White Rabbit

by London Miller

  Even her makeup was flawless—black liner along her lids that flicked out at the ends, modest blusher on the apples of her cheeks, and lipstick so red that it made her white teeth seem brighter.

  Karina sometimes wished she cared that much about her appearance, and that she could practice in front of a mirror like Isla did to perfect the art of it all, but even as she wasn’t allowed to wear makeup quite yet, she didn’t think that there would ever come a time when she really wanted to do it.

  “It’s so good to have you home, darling,” Katherine said with a fond smile in Karina’s direction before she sat in her own chair, managing to make the action seem both effortless and graceful. “We’ve missed you.”

  Karina forced a smile even as she felt all the attention in the room come to her—something she had never been fond of. “I’ve missed you all too,” she said after a moment.

  It was the correct thing to say, she knew, even if it wasn’t entirely true.

  Katherine gave a slight nod as if she had done exactly what she wanted before she looked at John, but when she did, something about her expression changed. It was a subtle thing, her lips turning down at the corners, something Karina doubted she would have noticed if she hadn’t been looking at her.

  But her mother had always been good at shielding her expression—she only ever showed what she wanted people to see.

  “John, would you like to lead the prayer?”

  Her attention moved from her mother to John, and she couldn’t help but notice the way his already ruddy cheeks seemed to deepen to a darker shade. Something, though she couldn’t say what, had changed between ever since they had stolen a private moment to themselves earlier.

  The smiling man who had been there to greet her at the door was gone, replaced by the sullen figure sitting at the head of the table.

  “Of course,” he said from behind gritted teeth. “Appearances are important to you, aren’t they?”

  Beneath the table, Isla reached over, curling her hand around Karina’s, intertwining their fingers. An unspoken gesture of comfort.

  At least now it felt as if she could breathe a little easier.

  Katherine, to Karina’s surprise, looked wounded by the remark, her perfectly arched brows drawing together and her hand with red-painted nails fluttering to her chest. “Darling, what—”

  “Let’s leave it, shall we?” he asked rather pointedly. “Let’s get this over with.”

  He bowed his head, not bothering to wait for them to do the same before he spoke the Lord’s Prayer quickly and without inflection. He’d hardly said the final word before his head was back up once more, and he was reaching for the bowl of string beans and helping himself to a healthy amount.

  Karina risked a glance at her mother, wishing she could read her and at least understand what was happening here, but Katherine kept face as she stood and started carving the chicken, placing pieces on both Karina’s and Isla’s plates before walking over to serve her husband.

  The tension she felt, Karina realized, was between the two of them. It was as if there was a physical boundary between them with the way John seemed to lean away from her as she got close. But Katherine paid him no mind, offering him the breast piece before she returned to her seat.

  And it remained that way through the rest of dinner.

  The only sounds heard were the scraping of forks and knives against the plates. All too soon, Karina remembered why she hadn’t wanted to come home.

  She was dreaming … at least, that was her first thought as Karina blinked her eyes open much later that night, having been sure she’d heard something.

  But now, as she lay awake in the darkness, cocooned in the warmth of her blankets, she was almost sure she had imagined it all. That it was something else entirely that—

  A thump made her blink and sit up, too loud for her to ignore this time.

  She had been right—something had stirred her from her slumber.

  Next came the voices, louder than she had ever heard them before.

  “Nothing but a whore! They warned me about you, and I didn’t listen. I was a bloody fool.”

  Heat rushed to her cheeks as her fingers curled around the edges of her blanket, wishing she had never heard those words. She might have been young and didn’t know many things, but even at her age, she knew what a whore was—she also knew that her mother was nothing of the sort.

  And it was a rather rude thing to say to someone—especially to someone you loved.

  She strained her ears to hear what else was said, but Katherine’s response was too low for her to hear. She wished she did know what she had said, however. It was in Katherine’s nature to respond.

  But, whatever she said next was drowned out by John’s exclamation. “I want you gone out of my sight! You think you can do better than me after all I’ve done for you? Good luck trying.”

  They were still yelling when Karina’s bedroom door creaked open, Isla slipping inside before closing it back once more. “Oh, have they woken you too?”

  “How long have they been arguing?” she asked, scooting over a bit to give her room to slide in beside her.

  “You know how adults are at times,” she said with a pat on her leg as if she weren’t worried at all.

  As if she hadn’t heard the same words uttered that Karina did.

  “But why are they arguing?” she pressed on, trying to make out Isla’s face in the darkness.

  “They … well, it’s what married couples do,” she said, thinking better of whatever she had been about to say. “You’ll understand once you’re older.”

  But Karina wasn’t so sure about that.

  She would hope that if she married in the future, the man she loved would never speak to her this way. She hoped he would be, rather, like the men she read about in books.

  With warm smiles and charming words.

  “Do you think it’s—”

  The sharp crack that rent the air made Karina jolt, her eyes widening as she looked from Isla to the door. She didn’t think, as long as she had lived, that she had ever heard a sound quite like that before.

