settlement. You’ll receive twice what we originally said.”
It was a lot. Not the additional ten million he had requested last month, but more than enough for him to have what he had just said he wanted: never to have to suffer the way his parents did. If he did things right, he’d never want for money again.
Calvin dropped the divorce papers back on the desk, and they both stared at them for several moments.
When he looked up, his cruel eyes shone. “No.”
Nina’s jaw dropped. “No?”
Calvin stood and readjusted his belt. “No, princess, I don’t think so. The answer is no.”
A sinking sensation lodged in Nina’s belly. Surprise, followed by a hanging weight of dread. “What—what do you mean? How can you say that? We—we had an agreement.”
But Calvin only crossed his meaty arms. “Agreements can change.”
Nina felt her mouth go dry.
“I’m glad you got whatever you wanted from this arrangement, princess, but I’m afraid I didn’t. Not by a fucking long shot. This isn’t happening.”
“Yes, it is!” she cried, all vestiges of control gone for good. “I’ve, well, I’ve already made plans. I’m taking Olivia to Massachusetts with me, where I’ll finish school, like I said. I bought a house. I’ll get a car.”
“You’re not listening, Nina. You’re not going anywhere.”
“I am!” She was shouting now, hating the way her face heated up with rage. Emotion. “I already have the plane ticket, the house, everything. It’s settled!”
“A plane ticket?” He perked up. “To Boston?”
Nina cowered, realizing how much of the game she had actually given away. “I—no. It’s for…Florence, actually. I’m taking Olivia. I decided. Oh, Calvin, I’m sorry, but I want Olivia to know who her father really is. I want him to know about her. We’ll keep it quiet, I promise. I’m sure Grandmother will do whatever it takes to keep everyone’s names out of the press. But then…Calvin, I don’t want to stay in New York anymore.” A tear ran down her cheek. She had never known how much she felt that way until just this moment. “You said you needed to make your own life? Well, I do too. And I’m not looking for your permission.”
“Well, that’s too bad, because you don’t fucking have it!”
He grabbed the papers off the desk and hurled them away. They erupted midair in a sharp plume of white before scattering across the floor in listless piles. Calvin’s barrel chest heaved, sweat seeping from under his arms.
“You see, I know something else you don’t,” he said with a cruel curl of his upper lip. “Your old grandma? She’s sick. She hasn’t told anyone else about it, but I heard her say something to her butler about her meds. Zofran. Know what that’s for?”
Mutely, Nina shook her head.
“Cancer, babe. To help with the nausea from the chemo.” Calvin nodded, like it was good news. “She’s terminal, babe. She’s about to kick the bucket, hard. Now, it might take two years, or it might take ten, but one day old granny is going to be out of the picture. And with your cousin jumped ship, that leaves one heir left.”
Nina swallowed. “You mean me?”
Calvin stepped closer and pulled a lock of hair away from her ear so that as he spoke, his hot breath pooled around her earlobe.
“Did you really think I was going to miss out on my share of seventeen billion dollars? Time to face facts, princess. You’re stuck with me. For life.”
For a moment, Nina thought Calvin might charge at her. But instead, he turned around, riffled through a few other papers on the desk, then turned back with one particular document and shoved it at her.
“You’re going to stay here. You’re going to be my wife. And you’re going to support my business until I get whatever the fuck I want and become one of you. Because if you don’t, I’ll drag you down to my level, Nina. Starting with that.”
He shoved the papers at her again, and Nina took them. As she paged through, an eerie chill descended over her shoulders like an invisible cape. Or maybe just a cage.
It looked like a deed to one of the houses listed on so many of those applications.
“What…what is this?”
“It’s a mortgage,” he said. “Five, actually.” His face turned sour. “Opened in the name of a corporation that you happen to own. The goddamn banks see my name, and they think I’m no one. They hear the name ‘de Vries,’ and suddenly every damn door is wide open.”
She flipped through the papers. On the front was a name: Pantheon, LLC. A company, apparently located in Delaware. But on every page that required initials or the full name of a representative, her name was written in.
She set the papers down. “These aren’t mine.”
“Tell that to a judge. I’m pretty sure that’s your signature.”
“But…but…” Nina shook her head. “But I had nothing to do with this. What did you do, forge these?”
“You should really make your mark something more notable, princess. This was embarrassingly easy.”
Nina felt like her lungs were freezing. She couldn’t breathe. “Calvin, I have nothing to do with this!”
“And yet,” Calvin said, grinding his teeth into a sly, bone-chilling smile that spread his face like fingers in bread dough, “you do.” He tapped a thick finger next to her name, which was far too legible in her neat, polished script. “Right there. If I get caught, you’ll be liable. They’ll connect you to the whole scheme. Smart, isn’t it?”
“But how—don’t you have to be present to purchase property?” She knew this only because she had just done it herself.
Calvin grinned, his teeth like razors. “You were. Don’t you remember?”
