Society Girl (Animos Society)

by Alys Murray

  “What’s your plan?” he asked.

  “I need a little help learning it.”

  He pointed to it. Clearly, the song choice confused him. “This one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s a little…” He struggled for the word. Samantha knew exactly which he should pick and a moment later, he chose it. “Depressing, isn’t it?”

  Samantha shrugged and sat down at the bench, resting her hands on the keys.

  “It’s his favorite. He says it’s the greatest love song of all time.”

  “Okay.” Thomas took a long inhale of breath and waved her on encouragingly. “Let’s hear what you’ve got so far.”

  A few notes and a couple of big headaches later, Thomas placed his hand on his sister’s arm, halting her playing.

  “Right. Let’s start from scratch.”

  She shook her head. “There’s something else, too. Something that I have to do. But I’m going to need your help.”

  “What’s that?”

  In a rush, she described her plan, her voice only wavering once. And when she was done, Thomas looked as horrified as she’d expected.

  “You know Dad’s going to… He’d never look at you the same way again, Sam.”

  “I know. But I think it’s time for the Animos Society to end. Don’t you?”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The season dissolved into winter, and Daniel felt it in every strum of his guitar and whisper on the wind. It sank into his skin, settling deep beneath him in a chill he could never quite shake. To make matters worse, he now refused to wear the coat he’d once handed over to Sam. His coat had been returned, very neatly and obviously freshly cleaned and pressed. When it arrived, he fully intended to bring it home and wear it out of spite. But when he opened the box carrying it, a wave of tuberose and fireplace perfume smacked him. The coat might have been washed, but after sitting in her house for so long, her scent wove itself into the very fabric. He could endure the cold if it meant not getting wrapped up in her scent.

  And today, he’d have to. Because today, he was in London… And today, he was going to sing for Alanis and her staff.

  In the top of one of Bank’s most exclusive buildings, the lobby of Icon Records hung over London like a precariously hung Christmas ornament, a collection of modern furniture and glass walls that made Daniel nervous to touch most of anything.

  When Nan offered him the business card from Sam, he’d held onto it for a few weeks, frantically writing new music. He let the pain—the pain that had been so numbing at first—rush through him, working through it with every chord and every strum, until finally he had a collection of six songs that sang in time with his soul.

  There was also another song, a seventh song, that he’d probably never have the courage to perform in public. A song he wasn’t ready to sing yet. A song about love and forgiveness. He kept it in his notebook, a scribbled-out melody waiting for the day he decided he was ready, but today wasn’t that day.

  Not that he was especially thinking of Sam right now. His mind was too full of terror. In just a few moments, they would call him back and judge his dreams based on a collection of six songs written in the middle of heartbreak… Was he going to be good enough?

  Most of his life, he hadn’t been good enough. Or, rather, people assumed he wouldn’t be good enough. Now that he had a chance to actually prove them wrong…he could only hope he didn’t blow it.

  “Mr. Best?” the soft voice of the receptionist called him out of his cloud of nerves and back to reality.

  “Mm-hmm?”

  “They’ll see you now. Studio A.”

  Collecting his guitar case, he followed her polite directions toward the back of the office, past the posters of current and past acts and past cubicles filled with head-phoned staff. When he pressed into Studio A, it wasn’t the same kind of glass-walled suite he’d seen in the front of the office space, but a dense, soundproofed block in the back.

  He’d never seen the inside of a real studio—recording or otherwise—but this audition suite matched most of his expectations. The walls were padded with gray and livened up only by a few rugs pinned to them and a TV playing the BBC on one wall, and at the far end, a table of assorted suits sat in wait, with Alanis in her place at the center. In the middle of the room, a microphone rig waited for him. He stepped toward it, his boots making no sound on the carpeted floor.

  “Daniel!” Alanis said, rising to shake his hand. “It’s so good to see you again.”

  She made quick work of introducing the rest of their team; all of them gave him brilliant smiles and their names, which he instantly forgot.

  “Thank you for having me back,” he said, too embarrassed to apologize for blowing off their last meeting.

  “Nonsense. We’re happy to do it. Sam told us you were being poached by Atlantic and we weren’t sure we’d see you again. Getting your call was quite a relief, in fact.”

  “She said that?”

  “Oh, don’t worry. There are no secrets in this industry. And no hard feelings, either. If you missed our last meeting because Atlantic had come courting, I can only say that I’m glad you saw the light and decided to join up with a much better label.”

  She winked, eliciting a sea of tittering laughs from her assembled executives. Daniel, for his part, managed a small laugh, but behind his laugh, his mind was racing. Sam had covered for him. She’d gotten him back in this room—a feat that probably burned a ton of her social capital and favors—and she covered for him. His heart hammered even harder.

  “We heard you put on quite a show in Oxford this Autumn,” a woman with a blue-dyed afro said, glancing up from her notes.

  “It was just an open mic at a bookstore.”