  And it hadn’t come from downstairs—not when she was sure she’d heard the door open and slam shut mere moments before.

  Before she could even think about what she was doing, she climbed to her feet, hunting for her dressing robe.

  “Karina, I think we should stay up here,” Isla said in a hushed tone, still sitting on the bed, but something about her voice now made Karina think her sister was worried.

  “We should at least go check, shouldn’t we?” she asked, already planning to do so whether Isla joined her or not. “What if Mother was hurt?”

  Isla made a noise in the back of her throat as if harm ever coming to Katherine was highly unlikely. Karina could understand why she thought as much—their mother was quite resilient and didn’t often find herself in situations that she couldn’t find a way out of.

  But Karina couldn’t shake the feeling that had grabbed hold of her—a certain fear that clogged her throat and made her heart skip a beat.

  “Karina, wait—”

  Before Isla could talk her out of it—because that would surely come next—Karina stepped into her slippers and quickly darted out of the room, moving as quickly and as silently as possible down the stairs. It was too quiet by the time she made it to the lower landing, and as she approached the kitchen, her heart seemed to not know what to do with itself.

  It felt as if it was seconds from beating right out of her chest.

  But all the same, she continued forward.

  Fear was not something she could allow to stop her.

  That feeling might have risen up inside her, chilling her bones and making her breath stutter, but Karina still reached for the doorknob in front of her and gave it a twist, pushing the door open before she could talk herself out of it.

  Cold air assaulted her the moment she was standing on the landing, a chill racing through her. At first, all she could see was
white—from the barren trees and naked limbs down to the ground at her feet. Snow was everywhere, inches thick and so white it seemed almost too bright.

  Her teeth chattering, she took one step forward, then another, her slippers becoming soaked almost instantly, her toes going numb. She was almost ready to believe that there was nothing to see—that she had come out for no reason at all.

  Until she saw the blood.

  The stark red of it puddled and congealing in the snow.

  And now that she saw it, the coppery scent seemed to fill her nose, making her choke the acrid smell.

  “Karina, what are you ...?”

  She looked up, words lost on her as she found her mother some feet away, her eyes wide and alarmed as if Katherine hadn’t expected to find her there. She didn’t, however, seem bothered at all by the fact that she was holding a gun.

  Karina couldn’t take her eyes off it. Not the shiny silver of the barrel that looked longer than anything she had ever seen or the very tip of it that seemed to smoke in the cold night air. She’d seen them in films before, dangerous objects that she was sure she would never have a use for in her life, but she had never seen one in person before.

  She hadn’t even known, before this moment, that her mother even owned one.

  Let alone that she knew how to use it.

  But even as alarm rushed through her at the sight of her mother, her gaze was drawn down to the crumpled form at her mother’s feet.

  John, she realized a second later.

  He lay unmoving, his arms tucked beneath him, face down, but it was impossible not to see the darkening outline of red in his collared shirt or the concentration of it in his back where the hole was.

  She waited, counting each breath, expecting him to get up at any moment—to breathe or groan or do something to signal he was still alive. That he was only injured in some way.

  But as more time passed, and he continued to lay in that very spot, the more her heart felt as if it was sinking in her chest.

  “He was going to hurt me, Karina,” Katherine said, her voice turning earnest now, her surprise bleeding away. “I’d never seen him like this before.”

  When she attempted to take a step toward her, Karina took a step back, not even sure why she did it, but Katherine didn’t look saddened by what she did. She merely dropped the gun she was holding, raising her hands to show that she no longer held it.

  “He would have hurt me,” she stressed again, pointing up to her face.

  Karina finally dragged her gaze away from John’s prone body to look up at her mother.

  It was the first time she had ever seen her look so disheveled. Her hair was in disarray, her lipstick smudged and her mascara running. But it was the bruise she could already see forming that captured Karina’s attention.

  A bruise, she was sure, had come from someone’s fist.

  Katherine’s eyes were hard even as they were pleading. “I couldn’t let him harm me, Karina. What if he had come after you next? Or Isla? I couldn’t allow him to hurt you or your sister. I just couldn’t.”

  “What’s happened?” Isla called, appearing in the doorway, her wide eyes darting back and forth between them.

  But Karina couldn’t find the words to say anything, to explain what had happened or what she had seen as she’d walked out of the house.

  “You understand, don’t you?” Katherine asked, suddenly there, holding her hands tightly. “Tell me you understand this had to be done.”

  She didn’t.

  Not really.

  She didn’t understand anything at all.

  But Katherine wasn’t willing to take her silence for an answer. “He wanted to control us because he had the money,” she said, that careful calmness she always wielded sinking back into her voice. “You won’t understand until you’re older, but I saved us. I saved us from a very bad man.”

  Karina, realizing that Katherine wouldn’t release her until she gave some sort of answer, finally gave a slight nod. She nearly breathed a sigh of relief once Katherine let her go and stepped away.