Nina swallowed. She didn’t understand how, but somehow, he had managed to buy five houses around what looked like Brooklyn under her name, without her being present. There was only one explanation—someone was faking her identity. Someone Calvin knew. Someone the powers than be would have believed was her as well.
As she looked around the office, she realized how easy it would have been for her husband to orchestrate such a thing. Since he was apparently trafficking in forged identifications, it wouldn’t have been hard to recreate hers.
“No,” she said. “No. I’m leaving. I’m talking to Grandmother. She’ll fix it—she’ll fix everything, and she will take care of you, just like she does everything. You just st-stay away from me. You can’t do this. You can’t do any of this!”
She turned to go, but his voice yanked her back.
“I think you have that wrong,” Calvin said. “Your grandmother doesn’t take care of her family. She takes care of the people she thinks hurt it.” He tipped his head. “I always wondered what her husband did to piss her off. And wasn’t your uncle a bit of a black sheep too before he died? I never found a sailing accident all that convincing, to be honest.”
Nina’s mind rac
ed. This was preposterous. Her grandfather had passed years before her birth, and her uncle Jacob when she was just a girl. She had never questioned their deaths or what had happened…but could there be any truth to what Calvin suggested? She hated that she was even considering it.
“And then,” Calvin continued, “there’s the case of your cousin’s fiancée.”
Nina froze near the door, the bloody images she had seen of Eric’s love lying in a bathtub flashing through her mind. Maybe she had been afraid of that all along.
“I have wondered,” Calvin continued, his voice cutting through the room like a knife through butter. “If she was pregnant too. Would have been awfully inconvenient for the golden heir to knock up the Greek girl at twenty-two.”
Nina felt her skin begin to crawl. It was like he was speaking her greatest fears out loud.
“And if that’s what she would do to her, think what she would do if she knew her only great-grandchild was the bastard of a washed-up professor.”
“No,” Nina whispered, more weakly now. “I’m leaving. You…I have to.”
“Go on,” Calvin sneered, his oppressive bulk emanated heat just behind her. “Just know if you do, you’re signing your own arrest warrant too. No one will believe you, Nina. That’s your signature. Every single notary will swear you were there under oath. Do you really think dear old Granny is going to defend you against that? If you really think she’ll embrace you after the inevitable field day the papers will have at your expense, you’re even more naive than you look.” He leaned close so his belly touched the small of her back, and his thick lips brushed her ear. “She doesn’t care about you, Nina. None of them do.”
Nina had to grab the edge of a shelf near the door to keep from falling. For a moment, she saw her grandmother in the front row at her wedding. Watching the ceremony not with love or wonder or pride. Nor with concern or care, the way one might expect from a loved one. Disappointment, she had seen instead. And after she had allowed Calvin to kiss her and seal the rites: disgust.
“How could you?” she whispered as she slowly turned back. The deed shook in her hand. “You’re stealing my life.”
Calvin surveyed her for a moment, then scoffed when he spotted two large tears welling up and falling down Nina’s cheek.
“I’ll make you a deal, princess,” he said. He pointed at a large stack of papers on the other side of the desk. “See those over there? Those are the deeds to every piece of property that pretty ten million bought over the last year. And to save you time, Pantheon’s name is on all of them, along with your ridiculous little scribble.”
Nina felt her heart turning to concrete. Not the kind that held steady. The kind that crumbled under fire.
“A deal,” she said. It was hard to breathe. It felt like someone had punched her in the stomach. “What kind of deal?”
Calvin came close again, then slipped one sausage-shaped finger under her chin and tipped it up so he could look at her.
“You get me in with Eric’s people. With your people. You sell it to them; you make them learn that I fucking belong at the top of the world with all the rest of you upper-crust assholes. You make me a true power player, and I’ll take your name off those deeds when the day comes that I don’t need you. You bring me new partners, the kind I really want to go to bed with…and I’ll stop trying to get into yours.” He eyed her body with unmasked lust. “Or maybe I won’t. I think it’s long past time I asserted my other marital rights.”
So this is what hopelessness feels like, Nina thought vaguely as she experienced the strange sensation of her body starting to shut down. The concrete in her head began to spread through her chest and limbs as Calvin’s fingers roved down her body. It would be so easy to let him take what he wanted, she realized, as they took hold of her backside, her shoulder, slipped between her legs.
But she couldn’t give him that. She couldn’t give him everything.
“Get off me!” Nina erupted, a whirl of motion as she slapped his hands away. “Don’t you touch me!”
She dodged out of reach, finding the door only to be yanked backward and caged against the shelves.
“You think you’re so much better than me, don’t you, princess?” Calvin said nastily as he shoved her back. “Do you have any idea what they say about you? That you’re nothing but a spoiled child who couldn’t even make it through college without going back to her grandma’s money. They say you’re an idiot who doesn’t care about anything but clothes and jewelry. Not even your own daughter.”