  “Small, intimate. Exclusive. That’s the kind of image I see for you. And it’s a perfect rags-to-riches story, a perfect narrative. It’ll play well…”

  As if he weren’t there, they dove into quiet segments of conversation, debating his look and his persona, his approach and his marketing capacity. Then, when they hit a lull, Alanis waved a man at the end of the table, dressed all in black, toward the center of the room.

  “Daniel, we’re just going to get you hooked up to the sound equipment so we can listen to this again later, all right?”

  “Sure.”

  For a few moments, the sound engineer fidgeted with his guitar and the microphones, setting them into place as the executives resumed their whispering. Daniel, not invited to help or to give his input in their discussions, turned his attention to the television.

  And his heart dropped. Samantha was on television. Samantha was on television. She was on television, and the chyron below her read: MP’S DAUGHTER SPEAKS OUT ABOUT ABUSES IN ELITE CLUB.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, interrupting, “What’s going on?”

  The group of execs turned to the silent TV, but Alanis was the one who answered.

  “Oh, that? Yes, it’s a big thing, apparently. Samantha Dubarry, Lord Dubarry’s bastard, is talking about… Oh, what’s it called, Trevor?”

  “Animal, Animus…something or other, one of those posh clubs that’s been part of Oxford for centuries now.”

  “Yes, and apparently, she’s blowing the whistle on the whole thing. It’s not an official club, of course, so it’s not like Oxford can do anything about it, but she’s called a press conference this morning and said she hoped… What was it she said?” Alanis reached for the remote, rewound the footage, and turned up the volume. In the small space, Sam’s voice shot straight for his heart.

  “…these men, who grow up to be titans of industry and heads of state, do their cruel operating in the shadows. And I was one of them. I hope that by shoving them, and myself, into the light, they might be exposed. And in being exposed, I hope they finally put an end to their reign of terror.”

  Alanis muted the press conference, but Daniel couldn’t stop staring at the television. Sam had… She had… She was risking everything to make it right. Her fat
her would hate her for this. Her peers would despise her. But she was trying to fix this.

  To make sure no one like him was ever hurt by them again.

  The song in his back pocket burned.

  “I heard she was starting some sort of fund to help their victims.”

  “I heard—”

  Alanis cut off the baseless speculation with a wave of her hand. “I’m so sorry, Daniel. We’ve become thoroughly distracted. How about a song, then?”

  “Yeah. Yeah.” Reaching into his back pocket, he removed the seventh song from its place in his notebook. Maybe, just maybe, he was ready to sing it. “I think I’ve got one in me.”

  …

  When Samantha entered Ashbrooke Manor that night, exhausted from the emotional toll of the day and still sporting her sensible press conference wear, she knew nothing would be the same. She knew she’d lost her father. And she’d probably lost him forever.

  The night was dark, wrapping itself around the house like an impenetrable fog, leaving Samantha caught between despair and hope. Despair because she knew what was coming. But hope because she knew she’d done the right thing.

  Sure enough, no sooner had she slung up her coat on the rack than a voice rang out through the house, shattering the stillness of the place.

  “Samantha! May I see you in my office?”

  Her father wasn’t wasting any time.

  “Yes. I’ll be right up,” she called, steeling herself.

  You have to know that you don’t need his love or his approval, she thought, not for the first time since she’d begun planning this. You couldn’t go through life being a monster of his creation, no matter what it got you. You couldn’t live the life he wanted for you. Not if it meant hurting more people and hiding yourself away forever. Thomas placed a soft hand on her shoulder.

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Yeah. I have to face him sometime.”

  “Okay. I’ll be right down here if you need anything.”

  Tension strung its way through the air, weaving itself into the silence between the tapping of her heels as she made her way up toward the second floor. She and her father…they hadn’t been close by any stretch of the imagination, but recently, ever since she’d been kicked out of Animos, there had been a thawing between them.

  Now, she’d probably brought winter back with her press conference.

  At her father’s study door, she knocked. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes. Come in. Close the door behind you and have a seat.”

  The man put down his evening newspaper—upon which, her face was printed in full color—and she followed his instructions. The office was much the same as it had always been, but she noticed that today the phones had all been pulled off the hook. Apparently, he was avoiding the outside world. She didn’t blame him. It wouldn’t be easy navigating the political waters after what she’d just done.

  “Have I ever told you about the first time I saw you?”

  Her heart caught. He never talked about anything like that, at least not where she could hear him. “N-no, sir.”

  His voice was far-off and she could see that he struggled to get the sentences out, but she hung on his every last word. “I hadn’t known your mother was pregnant. And then, one day I opened the mail and there was your birth certificate. Your little footprint stamped in ink on the bottom. I got on the first plane I could, followed every lead I had until I found your mother’s place. But then, before I could go inside, I looked in the window and saw you.” He looked up at her then, though she wasn’t sure if he was seeing her or the memory. “Sitting there in the sunshine, your little eyes closed and your little hands all curled up. You were so small, so fragile. I was afraid I would break you. That I would hurt you.”

  If she was going to get kicked out or cut off or disinherited, then she was going to make sure he knew the truth. Swallowing hard, she spoke, her voice barely strong enough to be called a whisper. “You did. You did hurt me.”