  Isla took her place, and as she had always done when things felt uncertain, she tucked Karina’s hand into hers and held on tight. Far more comforting than she probably knew.

  “Listen to me, girls,” Katherine said, seeming to pull herself together. “We have to take care of this, understand? Just us three, and you can never, ever tell a soul what happened.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Isla agreed readily.

  Without question.

  Karina, her attention briefly stolen by the man on the ground, still remembered the way he’d smiled at her before ushering her inside earlier. The way he had seemed so genuinely pleased to see her.

  She tried to imagine that same man doing the awful things that Katherine alleged. She forced herself to look away—to ignore the tears currently filling her eyes.

  She wished the cold all around her could numb those as well.

  “Karina!”

  She jolted at Katherine’s sharp tone, her gaze lifting to find her eyes narrowed on her.

  “I said, do you understand?”

  “Yes,” she said after a long moment. “I understand.”

  And she did.

  Karina learned very quickly certain things were better left unsaid.

  1

  Dreams

  Years later …

  The smell of burning firewood never ceased to relax Karina as she stretched out on the couch, clutching a mug of hot chocolate in her hands.

  She let the odd but familiar surroundings of the A-frame cabin calm her racing heart, reminding herself she was no longer a little girl ignorant to the world.

  She didn’t often think about that day—when the snow had been bright and the streak of red impossibly brighter—but it was the only thing on her mind over the past few days since Uilleam had whisked her away.

  After she had chosen him instead of giving in to what Katherine wanted for her—the life, rather, that she had been trying to get Karina to see was worth all the pain that came with it.

  But sometimes, the memory crept up when she was least expecting it, and no matter how she tried to shove it back into its box and tuck it away, it always left her feeling unsettled.

  It didn’t matter that she sat in front of the fire now, watching the flames lick at the logs stacked within the hearth or the glowing embers that were oddly beautiful because she could almost feel the cold snow on her feet and remember the way her fingers had gone numb as she’d kneeled where she stood and started to dig …

  Blowing out a breath, Karina squeezed her eyes shut, counting backward from ten until the anxiety weaned a bit.

  More than a decade had passed since that day. A lifetime, it felt like.

  And in that time, she had learned very quickly that secrets were plenty—that it was best to keep them.

  This was one she didn’t mind keeping.

  Taking a sip of her hot chocolate, letting the warmth and sweet flavor mellow her out, she looked at the glass doors where Uilleam stood on the other side with his phone to his ear.

  It didn’t matter that this was supposed to be a vacation for them—to get away from the grim business he had left behind in New York after that unfortunate incident with Gaspard.

  He still, though it had been a few weeks now, hadn’t told her what he had done to make the man disappear, and she hadn’t asked. The only thing she did know was that he wasn’t dead, there was no army coming for his head, and Uilleam—as far as she could tell—was as powerful, if not more, than he had ever been.

  The Uilleam she had met at a quiet fundraiser, whose smile had made her feel bashful, was gone. And in his place was the man who currently conducting business though he was hundreds of miles away.

  The Kingmaker, they called him.

  A product of her own making.

  Some small part of her felt a bit of a thrill that she had ultimately given him something others hadn’t. That she, in her own way, had offered him a bit more
power in the way of anonymity than anyone who’d come before her.

  But that fleeting thought only left a smile on her face for so long because with power came more enemies—and one of those enemies, she’d learned, was her own mother.

  How foolish she had been to think she had stumbled onto Uilleam on her own—that she was clever enough to put together pieces of a puzzle she hadn’t really known existed until she found the evidence of it.

  It had all been by design.

  Her mother’s design.

  Katherine had wanted them to meet, though Karina couldn’t say why just yet. Of course, she had some clue.

  Her mother liked finding powerful men and stripping them of what they held dear. She found their greatest weaknesses, exploited them, and used every bit of her knowledge to ensure nothing was left by the time she finished with them.

  Yes, she knew that—her mother had taught her how to go about this over the course of her life—but what she didn’t know was why Uilleam?

  Usually, Katherine went after CEOs, the occasional governor and foreign minister, and sometimes criminals if she wanted a business of theirs for herself.

  But Uilleam was his business. There was no physical entity for her to take.

  What did she want?

  “Penny for your thoughts?”

  Karina blinked, coming back to the present as she turned to watch Uilleam pocketing his phone as he came back into the cabin, sliding the door shut behind him.

  It was ridiculous, really, the way her thoughts calmed when he was near—the way she felt more at ease. He just had that effect on her.

  Offering him a small smile, she sat up. “I thought Skorpion knew you were taking the week off?”

  She knew that with the sort of work he did, there was no such thing as a full day off, let alone a week, but when she’d last seen the mercenary at the hangar before they’d boarded the private jet, he had said he wouldn’t be ringing Uilleam if only because he’d wanted the time off.