Suddenly, Nina’s voice was steel. “You touch me again, I swear to God, I will scream loud enough that every person in this building will call the police, Calvin. I’ll cry rape. I don’t care if I go to jail too. I’ll tell them what you did, and I’ll use every cent of my money to bury you.”
The utter virility of her words surprised even her. She honestly didn’t know she had it in her.
But to her surprise, Calvin smiled.
“What money?” he asked softly. “Don’t you understand? You have nothing that truly belongs to you. Your credit cards belong to your family. Your trust, your allowance, your home—all from them are trussed up tighter than a fucking roasted chicken. And, as we’ve already discussed, your family won’t have a thing to fucking do with you if you disgrace them. You and your little bastard would be gum on the bottom of their shoes.”
Nina suddenly couldn’t breathe. She wrapped her hands around her neck, as if to force air in and out of her windpipe. “No.” Her voice was a breath. Barely a whimper.
“And there’s one more reason I know you won’t leave, princess,” he continued, then licked his bottom lip, like a predator about to pounce.
“Why—why is that?”
“Because if you take one step out of this apartment, you’ll leave that baby of yours alone. Maybe not right away, but one day, you will. And I don’t think you’ll like where she ends up.”
A chill sprinted up Nina’s spine. “Excuse me?”
Calvin tapped his lip, like he was thinking of something else. “You know, come to think of it…some people would pay a pretty penny for a little girl like her. All I’d have to do is draw up the papers.”
The lump in Nina’s throat turned to a rock. “Y-you wouldn’t.”
He leaned in so his rubbery lips touched her ear again. “Try me.”
“STOP!” Nina’s shriek came from deeper in her soul than anything ever had.
Calvin reared. His face turned the color of a ripe tomato, and then, without warning, his hand whipped through the air and found her cheek with a loud slap that sent her ears ringing.
“Stupid fucking cunt!” he growled, then grabbed her collar and rammed her against the bookshelves hard enough that the wood ridges jammed painfully into her back. He slammed her again, this time hard enough that his absurdly large wedding ring, with five separate diamonds set into the thick gold, sliced into her cheek.
But Nina didn’t give him what he wanted. Instead, she held herself as tall as possible against the onslaught. The knuckles meeting her jaw with a particularly vicious backhand. The hard wood corners of the shelves ramming into her hips, her shoulders, her head, again and again.
It could be worse, said some strangely placid voice in the back of her mind. He could use actual fists. He could use his feet.
He could rape you too.
And what would Grandmother say to that?
She’d probably ask what you were wearing to deserve it.
At last, when he had tossed her around the room enough that sweat had dampened the center of his shirt and his breathing was curiously postcoital, he released her into the corner, trapped against the shelves.
Nina slowly worried her jaw and touched her nose gingerly. It didn’t seem broken, but she honestly wasn’t sure. There was a steady trickle of blood falling over her lip.
“Still don’t want to fuck me, princess?” Calvin sneered. “Sure it’s not the lesser of two evils?”
Nina had never been m
ore sure about anything in her life.
She stared at the papers on the desk. The bars of her new prison. Calvin was right. There would be no one there to save her from this. She had created this cage for herself. But she’d be damned if she’d risk making another one too.
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I am.”
Calvin spat. “Have it your way. But don’t cross me. Consider yourself warned.”
Beyond the door, there was a distant wail of a child. Olivia, seeking Nina’s attention. Both Nina and Calvin perked at the sound, but neither moved. Calvin because he didn’t care. Nina because she cared too much.
“Greta will get her,” Nina said, hating that she had to concede even that. But there was no way she could show her face to the household staff now. There was no way she could show any of this to anyone. Calvin had made that very, very clear.
“Well, princess? What’ll it be?”
And with that, her heart hardened completely.
“All right,” she said quietly. “But if you want me to be your representative, so to speak, I have a few requirements too. For one, you need to keep your hands off my face. No one will trust a woman with a black eye or a broken nose.” She bared her bloodied teeth in the kind of smile needed to charm women at luncheons and the men they married. “You want to be like us, Calvin? Here’s your first lesson: keep your brutality behind closed doors where it belongs. Keep it away from where people can actually see it.”
He looked like he wanted to hit her again. Like he wanted to break her nose for real, maybe knock out a few teeth too. But to her surprise, he nodded.
“Anything else?” he asked.
Nina sucked in a breath, forcing herself not to flinch at the sharp pain in her side that accompanied it. “Yes,” she said. “They also keep their children out of it. Olivia never sees any of this. And you keep your fucking hands off her. Forever.”
Calvin was quiet for another long moment. Then, eventually, he stuck out his hand, like a sick parody of the deal they had made together one year earlier. Feeling like she was about to vomit, Nina slowly returned the handshake, fighting a revulsive shudder at the feel of his sweaty palm pressed against hers.
The Perfect Woman (Rose Gold Book 2) Page 26
