by Tiffany Sala
I stared at my parents as a conniving barrier to that outcome, and I saw them recoil at what they faced in my eyes. Yes, I was different in some ways they could probably guess… and others they couldn’t.
Daddy tried to step in, take control of the situation. “Well, I think the first thing we should do is get you off to the holiday house so we can all relax after what’s been a very draining period. Try to clear our heads.”
“The holiday house, huh. I guess we’re not going to go back and enjoy that fabulous view you paid so much for.”
“The holiday house is more private,” said Mum with this look of tremendous hurt like she’d had to sacrifice her own kneecaps for it.
“So you don’t run the risk of someone kidnapping me back, huh.”
I wasn’t going to blurt it out to them, but I had no idea if Devin would even try to ‘kidnap me back’. Maybe it would be easy for him to believe I’d run off by choice. Assuming he even realised I’d left the apartment. He’d probably be delighted to think I’d given up on bothering him on the text, I thought as Mum claimed my handbag from that sleaze who’d come so close to violating me in an unforgivable way.
They hustled me out a different way to the one I’d entered by, into an unfamiliar car too quickly to fight. Daddy buckled me into the back seat, locked the door on me, and went around to join Mum, sitting prim in the front passenger seat with two bags on her lap.
“Do you realise that man in there was one of the same men Devin hired to take me?” I couldn’t help bringing it up. “That he would have raped me if he could have gotten away with it?”
Daddy made a humming noise I couldn’t interpret. “That is what men do, Julia,” said Mum. “You have only to let them think they can get away with it.”
“Are you blaming me for it?”
“I never said that, Julia,” Mum retorted, but of course she didn’t have to say it. I didn’t need someone to tell me in words to know they looked down on me when they were so completely careless of my safety.
Devin, for all he’d made me feel like an idiot, didn’t think I deserved to be punished for my ignorance. He’d tried to protect me… whenever he thought I was facing too much, like he’d said.
Suddenly I wanted Devin to come find me more than I had ever thought I would. I didn’t want to be sliding away into the morning with my parents, who had never gone to so much trouble to pick me up for a birthday party. Devin had invested himself in my life more in the space of days than they ever had.
I thought about banging on the window of the car and screaming.
Mum was right there ahead of me. “I wouldn’t try to draw any attention to yourself if I were you, Julia. You’ll have to be very lucky to catch someone in law enforcement we don’t have an arrangement with.”
Those cursed mafia connections. Apparently, I needed an opposing mafia connection to fight this.
I needed Devin. And I hadn’t succeeded in getting him on my side when we were able to see one another… what hope did I have of getting him to come to me when I didn’t have any way of communicating with him?
My parents didn’t give my bag back when we arrived at our East Coast holiday house. They did leave me alone to wander through the faintly familiar rooms, touching doorways, freshly-painted walls, the bright kitchen benches and the shining bedframe in my usual room, so I accepted this temporary reprieve as a gift. I didn’t think I was going to get very many of those going into the future.
I was able to avoid the two of them for a few hours by skulking around in rooms they weren’t in, but I didn’t have anything to show for it by the time Daddy called me out to join them on the porch. I knew better than to try to slip out a window and run: when we were staying at this house, as with our regular house, a bevy of cameras now reported back to my parents’ phones in real time when there was any strange movement. They had shown me the way the system worked. It had been done for me.
I felt very conspicuous as I made my way out. I didn’t want to move in one of my usual ways: sulking around the edges of the rooms, flouncing like a little girl—the exact age depending on whether it was my parents or a boy I was dealing with. I’d been too frightened and confused to behave like myself since coming face-to-face with Devin’s world, but I supposed I’d been resisting coming up with a new self.
Now, I had to come up with something new that would save me from slipping back.
What I settled on seemed mostly like, well, a blank. Just a woman walking to meet her fate, no personality attached at all. But something about it made an impression on my parents. They were stiff in their seats at the little table on the porch, only their eyes following every subtle movement I didn’t think I was making.
Daddy patted the only other chair at the table. “Sit down.” I sat, taking my time to really align myself properly over the chair as I came down.
Mum almost started talking before I was fully seated, and made a big show of shutting herself up for a few seconds longer. “Now, do you know which lawyer’s office holds the paperwork?”
“The paperwork,” I repeated, saying the words slowly in case it helped them to make more sense.
“For what he agreed to pay you to play along with this charade. You’ve done your job according to the requirements, but you have to understand he is very likely to try to screw you out of anything because he wasn’t able to get the kind of control over you he hoped.”
How did my parents know about that arrangement? Caroline had probably spilled. I tried to not be obviously boiling over with fury that the little bitch had dared butt into my personal business so badly.
It wasn’t so hard actually, because once it sank in, I was cackling. “Is that why you took me back? Because you want to lay a claim on his money?” The more I thought about it, the funnier it seemed. “Even more of his money?”