  “I know. I know that now.”

  The words both shocked and didn’t shock her at all. She’d never seen him acknowledge what he’d done to her before. She’d never even seen him admit fault before, not really. But also…that wasn’t an apology.

  “Is that all, sir?”

  “No.” His eyes wandered to the newspaper resting face-up on his desk. “I saw you this morning on television.”

  “And?” she asked, not letting any emotion seep into her voice.

  “Why did you do it?”

  That was the million-pound question, wasn’t it? When the press asked her the same question, she talked about right and wrong, good and evil, privilege and poverty. But in reality, it was more complicated than that. She knew that she couldn’t spend the rest of her life pretending to be a better person if she didn’t do the work of actually being one.

  “Because I couldn’t start over knowing that they were still out there. I couldn’t live with myself if I knew I had the power to stop them and I didn’t.”

  “You realize that I’m one of them?” her father asked, his voice flat. A challenge. “And your brother, too.”

  Their eyes met and she answered his challenge.

  “Yes. I realize that.”

  They were all monsters. She included herself among them. But if it took the rest of her life, she would apologize to the world for what she did to Daniel.

  “Do you regret it? Knowing what it could do to your future, your reputation, your place in society?”

  “No. I can’t. I know it may lose me everything, including you. But no. I don’t regret it.”

  When she’d walked out of that press conference today, as she’d watched the meltdowns online and as her phone rang off the hook with calls from Captain, she felt, for the first time since she’d decided to throw herself in with Animos, like herself. She felt free.

  And it was in that moment, when she spoke that truth aloud, that her hands finally stopped shaking. The nerves populating her stomach dissipated. She didn’t need to remind herself that her father’s approval didn’t matter anymore because it just didn’t matter. She was free.

  She wanted him to love her, to be proud of her, to welcome her into the family with open arms, but she knew now that she would be okay without it. Her self-respect was more important.

  “Do you know what it says on our family crest?” he asked after a moment of consideration.

  “No.”

  “May our children be all that we never were.” His head bowed, he was smaller than she could ever remember him being. “Samantha, I am a coward. I abandoned you as a child and I abandoned you in this house. But you are more of a Dubarry than I will ever be. You are what I never was.”

  Her heart stopped. Was he…? No, he wasn’t angry. He hadn’t been asking her those questions about her motives because he wanted to tear her apart from them. At least, that’s what the tears brimming at the edge of his eyes, not daring to fall onto his cheeks, told her.

  “But the Animos Society—”

  “Is dead. Or at least, it will be by the end of this news cycle.” He swallowed and sniffled, averting his gaze and blinking as if she hadn’t already spotted his tears. His words were still stifled, difficult for him to speak, but they fought against his nature and instinct, pushing their way straight through to Samantha’s heart. “Seeing what they did to you…it re-contextualized my entire life. Everything that I’ve done, I’ve done to someone else’s Samantha. So has Thomas. We were cruel, careless men who didn’t care who we hurt. But, today, you have ended that cycle. You have begun a new world, one without Animos.”

  Shock locked up the muscles in her chest, making breathing almost impossible. He agreed with her. He wasn’t angry. He wasn’t disinheriting her. He supported her.

  “I thought you would be so mad,” she whispered.

  “I was. But then I remembered our time shooting. I told you to go out and make the change, to be better than you had been. You did just that.” His eyes glistene
d, and he bit the last declaration out with all of the feeling she’d never before see in him. “And I am damned proud of you.”

  Her jaw dropped. Her heart stopped. He’d finally said it.

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” Laughter danced around the edge of his lips. He was as free saying the words as she was listening to them. Her heart soared. Rising from his place behind the desk, he came to stand before her, sincerity written in his every motion. “I always have been, really. I was a fool to miss out on so much of your life and a fool to try and force you into my world. I’m sorry. You deserve more. And if you’ll let me, I’d like to follow your example. I’d like to make things better.”

  When she’d moved to England, Thomas told her that her father was very British. Not prone to emotional outbursts or displays of affection. But her father wrapped her up in his arms and muttered, “I love you, Samantha.”

  And she could not help but reply, “I love you, too, Dad.”

  The moment would never erase what he’d done to her or the life she’d had before it, but it was the start of something else, a new chapter of their lives, a new verse in their song. And she could not have been happier for it.

  Unfortunately, the world outside of that moment still existed, and it intruded as her phone began to ring.

  “Is that your mobile?”

  “Yeah.” Sam broke away from her father and checked the caller ID. Captain. This must have marked the thousandth time he’d called today. It was about time she answered. “Just one second.”

  She accepted the call and held the phone to her ear, answering gracefully. “Hello, Samantha Dubarry speaking?”

  He was a rage monster. As soon as she spoke, the screaming began. “You fucking bitch—”

  But this time, when he screamed at her, she was armed with something she hadn’t been before. Complete confidence that he had no power over her.

  “Reginald. I have nothing to say to you. And you have nothing to say that is worth hearing.”