They had little enough shame to puff their chests out. “A man like Devin O’Hare needs to be taken down a peg or two regularly. Once he gets too cheeky, just…” Daddy snapped his fingers in a gesture that looked like he was slapping an insect out of the air. “I should think us having access to more of his money, and completely legally, will keep him in his place for a decade at least.”
“But we need to get right onto finding where we stand legally,” Mum interrupted, “having our own lawyers look over this paperwork. It’s not going to be a problem, no matter what it says, but we—” The frown spread across her face fast. “Julia, why are you making that dreadful smug expression at me.”
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed like this. I was struggling to get the words out through my gasps. “Mum, there is no paperwork.”
She just stared for a moment, completely serene. I think she couldn’t grasp that particular configuration of words.
“He wasn’t screwing me over or anything,” I hurried to clarify. For some reason this detail mattered to me. “His mother had something drawn up at some point, we just never got around to signing off on it. Too much else going on.” I’d been more focused on getting him to spend his feelings on me, but I knew better than to say that. I doubted Mum had thought much about Daddy’s feelings in a long time, and she wouldn’t appreciate being reminded of it.
As it was, the face she was giving me felt capable of incineration. “How could you not make that a priority? Do you have no common sense in you at all?”
I shuffled down in my seat a little before I regained my consciousness of what I was doing. “I guess it’s the same as always, Mum.”
My parents were looking at each other now in unease. Had they really thought they could take me and claim Devin’s money? That whatever I’d been doing, I was going to just fall back in line with them straight away?
It didn’t matter what they thought, I knew that. They wanted me to fall in line and hand over the money, so they would act like it was a given. It was the same energy I’d seen in Devin, always having his plans… and me too, in my worst phase?
The truth was right here in front of me:
I was a part of this world, had always been a part of it though my parents had tried to keep me in my box.
Maybe that was what it had really been about all those years. Not my parents looking at me and finding me wanting… but realising they wouldn’t be able to control me if they let me have my head.
A white-anting strategy on their own daughter?
It seemed with my parents, there were layers beyond the layers I thought I’d already uncovered. And this made me certain there really was something more to Devin targeting them. Something personal that I hadn’t yet seen… something that had nothing to do with what had started to build between us.
I’d thought he was trying to hold his secrets over me, when it was probably hard for him to reveal them to anyone… let alone a girl whose family was connected to them. I needed to talk to him, now, but all I could do right now was face my parents, who were clearly settling on rage.
“This is pathetic even for you, Julia,” said Daddy. “Putting everything else aside for the moment, did you not think for one second about your own future? Do you really believe a man like O’Hare is a long-term prospect? Look at his father: ditched his wife as soon as he could, went straight off fucking every pretty little thing who got dragged into his orbit. Won’t be surprised to hear he had a go at you.”
I scraped my bottom lip between my teeth repeatedly. “Haven’t met him yet.” I couldn’t imagine Devin’s father being worse than his mother, though. Maybe the guy had perfectly good reasons for ditching Angel.
“Okay.” I tensed at the sound of my mother’s voice. This was getting serious now. “So what are we going to do about it?”
“There’s nothing to be done,” I said. “You gambled on something that didn’t pay off. I’m sure you’re used to that feeling.”
The sweet breeze of the coast sang through this heartwarming reunion between parents and child.
“Well we’ve already invested the money,” Daddy told me. “So somebody needs to be accountable for that.”
“You invested money you hadn’t…” Well, why was I surprised? “That somebody is going to be you and Mum, because I had nothing to do with this. And money that was promised to me has nothing to do with you anyway.”
Mum shook her head. “Get a grip, Julia. Those silly rules everyone else follows when it comes to money don’t apply to us. You can scream and kick about it all you like, but you’re going to have to be good for that money.”
“And you know there’s no way I can get it for you now, so what’s your point? How far are you willing to go to make me get that money?” But as soon as I’d said it I wished I hadn’t. I could easily picture them selling me to as many buyers as would make up the price.
Daddy laced his fingers. “It’s very easy, actually. We don’t need to do much. If he wants to make it difficult, we just make sure you’re where he knows to come and find you.”
They were going to try to blackmail Devin into signing those papers anyway? “That will never work. He’s not going to roll over easily.”
Mum was beaming with smugness. “You mean you failed to make enough of an impression on him to do this? That must have been disappointing for you.”
“I mean, what are you going to do to me, really? You know I’m going to fight back, try to leave… are you willing to threaten to kill me?”
After I’d said it I added, “No, don’t answer that,” because it struck me that I really didn’t want to know, but the look on Mum’s face told me I’d been too late.
“Of course we would never kill you, Julia.” Her voice echoed serene in the lazy afternoon air. I felt like I was on my knees in front of some very unexpected but inherently malicious thing that had started talking: the gravestone of a murderer, a statue erected to a discredited nineteenth century hero. “But you have to take responsibility for the consequences of your own actions from now on. If you don’t wise up to your place in the world very soon, then yes, you will probably find yourself dead.”
Had I really needed any more evidence that there was nowhere further I could go in my relationship with my parents? But here, at least, was a glimmer of hope. If I could get close to Devin, make him see that I really was finally growing as a person, maybe he would be willing to find some way to save me.
Chapter Seventeen: Devin
I didn’t feel good about where I’d left things with Julia the day before, but what was I supposed to do? She wasn’t ready for the truth.
Okay, that wasn’t it. I wasn’t ready for the truth.
All I’d ever wanted for her, from when she was just the Mahoney princess, her exact character a blank in my head, was to take her out of their house. To give her the choices I knew they wouldn’t. But to know why I even cared… that was much harder to convey. She might be a little brat who knew her way around a man far too well, particularly the parts inside the head, but she was going to struggle to not misinterpret this. It would either hurt her or bond her to me more closely, and neither was a desirable outcome. I had fought so hard to keep from putting her in another beautiful prison.
I had kept telling myself that, but it wasn’t protecting me from the truth: whatever my reasoning, I hadn’t handled this well. I wasn’t used to women as soft as Julia—which was saying something, because she was a tough little bitch. But she was also hungry for something neither of us had expected, and that had compromised her ability to focus on being the woman she needed to be away from her parents. After walking out of the apartment that afternoon, I felt like I had managed the whole situation in a way that held no prospect of ending well for her. And that made me a complete failure.
Maybe Julia was right, and trying to protect her from her feelings—or mine—was impossible. And who was I to judge or suspect her for desire or affection when she was trying so sincerely to accept the violence and espionage of the world she now knew she was a part of? Who was I to punish her because I hadn’t fully realised what she was offering to me that day we were together?
She didn’t deserve a punishment. She deserved… something I hadn’t intended to give her, something I didn’t think I would be able to give her. I’d actually planned against that outcome.
But she had changed the plan, and just as I’d tried to tell her so many times, it was stupid to fight against the way things were going to be.
I needed to stop shirking my responsibilities out of fear. I should invite her out for dinner that night, a non-threatening public activity, and push myself to get comfortable with the idea of going back to the apartment with her after and telling her everything. And however she reacted… I had to let her own that reaction. If she needed space to process it, I would give her more space. If she felt the need to make a physical connection… I wasn’t against that either. Not at all.
The afternoon was passing quickly, so once I was decided I sent off a quick invitation to be awaiting me by text, resisting a fleeting inclination to offer something apologetic or conciliatory. I was reaching out here, wasn’t I? That should be enough.
When she didn’t immediately respond, I wasn’t sure. She’d been obnoxiously responsive up until now. I tried calling, and she didn’t answer.
I called my mother. “I don’t suppose you’ve spoken with Julia today.”
Her words were slow, careful. I hadn’t spoken to her since I found out about the trouble she’d caused with Julia, but she had to realise Julia had probably let slip what happened. “I saw her yesterday. I haven’t visited today.”
“I can’t seem to raise her,” I explained. “I was going to go to the apartment and see if there was something—”
“No. Don’t.”
She seemed to have surprised herself by her insistence, and before I could speak she grasped for more words. “I’ll go myself. There are some things women can only express to other—”
“Don’t try to play me like that, Angel. I can hear what’s behind it far too well.” She made a noise acknowledging I’d caught her at something. “Don’t bother with Julia. I will go o
ver myself, and I don’t want to meet you there trying to do damage control on the trouble you’ve caused.” I suspected all of what she’d been up to was far worse than putting doubts in Julia’s mind, but I revealed just enough of what I’d worked out to keep her busy scrambling to hide the rest.
“Call me or drop by once you’ve been to see her,” said Mother. “I’ll be available to talk.”
I didn’t know if this was damage control for the thing I knew about or the thing I only suspected, but I cancelled the conference call I’d been planning to slip in before dinner, and drove myself over to Julia’s apartment almost without checking to see if I was in a decent condition. I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t answer a doorbell ring: I tried once and then let myself up to the apartment.
She wasn’t inside. No signs of a struggle—the only hint of violence was some damage to the inside of the door I’d noticed when I was there the day before, something being swung or thrown at it. I guessed some part of what my mother had said to her had really upset her.
I made a quick study of the apartment, now slumped into the same mild disorder as Julia’s bedroom at the Mahoneys’ house. Cups and plates that had been out and dirty when I was there were still out. Her bag and phone were gone. It was most likely she had left voluntarily, with someone she thought she could trust. Too much effort to make the place look this natural otherwise.
So if she had been taken, there was someone she knew involved. But there was a chance she was just out for the evening anyway and she’d switched off her phone or was not checking it. A good chance she’d left by herself and planned not to return, given the way she’d been talking yesterday.
I already had my hand on my hip when the apartment door opened again… but of course it was my mother who walked in.
“You couldn’t leave well enough alone, could you?”
“I don’t know what’s happened here,” she replied, closing the door behind her and curling her lip when she saw the dent on the back, “but I was certain you would need my immediate support and guidance.”
